“Your energy is critically depleted,”
I continue, focusing on Grace.
“And his-“
I jab a finger toward the now-seething Lycan King,
“-is overwhelming. One touch, even a small one, and he’ll pull from you again. He can’t help it.”
Grace’s eyes widen. She looks down at her hand like it’s suddenly foreign to her.
“I wasn’t intending to… Sorry, Lyre.”
“That’s the problem with mate bonds.”
I sigh heavily.
“They override rational thought. You don’t think, you just act, and suddenly you’re back in a hospital bed with tubes down your throat.”
Caine pushes himself off the floor, bristling with barely contained rage. His hands clench and unclench at his sides, tattoos rippling across his skin like living shadows.
“You have three seconds to explain why I shouldn’t tear your head off,”
he growls.
Uninspired. I roll my eyes.
“Because A: you can’t, and B: I’m trying to keep your mate alive, you absolute walnut.”
“Walnut?”
Jack-Eye whispers from somewhere behind me, sounding far too amused for someone who’s supposed to be blindly loyal to his king.
I clap my hands together, loud enough to startle everyone. The brief nudge of arcana to amplify the sound might have helped.
“Charming as this display of dominance is-truly, it’s riveting-there are way more important questions to ask right now, don’t you think?”
Caine opens his mouth, no doubt to say something predictably threatening, when movement catches my peripheral vision.
The feral toddler comes tearing around the corner, her face smeared with what appears to be pizza sauce and possibly chocolate. I hope it’s chocolate.
Behind her, a girl with braided hair sprints with her arms outstretched, looking equal parts furious and desperate.
“Bun, get back here!”
she hisses, reaching for the escaping toddler.
But Bun is faster than she looks. She careens across the floor with the unstoppable momentum of a tiny, sauce-covered missile. Her destination is clear, and nothing-nothing-will deter her.
She launches herself directly into Grace’s lap with a flying leap Olympic gymnasts would admire and lets out a bellow loud enough to shake dust from the cave ceiling.
“MAMA!”
The word echoes, bouncing off stone walls and ringing in the sudden, profound silence that follows.
Grace’s face goes slack with shock, her mouth wide enough to catch an army of flies as she instinctively catches the child. Motherly instincts. Not surprising, for someone with her fate.
Bun immediately snuggles against her chest, tiny fingers gripping Grace’s shirt with surprising strength as she rubs her sauce-streaked face against the fabric. She’s babbling a mile a minute, looking aggrieved with her scrunched up expression and fat crocodile tears.
Caine looks like someone just hit him with a sledgehammer. His expression cycles through confusion, shock, disbelief, and something that might be horror, all in the span of three seconds.
Oh.
This.
This is delicious.
My lips quirk at the horrible misunderstanding going through his head, even as I see panic widening Grace’s eyes.
“What,”
he says, voice dangerously flat,
“is that.”
The older girl skids to a halt at the edge of our little circle, her face draining of color as she realizes what just happened. Her pale skin goes even whiter, red eyes wide with panic.
“That’s the Lycan King, isn’t it?”
Grace’s hand hovers uncertainly over the child’s head, not quite touching.
“I-she’s not-we’re not-“
Her face has gone an alarming shade of crimson.
“So,”
I drawl, enjoying this moment perhaps more than I should,
“when were you going to mention you acquired a child? Must have slipped your mind during our quality time together.”
“She’s not mine!”
Grace manages to squeak out.
“She just-I don’t know why-“
Jack-Eye looks like he’s contemplating the nearest exit strategy, his gaze darting between his alpha’s increasingly thunderous expression and the child now contentedly nestled against Grace.
Owen steps forward, hands raised in a placating gesture.
“I can explain,”
he begins, then immediately takes a step back when Caine’s attention snaps to him, like a predator catching movement in tall grass.
“Please do,”
the Lycan says, each word dripping with menace.
Bun burrows deeper into my lap, trembling against my chest. The cave has gone deadly silent except for her sniffles.
“I can explain,”
Owen says again, taking another careful step back when Caine’s eyes lock onto him like heat-seeking missiles.
My heart pounds, trapped somewhere between panic and a bizarre protective instinct for the toddler currently using me as a human tissue. I’ve known this child for less than a handful of hours, but the bone-crushing tension radiating from Caine makes me want to shield her with my body.
“She’s not-we’re not-“
My voice is thin.
“This isn’t what it looks like.”
The words are lame, but it isn’t as if I was expecting to defend myself against a toddler calling me her mother.
Caine’s jaw twitches. The tattoos on his skin seem to pulse darker, shadows writhing beneath his flesh. I can practically hear the calculations happening behind his stormy eyes-dates, timelines, possibilities…
Not that there’s much to calculate.
No. Wait. Is he really wondering if Bun could be Rafe’s…? No.
Owen clears his throat.
“Bun has no parents. None of the children do.”
His voice remains steady despite the death stare Caine is drilling into him.
“They’re all soulspliced aberrants I rescued from various facilities. Bun is the youngest.”
It’s the most words I’ve ever heard him put together at once.
“Soulspliced?”
I echo, glancing down at the little head tucked under my chin.
“Their souls are…”
He moves his hands awkwardly.
“Mixed with more than one source. Aberrants.”
Bun raises her tear-stained face to look up at me. Her features shift slightly-bunny ears pop out of her head, and whiskers sprout her cheeks again. Then they’re gone.
It happens so fast I might have imagined it if I hadn’t seen it multiple times already.
“MAMA!”
she wails again, louder this time, pressing her face back against my collarbone.
Caine’s expression darkens further, if that’s even possible. His hands curl into fists at his sides.
Jer sighs from behind us all.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.