Page 64 of Wild Wolf

“It’s just, I…the moon…” She shook her head then her eyes moved past me to land on the painting. “It’s her.” Rosalie moved away from me, ethereal in her movements as she raised a hand and placed it upon the woman in her picture frame.

“You’re kinda giving me the heebies, baby. Are you playing a game? Do let me know the rules so I can play too,” I urged eagerly, following her to the painting and taking in the woman with her flowing black hair and gleaming brown eyes.

“I can hear her,” Rosalie said, goosebumps rising across her skin.

I frowned, listening for some voice coming from the painting, but I heard nothing. “I really should be getting stabby, can we talk to the painting once Tibsy boy is dead?”

“No,” Rosalie growled, all bossy boots again which, honestly, I fucking loved. It normally got me hard, but right now didn’t feel like a good time to get hard. It felt like something important was happening but I was two buns short of a baker’s dozen and no one felt like filling my bread basket.

“Sometimes, when the moon wills it…I can speak with the dead,” Rosalie breathed, her whispery voice setting a chill in my bones.

I swallowed thickly as a net curtain fluttered away from the window at my back and caressed my arm.

“Er, honey bunch?” I said tightly. “What’s happening?”

Rosalie whispered the word ‘yes’ in agreement to something then turned to me suddenly, her eyes as bright as moonlight, glowing at me with a burning silver luminescence. When she spoke, it wasn’t her voice, it was deeper, without an accent, still feminine, but lilting in a way that didn’t belong to Rosalie.

“I’ve waited so long,” she croaked, stepping closer, reaching out and caressing my face. “Beyond The Veil where all answers are given. I was forced to forget you in life, but now I remember. You are my son. Mine and Tiberius’s boy. I loved you so fiercely before you were lost to me – I still love you.”

Something crackled around me and I was vaguely aware of my silencing bubble falling but I couldn’t draw my gaze from Rosalie’s glowing moonlit eyes. I knew in my soul that this was no trick, the moon was allowing this, letting words pass from The Veil through my Rosalie, and the one who spoke was…my mother.

Her fingers tracked my jaw and tears of silver slid down Rosa’s cheeks. I was well used to madness and the twisted way of this world, so this truth wasn’t something I dared deny. I leaned into her touch, wanting so badly to feel this caress, to know what it was to have my mother’s love soaking into my skin. But then I withdrew, clarity punching me in the chest and reminding me that my mother had thrown me away. She had discarded me, and if what she said was true, if she was truly my mother, then the rest of it had to be true too. The tossing, the trash can.

I shook my head, backing up, retreating to the window until my spine was pressed to it and I felt boxed in. I could run. Left, right, dive out the window itself, but those glowing eyes wouldn’t look away. They had me trapped and I suddenly felt like a young boy being scolded by the mistress of the orphanage when all I wanted deep down was to be held, to be told I was loved and it didn’t matter that I liked to do strange things, because my mother would love me anyway. She loved me because of those things. But she didn’t. Never had. She’d been the first to look at me and see something unwantable. She’d been the first rejection but far from the last. I had been so unwanted that they’d tried to hide me away in the belly of Darkmore, tried to pretend I didn’t exist anymore. No one wanted me, least of all her. No one, no one, no one-

“Sin,” Rosalie’s voice broke through over my mother’s, the light in her eyes fading. “Listen to her. Just listen.”

I wanted to refuse, but for her, by the stars, for her, I would do anything.

I nodded, throat thick and limbs heavy as that warm voice came from my girl’s throat once more. “I was so in love with your father, but I wasn’t the one he was destined to marry. He had been betrothed to a woman of pure, Siren blood, of great power and from a family held in great esteem by the Savage King and his father before him. My Tiberius was destined to be bound to another woman in matrimony but his love for me made it impossible for him to give me up or I him, despite his planned union to her. So he kept me despite their upcoming marriage, our love a secret which she knew well - though she despised me for claiming his heart from her. But it wasn’t his heart she truly wanted. It was his power, his prestige, his bloodline which meant that their child would be in line for the throne once they came of age. So she ignored his indiscretions with me right up until I found out that I was pregnant with you.” Her voice cracked and I only stared into those moonlit eyes, drinking in her words even though this story held no happy ending. “I was a fool. I thought…I stupidly believed that she would allow me to take her place and be the one Tiberius married once she realised I was with child. So, without telling another soul about my pregnancy, I went to her and told her that you were growing in my belly. I told her that Tiberius loved me and that I was going to ask him to discard the arrangement between the two of them and marry me instead. I knew he would do so despite the scandal, despite the wrath of the king, because I knew his love for me would win through.”

