Chapter 48 Finneas
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Finneas
Alex was three weeks old and I was obsessed.
I knew I was obsessed because Luca told me I was obsessed, Andrea told me I was obsessed, the night nurse told me I was obsessed, and I didn’t give a shit because my son was the most remarkable thing that had ever existed and everyone else was underreacting.
I was terrible at diapers. The first one took eleven minutes and Andrea timed it from the bed, calling out the seconds like a sports commentator, and by the end she was laughing so hard she had to hold a pillow against her stomach because it hurt the stitches.
The second one was faster. The third one I somehow got backward and Andrea laughed until she cried and then yelled at me for making her laugh because it pulled the stitches.
By the end of the first week I could do it in under two minutes.
“Congratulations,” Andrea said. “You’ve reached basic human competency.”
I took it as the highest praise I’d ever received.
I was excellent at the three am feeds. Better than excellent.
I got up before Andrea, lifted Alex out of the bassinet I’d built with the rail that was definitely ambiguous regardless of what the label said, and carried him downstairs.
I heated the bottle the way the nurse showed me and sat in the kitchen in the dark with my son in my arms and watched him eat.
His fist curled around my finger while he drank.
The grip was surprisingly strong for someone who couldn’t hold his own head up yet.
He had Andrea’s nose, her grandmother confirmed it the day he was born, and my hair, dark and already curling at three weeks.
His eyes were still the murky blue that all newborns had but Andrea swore they were going to be green like hers. I hoped she was right.
I stared at that tiny hand wrapped around my index finger and thought about my father.
Wondered if Paul would have been a good grandfather.
He wasn’t a good father. Too busy, too absent, a King first and a parent when the schedule allowed.
Would he have slowed down for a grandchild?
Maybe. Maybe not. I’d never know, and sitting in the dark with my son at three am, I realized that was okay.
I didn’t need my father’s example for this. I just needed to be the opposite of it.
I was going to be at dinner. I was going to be in the nursery at three am.
I was going to build things with my hands, get paint on my clothes, let Andrea photograph every screw-up.
My son was going to know his father’s face from across the breakfast table, not from a portrait in the council chamber.
Andrea found me one morning. Four am, kitchen, Alex asleep on my chest in the rocking chair her grandmother sent from Whitebrook. She leaned against the doorframe in my shirt with her hair everywhere, looking half awake and fully unimpressed.
“You’re doing the staring thing again.”
“I’m not staring. I’m monitoring.”
“You’ve been monitoring him for three hours. He’s asleep.”
“He could wake up.”
“He’s three weeks old. All he does is sleep, eat, and shit. You don’t need to supervise all three.”
“What if he needs something?”
“He needs his father to sleep so he doesn’t drop him tomorrow.”
“I’m not going to drop him.”
“You dropped the bottle earlier.”
“The bottle was slippery.”
“The bottle was dry.”
She came over, leaned down, kissed Alex’s head, then kissed my mouth. Her hair fell forward and tickled Alex’s face and he scrunched his nose in his sleep. We both froze.
“Did you see that?” Andrea whispered.
“The nose scrunch.”
“We made that. We made a whole person who scrunches his nose.”
“We did.”
She sat on the arm of the rocking chair, leaned her head against mine.
We watched our son sleep, scrunch, breathe.
I thought: this is what I almost threw away for a fake illness and a woman I didn’t love.
This kitchen, this chair, this baby. I would spend the rest of my life making sure I earned it.
A few days later I came home and heard her laughing in the living room. She was on a video call with her therapy group from Whitebrook, holding Alex up to the camera so they could see him.
I stopped in the hallway. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. But the sound of Andrea laughing was something I’d walk through fire to hear.
“He’s perfect,” she was saying. “Ten fingers, ten toes, his dad’s hair, and he screams like he’s being personally victimized every time we change his diaper.”
A voice I didn’t recognize, loud, probably Hallie: “And Finneas? Is he still doing the obsessive staring thing?”
“He’s been up every night at three am for three weeks straight. He feeds the baby, holds the baby, stares at the baby. I found him asleep in the rocking chair yesterday with Alex on his chest and drool on both of them.”
Laughter from the phone. Then a quieter voice, maybe Adela: “And you two? You’re good?”
Andrea was quiet for a second. “Yeah. We’re really good. Like, stupidly good. Better than I thought I’d ever get.”
