Stefan’s POV
“I think you should,” Mari says, her dark eyes seeking mine. “I heard you’ve been looking for her for years.”
“Don’t you want to stay with me?” I ask her.
She wraps her arms around herself. “I do.”
“Then let’s forget about her. I feel everything with you that I should with my fated one. Maybe it’s you I was meant to find all these years.”
Or maybe Mari, the real Mari, is dead. That’s the only way I could have bonded with someone else because I never rejected her.
“I don’t want you to be with anyone else, but…” she hesitates and looks away, chewing on her bottom lip.
“What is it?” I urge her on.
Her eyes lift to mine again. “What happened back then? To her.”
“She disappeared. One day she was here, the next, she wasn’t. So was her mother. I never heard from her since then.”
“I think your mother was responsible,” she says.
I frown. “What?”
“When she tied me up in her basement, it was because she thought I was her. Apparently, she planned to get rid of her back then. But the man… What was his name? Thomas… The one who was with her. He said she was a shifter, so he sold her instead.”
My hands fold into fists again, this time for a different reason.
All these years, I never suspected my mother. But if she somehow found out about the special connection between me and Mari back then, I wouldn’t be surprised if she tried to remove her from my life.
But a shifter?
Why would Thomas say Mari was a shifter?
And if he sold her…
“Did he say where he sold her?” I ask.
“To another pack.”
“Did he say the name of the pack?”
Mari… Gwen—what should I call her?—shakes her head. “No.”
Good thing both my mother and Thomas are in my dungeons at the moment, then. This night won’t pan out before they both tell me the truth about what happened.
“I need to do something,” I tell her. “Let me walk you back to your room.”
“I need to ask you something,” she says.
“Okay.”
She reaches up, pushing a non-existent strand of hair behind her ear. She’s nervous. “You’re clean, right?”
“What do you mean?”
Her eyes catch mine, but for only a second before they fall someplace beyond my shoulder. “We had unprotected sex.”
Oh.
I clear my throat. “Don’t worry, werewolves don’t have STDs. We can’t contract any from humans, either.”
She nods. “Must be nice.”
My lips quirk up in a smile. “Yeah. You won’t get pregnant, either. You were not fertile.”
Her eyes finally come back to mine. “Fertile?”
“A male can tell when you’re fertile. Able to conceive.”
Her cheeks light up. Then she waves her hand in dismissal. “I’m on birth control, I wasn't worried about that.”
“The contraceptives that worked on your human body won’t on your new body.”
“What?” she resumes chewing on her lip. “So when I’m fertile, we’ll need protection.”
I shake my head. “You won’t want it.”
Her eyes widen. “I don’t want a baby.”
I step closer to her and reach up to trail my fingers down the side of her face. “When you’re fertile, you’ll be in heat. Restless. Incredibly needy. Like how you were after your change. And the only thing that can solve that is me. In you. And my seed. In your womb.”
She lets out a little gasp at the same time the air thickens with the scent of her arousal. My own loins stir, responding to her.
“But I… we…”
She sounds lost. I know what she’s thinking about. Will she have to go through that agony without me, or will she have to give in to nature and carry my babies?
“Would you like to have my babies?” I ask, leaning in, getting closer to her, to that scent emanating from the pores of her skin.
Her pulse thuds hard and fast against my fingers, which have now made their way to her neck.
“I… I’ve never thought about having kids,” she replies, her voice breathy.
“Think about it now,” I whisper in her ear. Then I withdraw from her, stepping back. Because if I don’t, I won’t be able to keep my hands from her. And she needs to rest.
On one of the next few coming nights, she’ll shift for the first time, and she needs to be in optimal physical condition then. Until then, I can’t tire her anymore with physical activities, and that includes sex.
“Let’s talk more tomorrow,” I tell her. “I’ll walk you to your room.”
A few minutes later, when she’s back in her room and almost closing the door in my face, I remember I haven’t cleared something up.
“Should I still call you Mari?”
She hesitates, then nods. “I’ve lived with that name for longer than I did with the other one. I grew into it.”
I nod. “Okay. Goodnight, Mari.”
***
I’ve barely made it to the bottom of the stairs after bidding Mari goodnight when a guard rushes through the front doors.
On seeing me, he rushes forward and gets down on one knee. Bowing his head, he reports, “Alpha, something has happened in the dungeons.”
His voice is rife with fear as if he’s afraid I’ll do something horrible to him. Why would he be so—
“What?” I demand. If my mother got away…
“One of the prisoners is dead.”
“What prisoner?” I demand, getting impatient.
“Thomas, your mother’s...”
I don’t hear the rest of what he says because I’m already bounding out of the mansion and heading straight for the Security House.
My boots thud on the stone stairs as I make my way down to the dungeons. The guard at the bottom hurries to open the gate before I get there.
Walking through, I head straight for the cell where the man was held.
His body is lying on his bed, stiff and pale.
“How did he die?” I ask the guard standing near the bed.
“We think he was poisoned.”
“Poisoned!” I huff and walk out of the cell. I go further down until I’m standing outside my mother’s cell. She’s standing at the bars as if waiting on me. “Did you kill Thomas?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she claims.
She’s lying, I can tell that much. She knew I would come looking for answers about Mari’s disappearance, so she got rid of her accomplice.
I get as close to her as I can with the bars between us. “As long as you’re alive, you’ll tell me what you did with her.”
“I don’t know what you're talking about,” she repeats.
I narrow my eyes at her. “You’ve kept him by your side for so long, only to get rid of him now? What are you hiding?”
“You said it yourself, he has been with me for so long. He’s my most trusted aide. Why would I kill him?”
“Aide?” I scoff. More like lap dog. “I don’t exactly see you mourning.”
“Don’t worry about me and think about yourself. You can take that human for your mate if you want. I might not be able to stop you, but he will.”
“He? Who?”
“He,” she continues, “will have no one but a female of the strongest werewolf genes. He will never settle for less.”
“What are you talking about?”
She scoffs. “Do you mean that he hasn’t made his presence known to you to this day? That’s ridiculous. You would never have made it this far without him.”
Her words slither over me like poisonous vines. If that incident with Mari hadn’t happened, I would be lost. But now? After hearing that voice in my head? Not so much.
My hand wraps around one of hers that’s resting over a bar, holding her in place. “What do you know?”
She smiles. “Ah, it appears that you are aware. At some point, I was worried you were too weak to host him. When your father threw you in the dungeon and you let him like a weak, useless pup, I lost all faith in you. But he finally showed up, right? Your beast. He’s not like other wolves, is he?”
My hands tremble as I glare back at her. She has always known that something was abnormal about me, hasn’t she?
“Do you know why your eyes glow even in your human form?” she asks.
“Why?” I grit out.
“Because whatever you see, he sees. Even in this form, he’s here, with you. He never leaves.”
“Can you speak directly?”
“Let me out of this place and I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
I glare into her eyes, grey like my own, wishing I could force her into telling the truth. But she isn’t just another werewolf in my pack. She’s my mother, and I can never dominate her, not like I can with others.
“You better hide nothing,” I warn her.
I might not be able to dominate over her, but I can very well make her homeless and packless in an instant.
She better keep that in mind