“So why didn’t it?” I breathed, my words slipping past my lips as little more than an exhale as I held my breath against the answer which would spell out the tattered truth of my beginnings in this world.

“She was a far more powerful Fae than I,” my mother admitted. “And she wasn’t willing to give up her path to the power her wedding could offer. She used her Siren gifts on me, forcing me to feel hatred in place of the love I held for Tiberius. She made me leave a note to him, ending things between us, then hid me away in the basement of her home, concealing my pregnancy while pushing forward with her plans to marry the man I loved. She kept me tethered in the confines of my own mind, a slave to the power of her Siren gifts. I lost all sense of time, of the world, of myself. I don’t even remember giving birth, only that she took you from my arms before I’d ever had a real chance to hold you. When she returned, she forced her way deeper into my mind, her Siren gifts so powerful that I lost all memory of ever having you at all. She kept me captive a few months longer, only releasing me after her marriage to Tiberius when my mind had been moulded and beaten into submission and I had no recollection of any of the time which had passed since the moment I had realised I was with child.”

“Then why was I wrapped up in a blanket with the name Whitney Northfield stitched into it?” I demanded, hot-headed yet softening quickly again, feeling guilty for blaming her when the truth was such a wicked damn thing. “I just need answers.”

“Some part of my mind must have clung to the hope that you could find me if I left a clue, a name… the name I’d wished to give you.”

“I searched that name though, I never found anything,” I growled, frustrated with the stars and most of all furious at the woman who had forced my mother to abandon me.

“Northfield is a common name,” she said mournfully. “And I was no one special.”

“You were to me,” I croaked, then forced out my next words, needing to know it all. “What happened next?”

“She let me go. I was sent back out into the world with only a feeling of yearning left in my soul where you belonged that I could never understand until my death, when all clarity was gifted to me beyond The Veil.”

“But why?” I rasped, knowing I had so many other questions, but that one clawed at me most of all.

“Linda wanted Tiberius for his power and she wouldn’t let anything stand between her and that. She wanted me gone so that she could take him as her own and provide an heir to the throne herself. I’m only glad she didn’t kill you as I fear she’d intended to do. But I suppose even her power-hungry heart couldn’t bear to hurt an innocent babe.”

“So what happened to you after that? If she let you go, then why aren’t you alive?” I rasped, my mind a muddle with all she was telling me, the answers to so many questions flooding my brain to the point of overflowing.

“She had spent the better part of a year messing up my mind with her gifts to make certain I would have no memory of bringing you into the world and had left me with a false memory of a head injury to explain away my forgetfulness. But I don’t think she paid enough attention to blocking out my love for Tiberius and within a few months of my release from her captivity, the hatred she had falsely given me for him fell away, my love for him breaking through once more and filling my heart until I found myself upon his doorstep one morning, begging him to have me back. Tiberius had loved me in all the time I’d been gone and despite his marriage to Linda, he couldn’t deny his heart when we were reunited, and we fast rekindled our romance. He brought me into his household, gave me a job working in his manor to disguise the real reason for my presence and told Linda he would not let me go.”

“You were his dirty piece on the side?” I snarled, hating the idea of that and she shook her head.

“It sounds so much worse when you say it that way, but it wasn’t like that. Tiberius had always made it clear to Linda that his heart was already spoken for and once he got me back, he refused to lose me again. She wasn’t happy, but she had little choice but to endure my presence. I may not have remembered my time with her, but being close to her after that always filled me with a fear I couldn’t explain. I made certain to keep my distance, never once letting her get me on my own. She was focused on placing an Heir in her belly, though I knew that following my return, Tiberius refused to perform his marital duties to give her the chance of one. She got her wish of a child by him eventually, but not before my death and not before I birthed another son. Once I found out about the pregnancy, I had this instinctual urge to tell Tiberius immediately, as if some part of me knew that if I kept the secret, something terrible might happen if I didn’t. He protected me throughout it. Linda was furious when she found out, but Tiberius made it clear that our child would be his Heir. He couldn’t divorce her without causing a huge scandal and the Savage King would have been furious if he alienated Linda’s family, whose political sway was integral to his rule, so Tiberius convinced her to fake a pregnancy, to allow me to remain hidden in the shadows so that once my child was born she might pretend that our child was hers. To give our baby the legitimacy he needed to claim his position as Heir.”

---