Aaron
My mother hasn’t stopped talking since I said the word boy.
She’s got both hands going, painting the whole future in the air in front of her, and it’s a good future—a second cabin out at House of Zorah, close enough that the cub grows up under all of them, Sunday dinners, the girls trading off so Mara can teach.
She’s wanted us pulled in tight like this her whole life, and now that she finally has it she’s holding on with everything she’s got.
I stand in the middle of it and make myself memorize her like this, happy, because I’m the one who’s about to take it from her.
“That’s what I came to talk about.” The room quiets around the words.
Tiana stops mid-laugh, Kiara’s hand drops off Samara’s shoulder, and my mother turns from the future she was building and lifts both hands, palms out, like she can hold off whatever’s coming if she keeps it far enough from her body.
I raise mine to match her, slow. “The Witching Glen needs a leader. What you’ve all been doing, taking turns going in, sitting with them—it’s good of you.
It’s honorable. But it can’t hold. If those people don’t get someone to stand for them soon, they’ll slide right back into what they were, and everything I tore out of that realm will have been for nothing. ”
“Mother Fate handed me this magic, and I’ve been sitting on it a month, pretending I don’t know what it’s for.”
Tiana’s arms fall open. “No. You siphoned it. Out of every soul in that Glen. That’s how you got it, so don’t stand there talking about Fate’s gift like it fell out of the sky.” I cut my eyes at her, and she holds the look without giving an inch.
“No,” my mother says again, firmer, talking over both of us. “Absolutely not. You’re about to be a father. You’ve got bigger things in front of you than a realm full of strangers.”
My hands drop to my sides. “You think I want this? You’re wrong. There’s nothing in me that wants it. But I know I have to. You’re all hunting for a reason to keep me home, and I love you for it, but that’s not how Fate works.”
“Excuse me?” Her voice climbs.
“Ma—“
“Don’t you Ma me.” She jabs a finger up at my face, and under the heat in her something’s already cracking.
“I found out this morning I’m going to be a grandmother.
My first grandbaby, Aaron. And you stand in my Conjuring Hall and tell me you mean to carry that cub into that dead, rotten realm? Absolutely fucking not.”
“She’s not going.” The whole room stops on it, and for a second nobody breathes before it comes at me, what, and huh, and Kiara’s small wait.
I make it plain, so there’s no soft place in it for them to push against. “I’m not bringing my son into the Glen.
Look at what it is right now. What kind of life is that to hand a cub? ”
Tiana’s the one who says it, slow, aiming it to wound. “So you’ll walk into that Glen and leave Mara and your son behind.” Her chin comes up. “Just like Eric did us.”
A flat, dangerous calm settles over me. I turn my head and look at her, really look, and whatever she finds there takes her back a step. “What did you just say to me.”
“Aaron—“
“I am not doing that to my mate. I’m not doing it to my son.
Dragging the people I love out of their own lives and locking them in mine because I can’t stand to breathe without them in reach—that’s not protecting them, that’s eating them alive.
That’s the thing Eric did. And I’d cut my own heart out before I’d become him. ”
My mother’s hands come down slow. Her shoulders drop, and when she speaks again it’s quiet. “And does Mara get a say? Have you told her? Is she all right with this, you leaving her behind and carrying?”
I don’t look away from her. “She’s going to hate me.
I’m expecting that. And she should.” My eyes burn.
“But somewhere down the line she’ll understand I left because keeping them close would’ve been for me, not for them.
I’ve made a whole string of selfish choices, Ma—ones that landed on her, on you, on everybody but me.
I carry this one. Not her. I won’t set it down on her again. ”
Samara’s come up close while I talk, and my littlest sister tips her head back to look up at me with wet eyes. “You’re a good man, brother,” she says, soft. “And you’re going to be a good king.”
“I don’t want you to go.” It’s Tiana, and my head comes around to her.
Her arms are wrapped tight over herself, all the sharpness drained out of her, and what’s left in her eyes is the thing the two of us have spent our whole lives pretending isn’t there.
She’s loved me, and I’ve been her big brother every day of it.
