23. Tony

“What baby?” Did Flint forget to tell me about a child or had he adopted a puppy?

Rudy drew me inside, and I sat while Flint stood beside me, holding my hand. “I’m not certain, but it might be.” Rudy was bouncing on his toes.

Whatever I had couldn’t have been bad, because Rudy was beaming, but when I looked up at Flint, he was as white as a sheet. Maybe he had caught the same nasty bug I had.

“Okay. Is it catching?”

Ranger guffawed. “Not the way you mean. And besides, many human illnesses don’t affect shifters.”

I squeezed Flint’s hand because he wasn’t saying anything, and the others were downplaying what was wrong with me. Rudy was bubbling with excitement.

“Flint?” Hunter nudged his big brother. “You got something to say to your mate?”

“Yeah, Flint. You got something to say?” I mimicked Hunter.

Flint squatted in front of me. “They’re trying to tell us that you might be pregnant.”

“Pregnant? We only had sex for the first time two weeks ago!”

Everyone except me and Flint burst out laughing.

“That’s all it takes, especially for shifters.” Rudy hugged us. “I’m going to have a grandbaby. But I warn you, I won’t be doing the traditional grandpa activities. There’ll be color, laughter, and dancing under the stars at midnight.” He raced off looking for a purple feather boa.

“Are they right?” My hand went to my belly, but it was Flint’s reaction that worried me. Tears were streaming over his cheeks, his face was red and puffy, and ewww, there was snot. I’d never seen him look anything other than put together.

“Do you not want a baby?” I was suddenly very protective of the sesame-sized nugget in my tummy.

“Gods, no, the opposite.” He covered my face with kisses despite the tears and the mucus. “I just never imagined… we… I don’t know.” He sniffed and put his head in my lap.

“Is that what happens when you find out you’re a father?” Hunter asked his dad as Arnie handed Flint a box of tissues.

“Pretty much.” Rudy had returned with a bunch of photos of Flint as a baby.

“Do you feel well enough for the drive… back to… my house? We can stay here for the next nine months if you don’t.” He helped me to my feet.

“That’s a joke, right?” I frowned at him as the Durands shook their heads at him. “I’ll be at college tomorrow and the next day and the next until I defend my thesis.”

I kissed the four Durands who were standing at attention and waltzed out the door. Amazing how the prospect of an argument with my mate made me feel so much better.

“You and the baby won’t be safe on campus.” Flint raced in front of me while scrolling on his phone. “I’m hiring a doctor who’ll be with you every minute until the birth.”

“Stop.” I grabbed the phone out of his hand and tossed it in the car. “I’m no different than I was an hour ago or yesterday or last week. I have a tiny speck inside me which is the size of our baby.”

“But what if something happens?”

“Omegas have been giving birth for centuries.” I buckled the seat belt, the metal cool to the touch. “Wait, is there something different about a shifter birth?” I could ask my dad because my alpha father was a shifter. Not that he was aware of that, so no, I couldn’t.

The last time we spoke a week ago, he and Derek had been embarking on a cruise, and he’d talked about them and their upcoming vacation and never once asked how I was.

“No. If the baby is a shifter, they won’t meet their wolf until adolescence.”

Ahhh, that was one worry crossed off my list. For a second, I’d pictured myself running through the woods after a diapered wolf cub.

I yawned, and Flint stopped the car. Now what? I was no mechanic, so we might have to spend the night at Rudy’s.

“Are you well enough for me to keep going?”

“Flint, I yawned. People do that. I’m tired, and I have to read over a paper in the morning.”

He continued driving. This was going to be a long nine months.

“Stop the car!”

“I knew it. I’ll head to the hospital.”

“Stop right now and listen. I trust you to keep me safe with your bodyguards and cameras and apps and gods only knows what else. But you must trust me to look after our baby. I won’t be hurdling over tall buildings or mountain climbing.”

Poor Flint. His eyes bulged, and I hid a smile, thinking of him traipsing up a mountain with a heap of baby paraphernalia.

He exhaled. “I can do that, but if I slip and fail, be gentle with me.”

“Not sure about that. I might have to smack your backside.”

“Tony, I almost came in my pants.”

“Naughty.” I put a hand on his thigh, and he gasped.

No matter what happened, we were linked forever because of our child. But we hadn’t had the mate discussion, nor had we come to an agreement about his work. I was floundering in a deep pool, but no matter what the future looked like, I had to step up and be responsible for the baby.

