Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jessa
I’ve counted the cracks in the ceiling twice, and both times I lose the number halfway through.
Sleep won’t come. I roll onto my back, shift to one side, then the other, the sheet knotting around my ankles.
Every time I close my eyes, I see Mia’s eyes turning gold and the claws pushing out through her fingertips.
I hear the growl that came up out of her chest when she went after Sloane.
A shifter. A non-human.
The child that I could have sworn I knew better than anyone is a shifter. And I’ve seen now what a shifter is. A large looming wolf, terrifying as it approached me. Will she look like that in a few years?
Will it change how I feel about her?
The answer comes before I’ve even finished asking the question. My answer to Marcus hasn’t changed.
Turning on my back, I throw an arm over my eyes, trying not to think of what I witnessed today. I don’t know why I didn’t run away screaming. All I know is under the fear was something else, a strange sort of calm. Like somewhere deep inside, my soul knew him, felt safe with him.
“Damnit.” I sit up in bed, frustrated.
Easing out of bed, I pad down the stairs on bare feet and slip past the door the girls are sleeping behind.
The kitchen still holds a trace of bleach where the glass got swept up.
My hand goes for the milk out of habit when I open the fridge, then stops on a bottle of beer, cold under my fingers.
Milk isn’t going to fix what’s wrong with me tonight. But alcohol might.
I take the beer out to the patio and drop into a chair, tucking my legs up under me. The first swallow is bitter and cold. I let my head fall back against the seat and look out at the black wall of trees where, two nights ago, everything I knew about the world changed.
My life used to make sense. I kept a spreadsheet for everything. Now my daughter is going to be a wolf, and here I sit on a shifter’s patio at one in the morning, drinking his beer.
A board creaks behind me. I glance over my shoulder, already knowing who it is.
Marcus crosses the deck in nothing but a pair of pajama pants slung low on his hips.
He’s bare from the waist up, the wound closed over already, only smooth skin where I watched him bleed.
I look at his chest before I can stop myself, then lower, then drag my eyes up to his face and hope the dark hides it.
It doesn’t.
“Want to touch?” His mouth curves.
“No, thank you.” I take another sip so my mouth has somewhere to be. “Touching you is what landed me in this mess to begin with.”
He laughs softly and drops into the chair across from mine, angling it so he’s facing me straight on. “How are you holding up?” he asks.
“It doesn’t feel real.” I turn the bottle between my hands.
“I can imagine.”
I hold the beer out across the gap between us. He takes a pull off it and hands it back. His fingers graze mine on the return, enough to prickle up my whole arm.
“Ask me anything.” He rubs the nape of his neck. “The only thing I ever kept from you was this, the shifter part. I couldn’t tell you.”
“But you did.”
“I had to, sooner or later.” His eyes hold mine. “I just couldn’t work out how to say it without you running for the hills.”
“Bit hard to run for the hills.” I stare into the dark. “My own kid’s going to sprout fur someday.”
That drags a huff out of him. “She’s not going to turn into a wolf and stay one.” He leans forward, forearms on his knees. “She’ll gain the ability to shift back and forth, whenever she wants it. That’s a different thing altogether.”
“And what does that mean for her? For her life?” My voice comes out smaller than I’d like.
“It means she needs a pack.” He watches me take it in. “A pack grounds a shifter, keeps the wolf steady. Since she’s mine, she belongs to mine.”
“The people who hurt her.” I make myself ask it. “Did they know what she is when they handed her that candy?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “Nobody knows. Just me and one friend you haven’t met yet. Adrian.”
“You trust him.”
“I’d trust him with Mia’s life before my own.”
“And your uncle?” I’ve met the man once, and once was more than enough.
Marcus’s jaw tightens. “He doesn’t know.” A beat passes. “He’s been trying to push Sloane at me for ages now. If he learns about you and Mia, I don’t know how he’s going to react.”
“Charming.” I pick at the wet label on the bottle. “Is he going to be a problem?”
“He’s a good man. Stubborn, set in his ways.” Marcus breathes out. “He’s also the alpha.”
“Which means what, exactly?”
“He leads the pack. Makes the calls, holds the whole thing together.” His expression sobers. “Ask me whatever you need. There are no more secrets now.”
I roll the cold glass between my palms. “So you’re not human.”
“Biologically, I am.” He tips his head. “My blood just runs different.”
“That’s why you wouldn’t let me take her to a hospital.”