I stare at her, and the grin comes anyway, wet as it is.
She crosses the floor and slams into me, arms locking around me, her face buried in my shirt.
Kiara’s there a second later, then Samara, the three of them folding in around me and holding on, and that’s the thing that does it.
They’ve stopped fighting me, which means they know I’m really going—and I come apart.
It rolls up through me rough and ugly, and I wrap all three of them up. Samara cries into my side. “I love you, Aaron,” she gets out, fisting her hands in my shirt. “I don’t want you to go.”
I rub slow circles over her back and lift my eyes over the tops of their heads to my mother, who stands apart from us, watching her children break. “I know, baby,” I murmur into Samara’s hair. “I know. But I have to.”
My mother holds my eyes a long moment. Then her face closes and she turns and walks out of the hall without a word, her steps hard and fast on the floor.
I don’t go after her, because she doesn’t want me gone any more than the rest of them do.
She just can’t stand in this room and watch me choose it.
The girls peel off me one at a time, and I scrub the wet off my face. “I have to go,” I get out, rough. “There’s something I’ve got to do first.”
Kiara turns and throws herself into Tiana’s arms, sobbing, and Tiana folds her in and holds her, watching me over the top of her head. Samara catches my sleeve. “Will we see you again before you leave?” I don’t have an answer that won’t break her worse, so I don’t give her one.
I close my eyes and the magic takes me, and the Conjuring Hall blinks out around me like a snuffed candle. When I open them I’m standing in the last place in any realm I want to be—Solaris Pride.
It’s time to make it right with Mara’s father, and there’s no version of this that goes easy.
The guards at the territory line catch my scent the second I appear, two big lions in half-shift, and they come up onto the balls of their feet with their tails rising stiff, throwing their heads back to roar at me across the line—a wall of sound built to put a man on his back.
I’m too tired and too gutted to be impressed by it.
“I don’t have time for this,” I tell them, and I keep walking.
I don’t lift a finger. I just decide it, and both guards leave the ground at once, their legs cycling at nothing and their roars cutting off into startled, furious yowls.
I hold them up there easy, no more effort than holding a thought, and I walk between them and up the path toward the alpha’s cabin while they hang in the air behind me.
Ahmal comes off his porch with a roar that rattles the windows in their frames, his amber eyes blown wide.
He clears the steps in one leap and charges, all that weight and muscle barreling straight at me with his claws out, and it would have taken everything I had to stop him.
It takes nothing now. He’s off his feet and floating before he’s closed half the distance, swiping at the air.
“I don’t want to fight you.” I mean every word of it. “I came to ask you for a favor.”
“I want you dead,” he snarls, twisting against the magic.
“Get in line.” Something that’s half a laugh and half not gets loose in me. “But what I came to say will make you a happy man, so hear me out.” I groan and set him down, the magic lowering him slow until his feet find the dirt, and he stands there breathing hard, too thrown to charge again.
“I’m leaving Wintermoon. Probably for good.”
A growl tears out of him. “And taking my Mara. I will die before I let you—“
“I’m not taking her with me.” The growl dies.
“I’m here to ask you to watch over my mate.” The word sticks and I have to push it out, because handing her to anyone, even the man who made her, feels like cutting off my own hand. “And our cub.” It takes a hard swallow to get the last part out, and Ahmal’s hard face gives way.
The cabin door opens behind him and his sons come out fast—Dayo first with his shoulders filling the frame, Tunde a step back, lean and ready, both of them reading the air for a fight. Ahmal lifts a hand without turning, and they pull up short at the top of the steps and hold there.
“What have you gotten yourself into, warlock.” It isn’t quite a question.
I sniff hard and drag my wrist across my nose. “Some real shit I can’t bring her into. I love her too much to make her stand in the middle of what’s coming for me.”
I start to go down to one knee, and his hand shoots out and catches my shoulder before I get there, gripping hard, keeping me on my feet. “Don’t you bow to me,” he says, low, and I straighten back up.
“I don’t want to do this.” My voice is coming apart, and I quit trying to hold it together.
