Chapter 13 #2
“My track record with men is bad.” She says it to the dark. “I’m not built to gamble my heart, or Mia’s future, on a coin toss. As long as the two of us are all right, we don’t need anybody else in it.”
It shouldn’t get to me, but it does. She’s just shut a door in my face, and my chest aches.
“Do you think you’ll always believe that?
What if you meet someone good, someone who knows how to cherish you and ou—your daughter?
What if you meet someone who’s willing to put you first?
In ten years when Mia is off to college and you’re alone, won’t you regret it? ”
“I don’t think I will.” She meets my eyes steadily. “Mia’s my whole life.”
“I hear you.” I roll the bottle between my palms. “Up until a little while ago, Bella was the whole of mine. No room for anything else, and I liked it that way.” I watch the trees. “Things change whether you want them to or not.”
Neither of us fills the silence.
“You’re a decent man.” She says it slowly, and she sounds surprised to mean it. “Even when I don’t want to believe it, I can tell you are.”
A laugh scrapes out of me with no humor in it. “Don’t go grading me this early. You haven’t seen enough.”
She stands, stretches, and pats my shoulder on her way past the chair. “You’re right about that. I shouldn’t grade you early.” Her mouth tips. “Maybe you’re saving the real you for later.”
She moves to step past me. I catch her wrist before she clears the chair, and I look up at her in the porch light.
“You can trust me.” I keep my hold light. “I’d never hurt you. I’d never hurt Mia. Not in a hundred years, not for anything.”
Old fear surfaces in her face, gone as fast as it came, and she studies me a long moment. Then her fingers come down and rest over the back of my hand lightly before she draws her own free.
“Never say never,” she says.
She walks inside. I stay where I am and watch the door swing shut behind her.
I sit out there until the beer’s warm and useless. Then I climb the stairs and go to Mia’s room.
The small lamp throws everything gold. I lower myself onto the edge of her bed and stroke the dark hair off her face, and I look at her. My chest hurts at the sight, and I don’t know how to handle these emotions.
“I missed all of it,” I say quietly, my words ragged.
“Your first steps. The first time you laughed. The first word out of your mouth.” None of it lives anywhere in me.
There’s no memory to even mourn, just a blank where ten years should be.
And somehow, after everything, with Jessa the one who kept this child a secret from me for a decade, I’m the one sitting here lined with guilt.
Because she did come, and someone who knew me turned her away.
What would I have done if I had been the one to meet her?
I look down at my child, and my heart tightens. “I wasn’t the best version of myself, but I’d like to think I would have cherished you back then.”
Mia shifts under the blanket and settles. She’s sleeping now, not the awful slackness from the festival. Just a tired kid, deep under.
“One day you walk into this house as mine,” I tell her, so low it’s almost nothing.
“Out in the open. But you’ve got to wait for it, and so do I.
” I tuck the blanket to her chin. “Looks like I went and hurt your mother somewhere along the way. I have to fix that first. Before anything else, I have to fix that.”
I can’t make myself stand up. I sit and study her face, the stubborn brow, the mouth that’s her mother’s, and I’d happily lose the rest of the night to it.
There’s a rustle from the other bed. Bella pushes up onto an elbow and knuckles at one eye.
“Uncle Marcus?”
“Go back to sleep, Bell.”
“What are you doing in here?”
“Came to check on Mia.” I keep my voice low.
She blinks at me. “Can I have a goodnight kiss?”
I lean across and press my lips to her forehead, then ease her down and pull her blanket up. I tuck Mia in once more on my way past, and I let myself out.
I stop outside my own door, hand on the wood, and open it slowly.
Jessa’s already under, turned on her side, one arm flung across the pillow.
Even sleeping, the strain hasn’t left her.
Rest hasn’t touched the tiredness around her eyes, even now.
She walked through hell with nobody’s hand to hold, and she did it carrying my child, abandoned and humiliated.
What she told me tonight I don’t think I will ever forgive myself for. I might not have been the person that did that to her, but it was inadvertently because of me. I pull the door shut and leave her to sleep.
