Epilogue
Three months later…
“For the love of—will someone get me an update? Now!”
Derek’s roar echoed through the hospital hallway, making two nurses scatter like startled rabbits.
Adrian watched his older brother pace the length of the private birthing suite’s waiting area for what had to be the hundredth time in the last three hours, and felt something he rarely experienced towards Derek.
Sympathy.
“She’s been in labor for six hours,” Derek snarled, raking both hands through his disheveled hair.
The billionaire CEO of TalkToMe looked nothing like himself—his shirt untucked, his sleeves rolled haphazardly, his tie abandoned somewhere around hour two.
His brother had started off in the birthing room, but after almost attacking anyone who came near Julie, he’d been banished. “Why won’t anyone tell me anything?”
“Because you’ve threatened to fire the entire medical staff twice,” he said dryly. “Possibly three times. I lost count.”
Derek spun on him. “My mate is in there—”
“With the best doctors on Monster Island.” He rose from the ridiculously expensive leather sofa and gripped his brother’s shoulder. “Julie is strong. The baby is strong. You need to breathe.”
“Don’t tell me to breathe.” But some of the wild panic faded from Derek’s eyes. “How are you so calm?”
He thought about Harper, curled up on that same sofa with her laptop, pretending to work while she cast worried glances at the birthing suite doors every thirty seconds. His mate. His Luna. The woman who had somehow transformed his entire world in the span of a few months.
If she were the one behind those doors…
“I’m not calm,” he admitted. “I’m just better at hiding it.”
Derek let out a strangled laugh. “Runs in the family, I suppose.”
A muffled cry came from behind the doors. Derek went rigid, every muscle in his body tensing like he was about to shift right there in the waiting room.
“Derek.” He tightened his grip. “Breathe.”
“That was Julie. I heard—”
The doors swung open.
A doctor emerged, her face tired but smiling. “Mr. Moonstone? Your mate is asking for you. And there’s someone else who’d like to meet you.”
Derek was through those doors before she finished speaking.
He exhaled slowly and turned to find Harper at his side, her laptop forgotten, her grey eyes bright behind her glasses.
“He’s going to be okay,” she said softly. “Right?”
“He’s going to be insufferable.” Adrian pulled her against him, tucking her under his chin. “In the best possible way.”
They waited.
The private birthing suite at Monster Island General had been designed with werewolf families in mind—soundproofed walls, reinforced doors, space for the inevitable pack members who would want to witness the birth of an Alpha’s heir.
Today it was just the four of them. Derek had insisted on privacy, something he understood better now that he had a mate of his own.
Some moments were too precious to share.
Harper shifted in his arms. “I should probably check on the security protocols. The new authentication system went live yesterday, and there was a minor glitch in the—”
“Kitten.”
“Right. Not working.” She pressed her face into his chest. “I don’t know what to do with my hands when I’m not typing.”
“You could hold my hand.”
“That seems… simple.”
“Sometimes simple is good.”
She laced her fingers through his, her small hand warm against his palm. The bond between them hummed with contentment, their shared love tangling together into something stronger than either could be alone.
Three months. That’s how long they’d been mated. Three months of Harper learning the ways of the pack, of the pack learning to accept their human Luna, of Adrian discovering that vulnerability wasn’t weakness when you had someone to be vulnerable with.
The door opened again.
Derek stood in the doorway, and Adrian barely recognized him. His brother—the polished businessman, the confident Alpha, the man who had built an empire through sheer force of will—had tears streaming down his face.
“A boy,” he said, his voice cracking. “We have a boy.”
Adrian crossed the room in three strides and pulled his brother into a fierce embrace.
“Congratulations.”
“He’s perfect.” Derek gripped him back just as hard. “Ten fingers, ten toes, a full head of dark hair. Julie is… God, Adrian, she was incredible. I’ve never seen anything more terrifying or more beautiful in my entire life.”
“Can we see them?”
Derek nodded, stepping back and wiping his eyes with absolutely no shame. “I want you to meet your nephew.”
The birthing suite smelled of antiseptic and something else—something warm and new and unmistakably alive. Julie lay propped against a mountain of pillows, her hair damp with sweat, her face exhausted but radiant. And in her arms…
His breath caught.
The baby was so small. Impossibly small.
A tiny bundle of blankets with a shock of dark hair and miniature fists clenched against his chest. His eyes were closed, his rosebud mouth working in sleep, completely unaware that he’d just been born into one of the most powerful werewolf families on Monster Island.
