Chapter 53

Fifty-Three

FINN

I paced outside a small house. The pack kept their distance, feeling my disquiet. I’d been cast from the room as I’d snapped at the nurses too many times. Cassa’s omega energy calmed me enough to convince me to leave, but not further than outside.

“I should be with her,” I told Odion who now lived as Oberon. He leaned against a tree more than two dozen yards away.

“If you weren’t snarling at everyone, sure,” Oberon agreed. “Can you go in there, see her in pain, and not bite everyone’s head off?”

I couldn’t, that’s why I’d been kicked out. My wolf growled and snarled at everyone, possessive over the little omega I’d rescued more than a decade ago. A hundred alphas wandered through my pack, as we searched for her mate. I’d learned early on to keep my distance as I couldn’t control the absolute nightmare I became when another alpha got close. And yet, she wasn’t mine. Not fated at least, though in the end, she had chosen me.

Did she fear she’d never be free if she didn’t? Or perhaps she feared the dark rage that could occasionally find a way out of my firm grasp of control?

“She must hate me,” I said.

Oberon snorted. “She loves you.”

“But she’s not really mine.”

“I think that’s her choice.”

If I’d left, perhaps she’d have found her true mate. Though I shuddered to think of the damaged alphas and broken wolves I’d leave behind. The darkest portions of me thought ending them might be kinder, though most had found quiet lives under my suppression of their monsters. Without me, they’d be unleashed on the world to create chaos. A burden I grew to hate more and more every day.

Now there was Cassa. The first whom my mortal soul, my wolf, and my beast agreed to let inside my heart. Love. What a complicated mess. I loved my pack, or at least the wolf did. I loved the wild ground I’d settled, the beast hidden inside my soul adored the forest’s growth and madness of nature between subtle quiets. And my human side loved many, like Oberon, as family. But even the brother of my heart couldn’t get close to Cassa without me snarling.

“I shouldn’t have picked an omega,” I grumbled. Three beings in one, yet a world of turmoil inside. Cassa soothed them all, as long as it was only her and me.

O beron laughed, a sound I rarely heard over the years. “You’ve never chosen the easy path, my friend. If you couldn’t have a true mate, who would fit you better than an omega?”

A baby cried, and I leapt to the porch, needing entrance. Oberon caught me, moving faster than any wolves should, but he wasn’t any wolf. My monster snarled at him and I fought to tamp it down.

“Not until you’re called,” he said as he folded his arms across his chest and became a brick wall in front of the door. I could kill him if I shifted to my darkest form, but my human heart didn’t want to destroy my brother. My wolf agreed with Oberon’s protectiveness.

“I need to see her.”

“Hmm,” Oberon said.

Another ten lifetimes passed in the moments I paced waiting for approval to enter. The midwife spoke to Oberon and he stepped aside. I ran past him and into the small cabin set aside for the birth. Cassa sat up, holding a swaddled baby, her face tense with exhaustion, and the room smelled of blood and afterbirth, pain and sorrow. The last made my heart flip over. Had the baby passed? Cassa wanted it desperately, and I’d done everything I could to ensure her dream came true, even if that meant suppressing her wolf with my magic to keep the baby from being lost.

I tiptoed to her side and heard a racing heartbeat, not hers, the baby’s. It lived. I sighed with relief as I sat down on the bed beside her. She opened her eyes to gaze watery eyes at me.

“Cassa, what’s wrong?” I whispered, touching her carefully, fearing causing her more pain. Oberon ushered the midwife and her assistant out, whispering to them, though I couldn’t hear what they said.

Cassa pulled the blanket back from the baby’s face as he suckled her breast for food, and I recoiled as a ripple of dark magic briefly turned it from cute baby cheeks to a gaunt monster, not unlike my beast. I gasped and reached for him.

“No,” Cassa said.

“He shouldn’t be touched by the dark already.”

“You were, and you’re okay.”