Flint helped me into the house. My instinct was to fling off his hand, saying, “I can do it myself,” but I bit off my response and enjoyed having him at the side and the skin-to-skin contact.

But when I crawled into bed and my eyelids were too heavy to keep open, my brain refused to quiet down. I flicked on the bedside lamp and shook Flint, even though he wasn’t asleep.

“If we decide to live together and be… you know… mates, what does that mean exactly?”

“If?” His poor brows were getting a ton of exercise.

“Calm yourself, big guy. I’m just asking. I need all the information before I make a decision.” This must have been hard for him. His body was rigid with tension and his jaw so tight it might break.

“As my mate, you are the Alpha Omega.”

“Yeah, yeah, I got that on the meet-the-pack day. And what a fun event that was.” I rolled my eyes at the memory.

“Traditionally—”

“Cut to the chase, babe.” I wasn’t in the mood for a history lesson. “In the twenty-first century, what role am I expected to play?”

“Ummm, well… you attend full-moon runs, though you’d be an observer, as you can’t… shift.”

“So once a month I show my face to the pack, stand under the full moon while the wolves do their thing. What else?”

“Support the family.”

“When you say family, is that the Durant family or the La Luna Noir family, because those are very different.” I tensed, waiting for his answer.

“Both.”

It was time to have that conversation. The one I’d been avoiding. I loved Flint the man, but what he did when he wasn’t with me couldn’t be excused by me saying, “That’s nothing to do with me.”

“I can’t bring a baby into this world and teach them about love, compassion, empathy, honesty, sympathy, and be with an alpha who is in the mob.”

There I’d said it. The only options were a) I’d leave Flint and raise the baby on my own, though knowing him, he’d have a bodyguard or maybe just Emilio sneaking around to check out what I was doing and that the little one and I were safe. Or b) he left his position in the mafia, which he probably wouldn’t do and that might end in his death? I’d never seen the mafia handbook rules, so I wasn’t sure.

Flint took both my hands in his. “You see the world in black and white. People are either good or they’re bad. That’s what your books and movies teach humans. But look around, Tony. Real life isn’t like that.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t give me that tired old, ‘You don’t know what my life is like,’ crap.”

We should have had this discussion during the day when we could be on either sides of a room, not with his leg brushing against mine, his hands clutching mine. We should have had it weeks ago, and now I was carrying his baby.

“When shifters came out of the forests, we were treated like the animals inside us by humans, but we had to survive. The world was very different. Chaos reigned, and shifters clung together. We saw a way to not only get through the turmoil but to thrive.”

“But that was then and this is now.”

Flint got out of bed and put on a robe. “Listen to me. We couldn’t afford to stick to the moral high ground, and now this way of life is in our blood. It’s who we are. We were born into this life. Our heritage marked us, for better or worse.”

He explained it was their wolves who gave them an advantage over small-time crooks, saying they chose to be predators not prey. “They are one of the reasons we have been so successful.”

He paced the floor, shoving his hands in the robe’s pockets. “What do you think would happen if I said, ‘Okay, today’s the day we give up everything and you all have to go find another job.’”

“The pack might riot?”

“You think?” His voice was close to shriek level. “They’d come for me and my family. But it’s not just about me. The other shifter families would take everything from us and probably kill us to make sure we didn’t try a comeback.”

“So which comes first? Shifter or mafia?” I asked.

“They’re intertwined. Shifters are who we are. Mafia is what we do.” He bit his bottom lip. “One favor. Please stop using the word mob. We are mafia.”

I hid a smile. My big tough guy with his gun was irritated by three little letters. I gave him a thumbs-up.

I looked around the room, the palatial furnishings provided by criminal activities. He couldn’t stop doing what he was born to do, not that I was sure he wanted to. His role as Alpha and his job were two halves of the whole.

He didn’t have a choice, but I did.

I could leave, love him, and ignore what he did or embrace his lifestyle.

“Swerving off that path we chose would be the end of us.” He slouched into an armchair and lowered his head, his brows knitted together.

I was standing at a fork in my life’s journey. The path on the right might be fraught with danger, while the left would be a life with my baby, but I’d grieve Flint with every breath until my very last. Dad had avoided this question because he never knew my father, not really.

“But what about our little one? Will they follow the same career path as you?”

He held up his hands in surrender. “I can’t answer that, but I will protect our child and you with my life.”

The fight went out of Flint, and I pulled him into bed. I still had so many more questions, but for now, we needed to be together, as a couple, as expectant parents, as mates.

I just hoped he would never take our child to take-your-kid-to-work day.