Watching our son gnaw on her tit was actually quite amusing. She was already supplementing breast milk with formula, and I knew she resented it.
If ever there was a woman who’d been born to be a mother, it was her.
She settled into it with an ease that surprised me, because I wasn’t finding fatherhood so easy.
I loved my son, and I loved the bonds between us, but damn, he cried a lot. And he shit himself—a lot. And that was nothing to the diapers and having to take a whole store worth of crap with us whenever we went anywhere.
Babies needed a lot of work, and I felt bad because Ethan and Eli didn’t seem to mind. Me? I was just surprised by all the heavy frickin’ lifting.
Almost like he read my mind, he squawked, grumbling around Sabina’s nipple in a way that was beyond cute.
That was his one saving grace.
He was beautiful.
Had Eli’s coloring, but Sabina’s tawny skin.
But he was cute as fuck as well.
When he grabbed a hold of your finger, he grabbed a fucking hold. His little nails, those soft milk ones, dug in like they were claws.
He’d look straight into my eyes, even though he knew what I was to him, even though I knew he sensed what I was—alpha to my core—and he’d hold that stare.
I knew I sounded nuts. Babies pretty much shit and ate, right?
Well, not Knight. Okay, he did plenty of that stuff too, but he was just turbocharged.
“Seth needs help.”
“We need fucking help,” Ethan muttered, and she arched a brow at him.
Ethan didn’t curse all that much, so when he did, it packed more of a punch than when I did. I tended to swear like a sailor, and Sabina’s inner monologue was as much of a fishwife as me.
“He’s just a boy—”
“He’s a creep.”
A few days after Knight’s birth, when we’d been tasked with offering Sabina’s placenta in the totem circle, a male had contacted Eli, telling him that his mate had cheated on him because she was pregnant.
Until now, females only birthed one pup. That was it. We’d been taught that to have more than one child was bad, not just for our eco-system, but almost like it was morally wrong to have more than one child.
What helped propagate that theory was that even though mated pairs couldn’t use condoms, thanks to the knot that appeared during sex, no one ever gave birth to more than one pup.
Unless they were twins like Ethan and me, and we were reviled for simply being plural.
So ever since that night, when the male, Leon Yardley, had beaten his mate for ‘cheating on him,’ even though that was a technical impossibility, Maribel Yardley had been living with us, as well as her son. Seth.
Seth the freak.
I knew it was mean to call him that, but the little shit was weird as hell.
I’d never actually caught him doing this, but he was just the sort of sicko who’d pull off the wings of butterflies, or get an almost dead fly and place it under a magnifying glass, just so that he could watch the sun burn it.
Yeah, he was a serial killer in the making, and he was living with us in the packhouse… Who said leaders didn’t have it easy?
“He needs help,” Sabina repeated.
“What kind of help?” I retorted, like I’d been retorting ever since she’d started this conversation over breakfast.
“Someone like Lara.”
The words were measured, but I narrowed my eyes on her because they were too measured.
We’d been looking for her sisters for a while, ever since we’d found out that her brother, the fucker who’d transformed her by accident, was alpha type. When a wolf child—those who were born humans and were transformed by an alpha’s bite—was made, the resulting shifter was always weaker than one who was born.
It was natural selection. Made sense.
That was why Sabina and her brother, Cyrilo, made zero sense.
They were supposed to be weaker than us, they weren’t supposed to have the powers they had. Which meant her lineage was special for some reason. That meant her sister, Lara, was likely just as special as her siblings.
All we’d found thus far was that her other sister, Jana, had died in tragic circumstances at a lake near her parents’ caravan when she was sixteen. The authorities believed it was suicide. We’d also learned that her mother was alive, but her father had passed away.
We’d sent people around, trying to discern the whereabouts of Lara, the remaining sibling, but so far, no joy. I had a feeling the mother knew something she wasn’t willing to share, but what were we supposed to do?
Have our mother-in-law tortured?
“What can she do?” Ethan queried, warily. “What makes you think she could help?”
“She’s an empath. Maybe she’d be able to untangle whatever the hell is wrong with him. He certainly needs more help than a regular shrink could provide.” She shivered. “At least, I have to hope he isn’t un-fixable.”
“I’m just glad you admit he’s a freak.”
She sniffed. “There’s no avoiding that, is there? He even looks weird.” She pulled a face. “And I hate saying that, I really do. I was always picked on and bullied, so I’d never want him to think we were ostracizing him, but he’s just…” Her words waned, and she winced. “Well, he’s just Seth, isn’t he?”
“Adjective, adverb, and noun. All in one,” Ethan confirmed, but though he was teasing, there was no matching smirk. He spoke the truth, and nothing but the truth.
Broodingly, I tapped my chin. “You really think she’d be able to help?”
“I don’t see why not. I figure it’s funny how Cyrilo and I were both granted certain abilities…she must be the same, surely. Maybe what we always just thought was the Roma blood was something more. Something extra.”
I knew Sabina saw auras, and that helped her in her role as omega. From what Eli had told me about his mother’s powers—Merinda was the omega before Sabina—she’d never seen the pack’s energy in colors. Not like Sabina.
According to her, all three of her mates, and now Knight, were represented with bold hues in her mind.
As a whole, the pack was a blur of light, but when she focused on them, on the individual, she could pick up things from them that were related to her ability.
I was, I’d admit, curious about what her sister could bring to the table, not just for Seth, but for the pack as a whole if we brought her to the community and she stuck around to be near her sister.
“Need to double up efforts to find her,” I muttered to Ethan, who merely nodded as he picked up a piece of toast and began to gnaw on it.
“What are your plans for today?” I asked her brightly, deciding it was best to change the subject.
When we’d come downstairs and had found Seth making one of the maids cry, well, that had prompted a whole other kind of conversation to the one I wanted to have.
Seth was only nine, and he was nowhere close to being ready to shift. Daniel, on the other hand, the neighboring pack’s former alpha’s son who we’d adopted, was already a shifter, and his dominance flared up from time to time.
But he never made the staff cry.
The maid wouldn’t tell us what he’d said, but whatever it was, it had made her run off weeping when we’d chastised him.