Chapter 25 Finneas
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Finneas
The hospital room was too bright. Fluorescent buzz above my head, the smell of disinfectant mixing with flowers someone had brought to make the place feel less like what it was. Three days ago. Before the magazine, before the rejection, before any of it.
My mother was in the bed. IVs in both arms, monitors beeping in a rhythm I couldn’t stop syncing my breathing to, her dark hair with its gray streaks spread across the pillow.
She looked smaller than I’d ever seen her.
Margaret Kingsley, who commanded rooms, who made grown Alphas drop their eyes with a look, lying in a hospital bed with her skin the color of ash, trembling.
I sat in the chair beside her and held her hand.
My wolf was howling, throwing himself against my ribs so hard I could feel the impact in my chest. She was dying.
The healers confirmed it, the doctors confirmed it, and I was sitting in a plastic chair holding her hand like that was going to do a goddamn thing.
Andrea was in the hallway. She’d insisted on coming, refused to let me walk into this alone.
She was sitting in a plastic chair surrounded by people who didn’t want her there.
I was terrified, because my mother was dying on one side of the door, the woman I loved was on the other, and I could feel the walls closing in.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” my mother said, her voice so thin I had to lean forward to hear it. “I didn’t want you to find out this way.”
“How long have you known?”
“A few weeks. The healers ran tests when I started feeling tired. I thought it was just age.” She squeezed my hand, barely any pressure behind it. “I didn’t want to worry you.”
I stared at our hands, hers small and gray inside mine, and I didn’t know what to say because there was nothing to say.
“Your father would have been here,” she said, and her eyes filled. “He would have known what to say. I miss him so much, Finneas. Every day. And knowing I’ll see him again soon is the only thing that doesn’t terrify me about this.”
My throat closed. My jaw locked so tight my teeth ached. “Don’t talk like that.”
“I have to. I have to say these things while I still can.” She turned her head on the pillow to look at me, and her eyes were wet but focused, sharpened by something I couldn’t identify yet. “I have one thing I need to ask you. One thing. And I need you to hear me out before you answer.”
“What is it?”
“Marry Lorraine.”
The monitors beeped on, slow and regular and indifferent to what she’d just said. My wolf went still inside me, the howling cutting off like a switch flipped, and in the silence that followed I could hear every machine in the room, every drip of the IV, every breath she took.
“Marry her, Finneas. Before I’m gone. Let me see my son married to a woman who will stand beside him the way I stood beside your father. Let me see that before I go.”
“Mother...”
“Please.” She was crying now. Not the controlled tears from our phone calls, not the careful wetness she used when she wanted me to feel guilty.
This was raw, ugly, her chest hitching under the hospital gown, her face crumpling, and I felt it in my own chest because she was my mother and she was breaking in front of me.
Her hand gripped mine with a strength that didn’t match her frail body.
“I know you don’t love her the way a husband should.
But she loves you. She understands our world.
She will protect the pack, the legacy, everything your father built.
That’s what matters when you’re running out of time. ”
“That’s not all that matters.”
“It’s what matters to me.” Her voice broke on the last word.
“Your father and I talked about this before he died. You and Lorraine, what it would mean for the families, for the pack. It was one of the last conversations we had. I have been holding onto it for eight years because it was the last plan we made together, and losing it would feel like losing him all over again.”
I closed my eyes. My wolf was screaming at me again, shoving images so fast I couldn’t block them.
Andrea smiling, the dimple on the right side.
Andrea in my kitchen in my shirt, barefoot, laughing about burnt pasta.
Andrea saying “I’m falling for you” in a bathtub with steam in her hair, her eyes wide and scared and honest. The bond was pulling me toward the door, toward the hallway where she was sitting in a plastic chair waiting for me, toward the woman who made me feel like a person instead of a king.
I opened my eyes and looked at my mother.
Gray face, tears running into her hair, monitors beeping.
She was dying. The woman who raised me, who held my hand at my father’s funeral, who pushed too hard and manipulated too much but who was still my mother, was lying in a hospital bed asking me for the only thing she wanted before she died.
“Okay,” I said.