Downstairs, once the house has gone fully still, I step out the back and call Adrian.
“Mia was poisoned with wolfsbane,” I tell him the second he picks up. “At the festival.”
A beat of dead air. “I’m ten minutes out,” he says. “Don’t say another word on the phone.”
He’s there in eight, pulling on his pants as he comes up the porch steps.
He drops into the chair Jessa left. “What happened?”
“We took the girls to the spring festival. Turned our backs one minute, and the two of them went off for peanuts.” I feel restless, angry. “A man gave them cotton candy. Bella’s got more sense than to take from a stranger. Mia took it. She ate some. It was spiked with wolfsbane.”
“Both of them were targeted, then.” His expression changes to one of anger, and then he scrubs a hand over his scalp. “But why Mia? She’s a—”
“Because Mia’s mine.” I hold his eyes. “She’s a hybrid, Adrian.”
He goes still in the chair. For a second he doesn’t even breathe. “You’re certain. No more maybe.”
“The healer confirmed it. My blood pulled the poison out of her.” I lean against the rail.
He sits back hard, the wood creaking under him, and drags both hands down his face. “But you don’t remember Jessa. You need to find out what happened then.”
“I’m getting to that.” I pull my phone out. “Voss won’t answer me. I’ve been calling him, but it keeps going straight to voicemail every time.”
Adrian digs into his pocket for his own phone. “He’ll answer me. Nobody ducks a call from the alpha’s second.” There’s a grim set to his mouth as he says it. He thumbs Voss’s contact and puts it on speaker, and the line picks up on the second ring.
“Adrian.” Voss sounds relaxed. “What’s the occasion?”
“You’ve been dodging Marcus all night.”
A pause. “I’ve been busy.”
“Not that busy.” Adrian’s voice flattens. “What is it you don’t want to say to him?”
“Nothing. Tryouts, paperwork, the usual grind.” A shorter pause. “What do you want, Adrian?”
“He’s standing right here. Talk to him.”
“No.” Fast, that one. “I’ve got to go.”
“Don’t you fucking dare, you coward,” Adrian snarls.
I lean toward the phone. “Voss. You hang up that phone, and I will drive to wherever you are tonight and beat the truth out of you on your own doorstep. Try me.”
The line goes quiet for a long stretch. Then, carefully, he says, “Hey, Marcus.”
“Ten years back. The stretch I was playing out of that last city.” I keep my voice level, which takes everything. “Did a woman ever come around looking for me? Saying she was pregnant with my child?”
Silence. Dead, total silence.
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“Don’t.” It comes out hard enough that Adrian glances up. “The truth. Now.”
A long breath crackles down the line. “Somebody came,” Voss admits. “Once. Had a test with her, the drugstore kind.”
My jaw clenches, and my voice is low. “And what did you do?”
“I turned her away. I was your manager, Marcus. I looked out for your career, your image, your whole shot at the top.” There’s no apology in his words. “A pregnant woman at the worst possible moment wasn’t part of that picture. It would have ruined you.”
My hand closes around the rail until the wood bites. “What did you do, Voss?”
He’s silent.
“Answer the fucking question!” I roar, and Adrian freezes as my alpha voice leaks out. It can’t impact Voss, who isn’t here, but it is a terrifying sound.
“I threw her out and told her to get an abortion,” Voss says quietly.
“You threw money at her. One-dollar bills.”
Voss hesitates. “She took it. Marcus, she took the money. She was after your money. She seduced you—”
“I seduced her, you fucking moron!” I can’t control my temper. “I ruined her life, and you humiliated her. You never once told me that I had a child out there.”
“I was trying to protect your career!”
Fury rears its head again. “That was my kid.”
“I’m sorry.” He doesn’t sound it. “You were at the peak of everything. And there was no proof the baby was even yours.”
I stand there a second, ten years turning into something I don’t recognize. “Well, she’s mine. And thanks to you, I’ve lost every year of her life so far.”