Chapter 29 Finneas #2
“You did what you had to do.” I could hear my own voice and it didn’t sound like me.
Low, shaking, scraped raw. “You hooked yourself up to fucking IVs, Mother. You laid in a bed with monitors beeping, gray in the face, holding my hand, crying, telling me you had months to live. You looked me in my goddamn eyes and told me you were dying.”
“Your father would have...”
“Don’t you fucking dare.” The words came out so sharp she took a step back. “Don’t you bring him into this. He’s dead. He’s been dead for eight years and you’ve been dragging his corpse into every argument since the funeral to guilt me into doing what you want.”
Her jaw tightened. The tears started, eyes filling, chin trembling, and I watched it happen.
Two weeks ago that face would have gutted me.
I’d have caved, apologized, taken her hand.
Now I watched her arrange her features into grief and for the first time in my life I saw it for what it was.
Performance. The quiver, the slow blink, the hand floating to her chest. Same gestures, same sequence, every time.
“Stop.” My voice was barely controlled. “Stop crying. I have watched you cry to get what you want my entire goddamn life and I’m done. I’m done, Mother. Turn it off.”
The tears dried up so fast it was like a switch flipping. Her expression went hard underneath, sharp, cold. The real Margaret. The one who orchestrated a fake illness down to the IV drip.
“Fine,” she said, her voice clipped. “You want the truth? That girl was never going to be enough. She’s human, Finneas.
Human. She can’t lead a pack, she can’t produce an heir worth a damn thing to the bloodline, she would have embarrassed you, embarrassed this family, embarrassed your father’s memory. I did you a favor.”
The rage hit me so hard my vision went white at the edges. A favor. She called it a fucking favor.
“She was my fated mate.” My voice was shaking.
“My fated. And you made me reject her. You made me stand in front of her and say the words and I felt the bond tear apart and I watched her double over in pain three feet from me and I couldn’t do a goddamn thing because I was too busy being your good son. Your obedient fucking puppet.”
“Fated mates are fairy tales. Your father and I weren’t fated and we built an empire.”
“You built a cage. And you’ve been trying to lock me in it since the day he died.”
Her mouth opened, then closed. No ready response. No angle to play. The silence that followed was the most honest thing she’d given me in months.
“The wedding is off.” I was breathing hard, my hands in fists at my sides, every muscle in my body coiled.
“You are done. No more visits, no more calls, no more showing up at pack events playing the grieving Luna. If you contact Lorraine, or anyone in the pack, I will have you formally banished. Not as your son. As your King.”
“You can’t do this to me. I am your mother.”
“You stopped being my mother the second you decided your bullshit agenda was more important than my life.” I was screaming now.
I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t dial it back, weeks of swallowed rage pouring out of me.
“You made me destroy the woman I love. You made me break her heart and reject our bond and watch her walk out of my life so you could have your perfect fucking wedding with your perfect fucking bloodline bride and I will never forgive you for that. Do you hear me? Never.”
I turned and walked away. She screamed my name behind me, not the tearful plea from earlier but a furious shriek, a sound I’d never heard from her, the composure finally cracking, the woman underneath all the performance revealed as someone who couldn’t stand losing control.
Her voice chased me down the gravel path, through the garden gate, through the house where the staff flattened themselves against the walls.
I got to my car, sat in the driver’s seat, and just threw my fist at the steering wheel. “FUCK!” I screamed. My jaw ached from clenching. My eyes burned with a pressure I refused to release because if I started I wasn’t sure I’d stop.
My mother lied to me. Faked a terminal illness, staged hospital rooms, manufactured tears. My own mother, who I would have done anything for, looked me in the eye from a bed full of tubes she didn’t need and weaponized every ounce of love I had for her against me.
I sat with that. Let it settle into me, let the shape of it become clear, the full architecture of what she’d done.
Every cough was calculated. Every tear was rehearsed.
Every mention of my father was a lever she pulled because she knew exactly how to work the guilt she’d been building in me since I was twenty-four years old.
She raised me to be loyal and then she used that loyalty to control me, and I let her, because I trusted her, because she was my mother.
Then my wolf moved.
Not a whisper. Not a tentative stirring.
He slammed against my chest from the inside with a force that made me gasp, tearing through the wall he’d locked himself behind.
Weeks of silence shattered in a single second, flooding me with something so intense I couldn’t separate the rage from the relief from the desperate aching need that poured through every nerve in my body.
He was back. And the grief and the fury at my mother were already fading behind a pull so strong it erased everything else, a compass needle swinging hard toward the only direction that mattered.
I didn’t know where she was. I didn’t know if she’d see me, if she’d listen, if there was anything left to save. But my wolf was awake, my chest was cracked open, and the only thought I could hold was her name.
I started the car.