The darkness hadn’t awakened in me until my mother had been murdered. Before that nightmare I’d been a glorious thing like my mother, filled with fire and light. How had it spread to the baby? My wolf breathed in the baby’s scent, finding the musk of wolf strong, the curse already in his blood, but beneath the heavy aroma of the beast, something was missing. That couldn’t be right.

“I need to hold him,” I said, reaching for the baby again.

Cassa tightened her grip. “No.”

“I won’t hurt him, I promise.”

Still she refused. I sat at her side as she nursed the baby, my heart hammering with worry. Oberon kept his distance, and once Cassa tired, he called for one of the packmates to come help with the baby. When Marina arrived, Cassa handed the baby off to her with strict instructions that I was not to be alone with the boy.

“That’s not right, Cassa,” Marina said. “The babe is his too, and he’s Alpha.”

I kept my distance, heartbroken by the accusations in Cassa’s eyes, though I hadn’t done anything other than sire the next monster. Perhaps that was enough to lose her love.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Cassa is just protective.”

“What’s his name?” Marina asked, gaze going from me to Cassa.

“Felix,” Cassa answered. It was one of a handful we’d agreed on.

“Felix it is,” Marina said as she rocked him. He slept and with it the touch of darkness with him buried itself deep. “Lucky, indeed. He’s adorable.”

Cassa curled up on her side, exhausted. I wanted desperately to hold her, but when I reached for her, she shook her head. “No.”

My wolf whined inside my soul, the rejection nearly bringing me to my knees. “Cassa.”

“Give her some time,” Oberon said. He gently touched my shoulder, careful to not show aggression. “You can rest at my place. It’s been a long day for all of us.”

“Always the voice of reason,” Marina said as she held Felix. “Let Cassa rest.”

The effort it took to leave the cabin made my wolf howl. I knew if I changed in that moment, the darkness would rise. Would anything be left of the little pack of broken wolves I’d built?

“Xander,” Oberon said.

“There’s no human in that baby,” I whispered, hands clenched at my sides as I followed him toward his home on our pack lands. Every step away crumbling more of my resolve to leave her with the baby. “No human soul, just a monster in human skin.”

“He has a wolf soul. It will have to be enough.”

“Can a wolf be taught to be human?”

Oberon met my gaze, his own too aware. “How often have you let the wolf have control?”

“Don’t say that anywhere near the pack. You know I’m not a regular wolf.”

“And Felix won’t be either. We can teach him.”

My wolf wasn’t great at being human. It mimicked, and often I worried the lack of empathy he showed was because I gave him few examples. But my soul had three pieces, most wolves only had two. And none before now had ever had to suppress a beast made to thrive in the dark. “He’s a baby. How will I teach him to hold back the monster?”

“You weren’t a monster until your mother died,” Oberon reminded me. “You could change, but the darkness didn’t settle. Isn’t that what you told me?”

But that wasn’t what I saw in Felix’s face. He wasn’t the glorious dragon of my mother’s lineage, rather he was touched by what ate my sire, and fought me for constant control. It was as though he’d taken the darkness I’d been drawing from the broken wolves. How was that possible?

“Fate is punishing me,” I said, sinking into a chair on Oberon’s porch and refusing to go inside and put another barrier between Cassa and me. Female werewolves never had children, the change made it too hard on their bodies. If Cassa had been a human untouched by the wolf taint in her blood, she might have had a child without me suppressing her wolf, but her omega would have lay dormant. “Or because I took Cassa as mine when she has a mate out there somewhere.”

“I think that was her choice.”

“If I’d turned her away?”

“How long do you expect your human heart to live without love?”

“I’ve lasted this long.”

He sighed. “Xander…”

I knew he understood my loneliness like few other. His handful of chosen mates over the years lost as much as mine had been. But Oberon had always been more human than I. I was other and without guidance, struggled to rein in the nightmare. How could I teach a baby control if I couldn’t leash it myself?