Page 59 of Broken Pregnant Mate
“Aidan,” I’m laughing, sobbing, not realizing until this moment how much I’d worried that he wasn’t going to be alive once I got in here.
“Emaline,” he gasps, his eyes clearing slightly as the pain starts to fade. “You need to run—get out—”
“Not without you,” I say fiercely, cradling his face in my hands. His skin is burning hot, and I notice cuts and bruises over his body, likely from his fight with Jerrod. “Aidan, I—”
A cold laugh cuts through our moment, ringing out through the ballroom, and when I look up, I see her striding through the pink cloud. It would be mesmerizing if it weren’t awful, if there weren’t still shifters writhing in pain around her. Along the wall, Ash crouches over someone, blood pooling out onto the floor and soaking into her white sneakers.
“How touching,” Mhairi Argent coos, stepping forward and cocking her head to the side. “Young love. So powerful, so pure—and so very useful as a motivator.”
Around us, the shifters continue to writhe in pain.
“What have you done to the stones?” I ask, the words blurting out of me, fueled by the wails of agony throughout theroom. How could she tamper with the Amanzite? What is the pink substance?
“Honestly, you should have known better than to create the stones with magic,” Mhairi says casually. “An unnatural substance like that can’t be trusted. Ask Emin—I raised him to only trust the real thing, growing up. This substance,” she runs her hand through the pink fog, a loving touch to her eyes. “It overrides the natural connection between shifter and stone. Something that wouldn’t work withtrueAmanzite. Rather than facilitating transformation, it prevents it—painfully.”
“Mom,” Emin gasps, just pulling himself to sitting against the wall, still heaving against the pain of whatever happened with the Amanzite. “Why are you acting like a crazy bitch?”
Mhairi turns, and when she looks at her son, something surprisingly soft flashes over her features, before it’s replaced with disgust.
“Is that any way to talk to the woman who gave you life?”
He tries to stand, but the lingering effects of the stone keep him down. I know I should try to do something, but I’m selfishly happy that she’s not focusing on Aidan. He needs more time to recover, time to get back on his feet, so I can get him out of here.
Distantly, I know that it’s too dangerous for me, too. For our baby.
“You don’t recognize me in this role, do you?” Mhairi spits, scowling at her son. “The alpha. The leader. The visionary. You never saw me this way because Ambersky never allowed you to see me this way.”
“You tried to take Kira,” Emin says, his voice hoarse. “Betrayed our father, betrayed your own pack—”
“I tried to bring your sister with me!” Mhairi snaps, practically foaming at the mouth. “I saw what was happening—Fields brought her back to that house to be his plaything. But she was special, powerful. And we could have ruled here together.”
“Oh, please,” Emin scoffs, getting shakily to his feet. “You didn’t care about Kira until you found out about her powers. And you’ve never cared about your pack—”
“My pack?” Mhairi laughs, the sound sharp and cold in the cavernous room, rippling over the moans of the still-writhing shifters. “Ambersky wasnevermy pack, not truly. Not when they refused to see what was right in front of them.”
Mhairi stops circling and stands directly in front of her son.
“I was born an alpha female in the Ambersky pack, with more strength, intelligence, and vision than any male in my generation. From childhood, I could out-fight, out-think, and out-maneuver every boy they pitted against me.”
The bitterness in her voice is layered there through the decades, and, in some ways, I feel it. The anger you come to recognize, the boiling, impossible rage of having things taken from you for no good reason at all.
She goes on, “And do you know what they said?What a shame she wasn’t born a boy.”
Emin stares at his mother. In the back, Ash is still crouched over something, moving slightly, and Dorian is on his back, wheezing.
“When it was time to fight, time for someone to take over,” Mhairi says, “Fields shouldn’t have been the one doing it. It should have beenme. I was the obvious choice. I’d spent years preparing, studying, training. I knew every family, everyalliance, every weakness in our borders. I was twenty years younger than that old fucking geezer.”
Mhairi stops, her gaze flitting to the side, to Dorian on his knees now, gasping for breath. “But instead, it goes to Dorian’s dear grandfather. And we all agreed to harbor peace from that point forward, so it’s not like I would challenge him, even though IknewI would win. Then, when he died in that tragic skirmish on the border,Ishould have been the one to take over. We had—the entire pack—agreed that the role was going to the most qualified alpha, but instead we resorted to the rule of kings. Everyone bows down to a man barely old enough to drink, let alone run a pack!”
Mhairi’s voice drops to a murderous whisper, a hiss that rings out through the room as she turns, her dress fanning out around her. She reaches up, adjusting the fur around her shoulders. I realize, with a start, that it’s a shimmering, deep black, not unlike the color of Oren’s hair.
My instinct—mygift—tells me that the pelt once belonged to Jerrod Blacklock, and he lost it through an experience of intense pain.
“Andwhy?” Mhairi stops, glancing around like she’s a professor giving a lecture, waiting for someone to volunteer with an answer. “Because of tradition. Because of the sacred bloodlines. Because Ambersky, for all its pretensions of progress, remains mired in the same sexist traditions as every other pack.Alpha females are too emotional.As if the male temper tantrums I’d witnessed my entire life were models of restraint!”
Something like understanding begins to dawn on Emin’s face.
“So I did what women have always done—I married strategically. I bore children who might have the opportunities denied to me.”
