Page 62 of Daddy's Mail Order Mate

“Gwen!”

My head is heavy and sluggish, so it takes me a few beats to recognize my brother’s voice. I can’t seem to turn my head despite trying, and I realize groggily that my neck is wound in thick bandages and gauze.

“Mmn. What…”

I try to open my eyes even though it aches to do so. The world is blurry at first, but eventually it starts to focus in. I don’t quite recognize where I am, but from the layout it looks like some quaint little medical room set up in a cabin.

“Where?”

“You’re at Elm Wood,” Lucas explains as he scoots his chair closer to my bedside. “In the med bay. We brought you here to get you treated by our doctor and keep you safe.”

“Where’s—”

I try to push myself up, but my arms shake out from under me and my brother helps catch and settle me back onto the bed.

“Where’s Rowan? I need to see him.”

“Don’t worry about him, sis. The Lunas have him. You just need to—”

“Please,” I interject, reaching out to squeeze his hand.

His eyes flit over my face for a few moments before he sighs and squeezes back.

“Alright. Just so long as you promise to stay in bed.”

The knot of anxiety in my chest slackens a bit at the assurance.

“I promise. What happened?”

“Some pricks in the Portsmill Pack were trying to abduct you and Rowan.”

“Yeah,” I wheeze out. My brow furrows as I strain through the blur of violence and distress to search my memories. “They mentioned… Wanting their people back?”

“Huh, well that backs up what Thorn was theorizing. He thinks it must have been some sort of plot for trying to force the council’s hand with Portsmill. Said it might have been to try and force a challenge to go back to their old ways. It makes me so goddamn mad to know that I’d just been all buddy-buddy with those assholes.”

My brother sighs and stares off a bit, mouth twitching.

“Well. I guess they’ve already paid for it.”

“What do you mean?”

He looks back at me and there’s some hesitation evident in his features. Even with how incapacitated I am, one arched brow is enough to get him to cave.

“So uh… Thorn really fucked them up.”

“To the point he couldn’t interrogate any of them about it? You said he guessed why.”

Lucas rubs his hands together before replying. Despite his usual healthy glow, he seems to grow paler and his eyes glaze over for a second as he musters a response.

“Yeah. You can’t exactly interrogate corpses. We couldn’t even recognize some of them just from the bodies alone. It was spooky as all hell; I’ve never seen anything like it.”

I recall screams and howls in my last blurry hazes of memory—that sounds about right. But that just reminds me of Rowan’s cries and I focus back on my brother.

“The baby.”

“Right, yeah. You did promise.”

He sighs as he stands before leaving me to my own devices. I use the time to slacken back into the bed and let myself drift until his return. Loose thoughts filter across my consciousness, hardly anything I could call a steady stream of thought. My senses only stir back into focus when the door opens again, and when I see Quinn entering with little Rowan in her arms a few tears slip silently free.

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