“A doctor would’ve seen it in her blood.” His thumb moves along the seam on his ribs. “Right now, hers sits close to a human’s, though it isn’t quite there. Once she begins to shift, it turns into what mine is. Human technology is good. We don’t tell humans about us.”
I ponder over that. An owl calls somewhere out in the trees, and I flinch, then feel foolish for it.
“The men who came after her.” My throat closes. “They’re not finished, are they?”
“No.”
“Then why her?” I lean toward him. “If they didn’t know what she was, why my daughter?”
He’s quiet for a beat. “Because they wanted to get at me, and somewhere along the line, they worked out that she matters to me.” His hands curl on the chair arms. “I’ll always have enemies. The ones who put poison in her hands are hunters.”
“Are they wolves too?” I look at him.
“No.” His face hardens. “They’re human, born to hunt our kind. Someone has to keep the balance or wolves would overrun the world.”
“And they hunt you.”
“They used to, wherever they found us.” His thumb finds the seam on his ribs again. “Now they run as organizations, keeping us in check. They don’t kill us now for sport at least.”
“But somebody’s trying.” I nod at his ribs.
“Somebody is.” His mouth thins. “A poison came back into circulation. Wolfsbane. It was wiped out generations ago, maybe centuries, and now it’s moving again.
” He looks off at the tree line. “I think hunters killed Bella’s parents with it.
My brother and his mate. At least my brother was poisoned with it. ”
The bottle stops halfway to my mouth. “You think, or you know?”
“I’m close to knowing.”
“Is Bella in danger from it? Now?”
“Not from that. I don’t believe so.” He drags a hand down his face. “But someone inside the pack had a hand in how they died, and that’s what I’ve been chasing these past weeks. It’s why the three of you are under my roof.” He nods at the dark. “Nothing crosses that tree line without me knowing.”
“Sloane did.”
Marcus’s expression darkens. “I don’t know how she got the key, but I will make sure she doesn’t come here again.”
“She called Mia a hybrid,” I reveal hesitantly. “So she knows.”
Marcus sighs and looks toward the trees. “It’s fine. She can’t do anything to Mia. Shifter children are precious. My uncle is more likely going to tell me to drop you and take Sloane as a mother figure to Mia than he is to tell me to get rid of my daughter.”
I immediately stiffen, and he lifts a hand. “I’m not doing it, Jessa. I’m just telling you the worst case scenario.”
A wave of anxiety washes over me. I’ve never felt so helpless before. These people, they can easily get rid of me if I inconvenience them. They can take Mia, and it doesn’t matter where I go. They will be able to find me. If not them, then the hunters.
I can’t even protect my own daughter.
Marcus tugs the beer bottle from my hands and sets it down on the boards.
“I shouldn’t have said that. Jessa, you are Mia’s mother.
You will always be the most important person in her life, and there is nobody who will take her from you.
I’ll make sure of that. I want you here, both of you.
If you’d rather have your own place, I’ll set you up on pack ground, somewhere safe, somewhere close.
I am not going to force you into anything. ”
“I don’t want that,” I say abruptly. “I want Mia to have her father.”
He goes still. “And what do you want, Jessa? For yourself, I mean.”
I don’t have an answer for that, so I press my lips shut.
Marcus rises out of his chair. He crosses to me, lifts me by the waist without effort, and lowers himself into my seat with me pulled across his lap, my legs over the arm, his heartbeat steady against my shoulder. His palm settles heavily on my thigh.
“I asked what you want,” he says against my hair. “For yourself.”
I stare at the buttons of a shirt he isn’t wearing.
“The first time we slept together, we didn’t love each other.
We didn’t even know each other.” My fingers find the edge of the healed skin on his ribs and skirt around it.
“When I came looking for you afterward, it wasn’t to trap you into marrying me. ”
“No?”
“I wanted to give you the chance to know her. If you wanted it.” My voice roughens. “I never meant to keep her from you.”
His arm tightens around my back. “And now?”
“It’s different now.” I can’t look at him.
“How so?” His voice stays low.
I don’t have the words, and I’m not certain I want to find them. My mouth stays shut.
Marcus lifts my hand off his ribs and closes it inside his. “Then I’ll say it for you.”
I hold my breath.
“Ten years ago, if you’d reached me, I’d have married you.” His thumb sweeps over my knuckles. “Or tried to, at least. I’d have wanted her raised with both of us in the house.”
“And if I’d told you no?”