“Every part of me wants to be selfish. Wants to throw her over my shoulder and haul her into that Glen so I never spend a night without her. But I can’t.
It’s wrong. I’m not—“ The rest won’t come.
Then it comes too big to hold. “I’m not him. ”
And then I’m shouting it. I stand in the dirt of my mate’s home pride and shout it up at Mother Fate, like noise enough could make it true—I’m not him, I’m not him—until the words go ragged and stop meaning anything. “Please.” It barely makes it out. “Help me.”
Ahmal makes a low, broken sound, and both arms come around me, huge and heavy, pulling me in.
I sag into the man who once swore to make my mate a widow, and everything I’ve been holding up since the Conjuring Hall finally gives.
I twist my hands into his shirt. The proud old alpha holds me through it, in front of his sons and his whole pride.
“It’s all right, warlock,” he rumbles against the top of my head. “I understand your pain. I do.”
He sets me back from him with both hands on my shoulders and searches my face. “Mara’s carrying?” I nod. He turns his head to the side and swallows down a growl. “This will break her,” he says. “You, walking away while she carries your cub. It’ll break her in half.”
“Are you telling me to be selfish?” My voice is raw. “To take her into the Glen after all?”
He falls quiet, looking at me a long moment, and whatever he finds settles him—the understanding in his face almost worse than the anger was. “When will you bring her?”
“Tomorrow.” The word breaks on its way out. “I want one more night with her first.”
He takes it in, then nods once. “I’ll guard your mate and your cub with my life. You have my word as an alpha.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “For being a man unworthy of your daughter.”
He shakes his great head slow. “No. You’re wrong about that, Aaron Blackwood.
” His amber eyes hold mine. “A lesser man takes what he wants and calls it love. You’re putting my daughter and your cub ahead of your own heart, and it’s killing you, and you’re doing it anyway.
That makes you a better man than any supernatural I’ve crossed in all my long years.
” His voice drops, and there’s grief in it and pride both.
“I’ll tell you the truth—I don’t know that I could be that selfless with my own.
Mother Fate could not have chosen better for my Mara, and I’m ashamed it took me this long to see it. ”
What he does next surprises me: the alpha of Solaris Pride lowers himself onto one knee in the dirt and bows his head. I can’t move. After everything I did to him, he’s the one asking me, without a word, to forgive him.
I reach out with an unsteady hand and lay it on the crown of his head, smoothing it back over his hair—the shifter way of granting forgiveness, of taking what’s offered. It’s done. We’re square.
He rises, an alpha again. “I’ll ready the pride for her arrival,” he says, and inclines his head to me. I bend forward and brace my hands on my knees. The whole thing has left me feeling like I might be sick.
“Not to ruin the moment,” Ahmal says above me, “but you may want to release my guards.”
I push myself upright and look back down the path.
There they are, still hanging over the territory line right where I left them, slowly turning, paws paddling at nothing.
One’s given up and crossed his arms, glaring at me like I’m dangling him over a bathtub.
The other’s still roaring at no one. It’s so ridiculous I laugh, wet and cracked and helpless, and once it starts I can’t stop it.
I bring them down without a word, easing the two of them out of the sky until their feet touch grass. They stagger, find their footing, and look around like they’re not sure what just happened.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I tell Ahmal, already backing away, and he bows his head to me one more time.
I’m turning to leave when his voice reaches me across the yard. “You’ll make an honorable king, Aaron Blackwood.”
There it is again. A man I respect looks at the wreck of me and calls me that. I close my eyes so he can’t see what it does to me, and the magic folds the world up and carries me home in the space of a blink.
When I open my eyes I’m in our cabin, and the ruined day drops away.
Mara’s at the kitchen counter with a torn-off heel of bread in one hand, her cheek packed full, caught mid-bite, blinking at me like I startled her out of a daydream.
She swallows and smiles, easy and bright and full of nothing but love—my whole world, standing there eating over the sink.
I smile back at her, standing in the doorway of the only home I’ve ever wanted. Tomorrow I walk away from her, and it’s going to gut me. Leaving her will be worse than dying.
I’d take the dying.