“Come meet him.” Julie’s voice was hoarse but happy. “He won’t bite. Yet.”
He approached the bed carefully, as if the wrong movement might break something. Harper hung back near the door, her eyes wide.
“Here.” Julie shifted the bundle. “Do you want to hold him?”
“I—” He looked at his hands. Hands that had fought and killed and led a pack through crisis. Hands that seemed far too large and rough for something so fragile. “I don’t know how.”
“Support his head. There you go.” Julie guided the baby into his arms, and suddenly he was holding his nephew.
The world shifted.
The baby weighed almost nothing. His tiny heartbeat fluttered against his chest like a hummingbird’s wings. When his eyes cracked open—blue, the unfocused blue of all newborns—he felt something ancient and powerful stir in his chest.
Pack, his wolf whispered. Family. Protect.
“He’s got your scowl,” Derek said from beside him, and he realized he’d been staring at the baby with an intensity that probably bordered on alarming.
“I don’t scowl.”
“You absolutely scowl. You’re doing it right now.”
“He looks…” He searched for words. “Strong.”
“He is.” Derek’s hand settled on the baby’s head with impossible gentleness. “We’ve been talking about names. Julie and I.”
“Oh?”
“We want to call him Robert.” Derek’s voice grew thick. “After Dad.”
His chest tightened. Their father—strong, steady Robert Moonstone, who had led the pack with wisdom and grace until Vivienne’s poison had slowly destroyed him. The father he’d spent years trying to live up to, the legacy he’d feared he could never match.
“Dad would have loved him,” he managed.
“He would have loved seeing us like this.” Derek met his eyes. “Together. Brothers again. You know, after Vivienne, after everything that happened, I wasn’t sure we’d ever…”
“I know.”
“But you came to my wedding. You accepted Julie. You let Harper into your life.” Derek’s hand found his shoulder. “I’m proud of you, little brother. And I know Dad would be too.”
The words hit harder than he expected. For so long, there had been distance between them—not hostility, exactly, but a careful separation. Derek had left for the city, built his empire, and mated a human. He had stayed in the mountains, held the pack together, nursed his wounds alone.
But now, standing in this room with his brother and his nephew and his mate waiting nervously by the door, he felt the last of that distance dissolve.
“He’s lucky,” he said quietly. “Robert. To have you as his father.”
“And you as his uncle.” Derek grinned, and it was the grin of the boy he remembered from their childhood—before Vivienne, before responsibility, before everything got so complicated. “You’re going to spoil him rotten, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
The baby made a small sound—not quite a cry, more of a complaint—and he carefully passed him back to Julie. She settled Robert against her chest with the easy confidence of a mother, and his chest suddenly ached.
Soon, he thought. Maybe.
“Harper,” Julie said gently, “Come and join us. You’re lurking by the door like a nervous cat.”
She approached with obvious reluctance. She’d changed so much in the past three months—more confident, more comfortable in her own skin, more willing to engage with the world outside her computer screen—but she still had moments of retreat.
Moments when the scared orphan she’d been showed through the capable Luna she’d become.
“Congratulations,” she said, her voice a little too bright. “He’s beautiful. You did great. Julie, you look amazing, seriously, I don’t know how you…”
“Would you like to hold him?”
She went pale. “Oh. I don’t… I’m not really… I’ve never held a baby before.”
“First time for everything.” Julie was already transferring Robert into Harper’s stiff arms. “Support his head. There you go.”
He watched his mate hold his nephew, and the ache in his chest increased.
She looked terrified. Her glasses had slipped down her nose, her pink ponytail was coming loose, and she held the baby like he might explode at any moment. But beneath the fear, something else flickered across her face. Something soft and wondering and achingly vulnerable.
“He’s so small,” she whispered.
“They start that way,” Julie said gently. “They get bigger.”
“Right. Obviously. I knew that.” Her laugh was shaky. “Hi, Robert. I’m your Aunt Harper. I work in cybersecurity, which probably doesn’t mean much to you right now, but I promise I’m going to make sure no one ever hacks your college fund.”
The baby blinked up at her with unfocused eyes.
“Great talk,” she said. “Really productive.”
She practically shoved Robert back at Julie a moment later, stepping away from the bed like it had burned her. He caught her hand as she retreated past him, feeling her trembling.