“You deserve it, Andrea.”
“I know.” I could hear her smiling. “I really do.”
I stood in the hallway for another minute, listening to her talk about our son, about us, about the life we’d built. Then I went upstairs before she caught me lurking.
Two months in I started planning the proposal.
I wanted to marry her. Not the shifter way, not the bond. The human way. A ring, a question, a yes or no that had nothing to do with wolves or packs or fated anything. She deserved both. The wolf commitment and the human one. I wanted to give her both.
The ring was the easy part. I had Luca track down a jeweler who specialized in custom pieces.
Simple, elegant, not flashy. Andrea would murder me if I showed up with something ostentatious.
A single stone, warm gold band, practical enough that she could wear it while handling animals.
It took three weeks. Cost more than the bassinet and the animal wing combined. I didn’t care.
The hard part was asking.
I practiced in the mirror like a goddamn teenager. I practiced in the car on the way to council meetings. Then one evening I sat on the floor of the animal wing with Buddy and practiced on him.
“Andrea, from the moment you walked into that interview...”
Buddy wagged his tail.
“No, that’s too formal. Okay. Andrea, you are the most...”
Buddy wagged harder.
“You’re wagging at everything. You have zero quality control.”
He licked my hand. I started over. Tried writing it down on my phone. It sounded like a corporate memo. Tried just talking, stream of consciousness, and it came out as a series of half-finished sentences and grunts that Andrea would have roasted me for.
I was the Lycan King. I’d faced down challengers, banished my own mother, commanded the loyalty of hundreds. And I was sitting on a floor rehearsing a proposal to a dog who approved of everything.
I chose the reading nook. The window seat, the bookshelves, the space Mary measured for Buddy. The place I built because she’d once described her dream room to a dog on a porch and didn’t know the dog was listening.
Andrea was in there on a Sunday afternoon, Alex in the bouncer on the floor, Buddy asleep at her feet, a book in her hand.
She was wearing leggings and one of my shirts and her hair was in the messy knot she’d been wearing since the baby was born because she said styling it took energy she’d rather spend sleeping.
She had spit-up on her shoulder, circles under her eyes, and her hair was held up by what I was fairly sure was a chopstick from last night’s takeout. Gorgeous. Absolutely wrecked and gorgeous.
I stood in the doorway and my hands were shaking. The ring was in my pocket. My heart was hammering so hard I was amazed she couldn’t hear it.
“You’re hovering,” she said without looking up. “I can feel you hovering from here.”
“I’m not hovering.”
“You’re standing in the doorway staring at me. That’s hovering.” She looked up. Saw my face. Her expression changed. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“You look like you’re about to throw up.”
“I’m fine.”
“Finneas, you’re white as a sheet. Sit down before you pass out.”
“Andrea.”
“What?”
I walked into the room. My legs felt wrong. I’d fought a wolf in front of my entire pack without my pulse rising and now I was shaking because of a woman in leggings reading a book.
I crouched in front of her. Buddy lifted his head, looked at me, put his head back down. Unhelpful as always.
“What are you doing?” Andrea said. She was looking at me with that expression, half concerned, half amused, one eyebrow up.
I pulled the ring out of my pocket. Her mouth opened. No sound came out.
“I had a speech,” I said. “I practiced it on Buddy. It was terrible. He liked it but he has no standards.”
She was staring at the ring. Her book was forgotten in her lap.
“So I’m just going to say it. I want to marry you. Not the wolf way. The human way. Your way. Because you deserve both and I want to give you both.”
“Finneas...”
“You called me a caveman to a dog. You threatened me with pink wallpaper. You read to me in the worst Scottish accent in the history of the English language and I fell in love with you somewhere between chapter three and the part where you told Fin about my forearms.” My voice was shaking.
Fantastic. “You are the best thing that ever happened to me. You and Alex. I want to spend the rest of my life getting things wrong while you photograph it.”
She laughed. It came out wet.
“Marry me, Andrea.”
She looked at me, crouched in front of her in the reading nook, ring in my hand, Buddy asleep at her feet, our son making bubbles in the bouncer. Her eyes were full. Her chin was trembling. The dimple wasn’t showing because she was biting her lip trying not to cry.
“You practiced on the dog?”
“He was very encouraging.”
“How long have you been carrying that ring around?”
“Three weeks. It’s been burning a hole in my pocket.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I’m aware.”