Page 109 of Evil Hearts

Monsters of East End

A Dark Monster Omegaverse Romance

By A. K. Graves

Prologue: It Was the Worst of Times

Mina

One Month Ago, London, England 1888

Asmall smile pullsat my lips as I hear Reggie coo, talking to the animals that are slowly spinning on his mobile, the little happy noises just for them. I look toward the cradle as I carefully place a stack of nightgowns into the small trunk, tucking the bonnets in on top of them before I close the lid.

He’s so content.

It’s only been a few minutes at most since the sweet six-month-old boy woke from his nap, his eyes opening with a smile on his face. I gave him a bottle, sang his favorite nursery rhyme, then settled him in with his animals, and he’s been perfectly content entertaining himself while I finish packing his things. Packingeverythingfor what will no doubt be a grueling trip.

A trip back home.

I pause at the thought, sighing as I try to push aside the melancholy that comes along with it.

The idea of returning to the place I once called home, a place that I never truly felt I belonged to, has brought on a depression so great I fear it could consume me.

The depression, the grief. The pain of leaving London. It’s been so deep that I feel it in my bones. If I didn’t have Reggie to care for, I know my thoughts would have pushed me into a melancholy so severe that Mrs. Hughes would have had no choice but to send me to the mad house.

Thank god for that sweet little boy.

He isn’t mine, not by any definition of the word, but that baby boy has been my saving grace in more ways than I can explain to anyone willing to listen.

There isn’t anyone who is, so I don’t have to try, but it doesn’t change my affections for him.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t change this all-consuming sadness, either, and I don’t understand it.

These feelings I have about returning to America are so bizarre, and so much stronger than anything I’ve felt before. Even when my father died, I wasn’t sad like this; I didn’t ache, didn’t feel like I’d be sailing to my death instead ofa new life.I’m starting to wonder if I should take myself to the mad house since it’s been weeks of feeling this way without an explanation.

Ever since I was told I’d be leaving London.

It feels as though I’m being ripped out of my real home, torn from some profound sense of belonging, and deprived of a deep-rooted love.

The minute I set foot on English soil, my sad little soul flickered to life, and when I took my first lungful of London air, I knew this was where I was meant to be.

Mr. Hughes and his wife were visiting family in New York when they found out they were pregnant, and since they’d had so much trouble conceiving prior to that, they decided to stay until after the baby was born. Which is how I came to be employed by them.

My father worked for Mr. Hughes’ brother—a wealthy man who decided to set up a shipping business in New York thatexclusively imported and exported goods from London—and he did so up until he became ill then died mere weeks before the couple came to visit. Since my mother passed during childbirth and my father was the only family I had left, Mr. Hughes’s brothertook pityon me, theunwed spinster omega in her early thirties, suggesting they hire me as a maid in order to help the missus in her newly realized condition, to which they agreed.

I cooked and cleaned, ran errands as well as the house, and I made Mrs. Hughes as comfortable as possible while she experienced various complications with her pregnancy. It was tedious work, work I was used to since it was mostly what I was doing for my father before he died, but the couple treated me well, paid me better, and allowed me to live with them during their time in New York. I assumed it would end once Mrs. Hughes gave birth, I figured I’d be let go as soon as they were ready to return to London, but that wasn’t the case.

No, Mrs. Hughes asked me to come with them because she was sofrailand hadno idea what to do with a baby,and she trusted me after so many months of working for her.

While I was flattered to a degree and appreciated her kind words no matter how insincere they were, I knew deep down she wanted me to stay because she felt no real attachment to sweet little Reggie.

I became his nanny and developed my own ardent attachment to the fair-haired, blue-eyed babe, and separating from him didn’t seem like an option regardless of what my instincts were telling me.

What they’d been telling me ever since the head of the Hughes’s household shook my hand, scoffed in my face, and tried to make me feel small despite the fact that I’m taller by at least two inches.

My instincts said that Mr. Hughes wasn’t as straight and narrow as his more successful brother, and he was dangerous because of it.

I couldn’t care less about either of the slimy, little excuse for an alpha, or his waste of space omega. Reggie was my priority, and I wasn’t going to leave him alone with such awful people.

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