Page 230 of His Hungry Wolf

My father stared at me until his gaze fell to his plate. He sighed painfully.

“You’re right. Maybe you don’t need me to protect you anymore. Maybe you’re old enough to handle the truth.”

It was my turn to freeze. I was just hoping to get a fuller sense of what happened. I hadn’t considered that he was covering something up with a lie. Heat washed across my face considering what it could be.

“Yeah, Dad. I can handle it.”

He looked up into my eyes with sadness.

“Your mother didn’t accept what you are as easily as I did. In fact, she couldn’t accept it at all. She would barely ever hold you. When she did, she would look at you with something dark in her eyes.

“As time went on, she become increasingly cruel towards you. When you shifted into a wolf, she would sometimes shave you. She said that she did it hoping that your fur wouldn’t grow back. It always did the next time you shifted and that angered her even more.

“She would clip you ears back with clothes pins threatening to cut them off. She would threaten to cut off your tail. In fact, I think she did once. She never told me about it, but there was a time when that particular threat stopped. I wondered why and then saw the terror in your wolf’s eyes the next time you two were in the same room together.”

“Oh my god, Dad,” I said not able to believe what I was hearing.

“Your mother terrorized you, Quin. And then, one day, I think she went too far. I don’t know what she was planning or what she did. But after finding the nanny I had hired to make sure that you two were never alone together, without you, I raced around the house looking for you.

“I found you two in the attic. You were crying your eyes out five feet from your diaper, and she was dead. I didn’t know what to do, but clearly I had to report her death.

“That was when I made the decision to tell the world about you. I thought that if you hadn’t been a secret, your mother wouldn’t have tried whatever she had attempted to do. And, I needed a cause of death.

“If I thought I could take the blame, I would have. But me being locked away would mean that you would grow up alone. So, I told everyone.

“And, when you grew older and started asking about your mother, I had to decide if I was going to let my sweet little boy grow up thinking that the person who was supposed to love him most, hated him. Or, if I would just blame it on the thing that we were already trying to get rid of.”

“So, you blamed it on my wolf?” I asked in a daze.

He shook his head.

“I’ve thought about that decision every day since. I still haven’t come up with what I could have done differently. I wanted my son to grow feeling loved. I wanted that for you.”

“And I got it at the expense of loving myself,” I realized.

“What could I have done differently? You now know the truth and you’re old enough to have an answer. So tell me, if you had a say in the matter, what would you have wanted me to do? Did I make a mistake?” My father asked with tears in his eyes.

I thought about it. What he had told me had rattled me to my core. My mind swirled.

“I don’t know, Dad. I don’t know,” I said with wet streaks lining my cheeks.

“I’m sorry this happened to you, Quin. I wish I could have been a better father. I tried. I tried so hard.”

“I know you did, Dad. You did everything you knew how to do,” I said reaching for his hands.

I was right. I could trust him. Maybe how he had handled it was a mistake. Maybe it wasn’t. It was going to take me a lot longer than a night to figure it out. But, I knew that what he did, he did thinking it was in my best interest. What more could I ask from him than that.

“I’m not the only one, Dad,” I told him unable to look him in the eyes.

“What?”

“There are others like me.”

“How? I never told anyone about the genetic codes I switched to make you. Not even your mother.”

“Wolf shifters have been around for a long time. And, they aren’t the only things out there. There are dragon shifters, Dad. I’ve seen one. And there are Fae.”

“Do you mean fairies?” He asked looking at me as if I was crazy.

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