The word came out hollow. My wolf howled, raw and gutted, and I flinched from the inside.
My mother’s face broke into relief. She pulled my hand to her cheek, pressed it there, whispered thank you over and over.
I sat in the chair staring at the wall above her head while the monitors beeped and my heart turned to ash.
She told me to send Lorraine and her mother in. She wanted to tell them herself.
I walked out. Andrea was standing up from her chair, concern all over her face, reaching for me, and it nearly broke me right there. My wolf was clawing at me to tell her, to grab her, to say “my mother asked me to marry Lorraine and I said yes and I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry.”
I told Lorraine and her mother that Margaret wanted to see them. They went in. Lorraine threw a look at Andrea over her shoulder on the way through the door, a small satisfied smile that made my fists clench at my sides.
Then it was just me and Andrea in the hallway.
“What happened in there?” she asked.
“She’s sick. It’s serious.”
“Okay. I’m here. Whatever you need.”
I looked at her hand on my arm, at her face, at the woman who’d dropped everything to be here for me, who was standing in a hostile hallway full of people who didn’t want her there because she loved me.
My wolf was screaming at me. Every cell in my body was screaming at me.
Tell her. Tell her right now. Fix this before it’s too late.
“You should go home,” I said. “I need to stay.”
“I can stay too. I don’t mind waiting.”
“No. Go home, Andrea.”
She kissed my cheek. I didn’t lean into it because if I leaned into it I would crack open, everything would come out, and I couldn’t let that happen.
She left. I watched her walk to the elevator, press the button, step in. The doors closed. She was gone. I stood in that hallway and felt the distance between us open like a wound.
I waited. Sat in the plastic chair Andrea had been sitting in, still warm from her body, and I pressed my palms against my face and tried to breathe.
The door opened twenty minutes later. Lorraine came out first, glowing. Mascara streaked, eyes bright, cheeks flushed. She crossed the corridor in three steps and threw her arms around my neck and tried to kiss me. I caught her shoulders and pushed her back before her mouth reached mine.
“Don’t.”
She pulled back, confused, but only for a second. The joy was too big for my rejection to dent it. “Finneas, I’m so happy. I’ve waited so long for this. We’re going to have the most beautiful wedding.”
She was already talking about venues, about dresses, about spring ceremonies, her voice running at a speed that told me she’d been rehearsing this moment in her head for years.
“We have so much to plan,” she said, grabbing my arm. “This is going to be perfect.”
Her mother came out behind her, watching me with an expression I couldn’t read. Satisfaction, maybe. Or something colder. She put her hand on Lorraine’s shoulder. “Let’s give Finneas some space, darling. He’s had a long day.”
Lorraine squeezed my arm once more, beaming, and they left. The corridor went quiet. I sat in Andrea’s chair and stared at the closed door of my mother’s room and the antiseptic silence pressed in from every direction.
Three days.
I didn’t answer her calls. Every time my phone lit up with her name my chest seized and my hand reached for it and I put it back down.
I read every text she sent. How is she? How are you?
Call me. The words on my screen, worried, scared, loving, and I couldn’t respond because what would I say?
What words existed for “I just agreed to marry another woman because my mother is dying and I’m too much of a coward to say no”?
I didn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw her face and my body jackknifed awake with the bond screaming at me to go to her. I didn’t eat. My wolf refused to shift, refused to communicate, locked behind a wall of silence that felt like punishment because it was.
Lorraine visited my mother daily. She held Margaret’s hand, cried at her bedside. It looked real. For once it looked real, and I hated that it complicated things because it would have been easier if Lorraine was a monster through and through.
On the third morning, in the car on the way to the office, Lorraine told me she was going to give Andrea the magazine personally. Casual. Delighted. “I thought she should hear it from us. From someone she knows. Isn’t that nice?”
My blood went cold. “I’ll handle it.”
“Oh don’t be silly, it’s already in my bag. She’ll be so happy for us.”
The elevator opened. She was walking onto the floor before I could stop her. Andrea was at her desk, and Lorraine was crossing the carpet with the magazine in her hand, and I was three steps behind watching it happen in slow motion, unable to stop any of it.