Blake
I haven’t been back to Moonrise in over two weeks. It wasn’t my idea to stay away this long, even though, almost a year ago now, Maeve badgered me into splitting my time between Eastonia and Crescent Falls. I didn’t realize back then how often I’d actually find myself gravitating back to Moonrise, to Eastonia in general. She was right, which I’ll never admit to her face, but coming back after two long weeks away, being fussed over by my mom, walking on eggshells with my dad over my idiocy… his words, not mine… it’s good to be home.
I click the cursor on my laptop, staring at the untouched funds in a massive bank account I set up… seven years ago, give or take a few months. The amount has changed. Grown with interest. Rarely a single dollar spent.
I run my hand over my face and check the page again, clicking through the account details, trying to paint a picture of what, if anything, Marianna has spent this money on… but there’s nothing recent to show.
It’s not the only account she has access to. Anything with my name on it–any personal accounts not tied directly to my family–is accessible to her at any time.
Sometimes a charge will come through that I can route back to a children’s clothing store, or a bookstore, or five dollars spent at an ice cream shop, but those are far and few between.
I never miss them, though. I always wonder what ice cream flavor they shared, what clothes she bought the daughter I chose not to know.
My office door opens with a crack, and the shadow stretching through the midday sunlight belongs to Soren, unfortunately, but just like Maeve, he never knocks and likely never will.
He’s dressed casually in jeans and a white T-shirt, his chestnut brown hair swept back away from his face, which he hasn’t shaved in a while. He looks a little beaten down, but I suppose having a two-week-old baby will do that to a man. I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there when Skye was that little.
He lingers in the doorway for a moment, waiting for my reaction to his intrusion into my space like he actually gives a damn.
“Do you need something?” I ask slowly, shutting my laptop.
“I heard you were back.” He leans on the door to close it, and I straighten a touch when the lock snaps into place. Bastard. “We need to talk about what happened.”
“Have you spent the last two weeks overthinking this?” I move my laptop to the side, clearing the space directly in front of me, before meeting his eyes. “I’d think you’d want to spend time with your child and your mate instead.”
Soren takes several calculated steps in my direction before smoothly sitting in the armchair in front of my desk. He rests his ankle on his knee, splayed out, relaxed. He stares directly into my eyes until I look away.
“What do you want me to say, Soren?”
“I want to know what Hannibal did to you in there. While you’ve been resting in Crescent Falls, tucked tight in your childhood bedroom, by all accounts, I’ve been here, trying to take care of Maeve and Fallon while Ryatt, Evander, and every other Goddess damned man in this family breathes down my neck.”
“Consider yourself lucky this is the way things went for you. Had hell not frozen over, your reception into the family might not have been met with such grace.”
“Listen,” he says, leveling with me, “I’m not going anywhere. Maeve is my mate. We have a daughter. I live here now, and you’re going to have to get used to that. Everyone else has.”
I bite the inside of my cheek as I move my favorite pen back to its spot.
There’re many things I could say. I could admit that I don’t like being confronted like this. I could say I don’t like other people, especially other men, in my space. I could say that Soren doesn’t deserve to be here, but that’s not true, is it?
I’ve known him for five years. In fact, unfortunately, my relationship with him, at least based solely on blind trust, has been the closest relationship I’ve fostered since Marianna.
I trust him. I hate it, but I do. I know he loves Maeve. I know it’s deeper than the mate bond for him. I know what he sacrificed for months to keep her safe. I know it tore him apart, and now he’s adjusting to a new life with his mate at the helm, totally and completely at her whim and mercy.
It’s a lot for a man like Soren, giving up that control. Letting someone else take the reins.
“Hannibal was looking for something, but I don’t know exactly what it was, so I shielded everything. Every memory, every line of thought. He was trying to dig past those shields and–”
“Boiled your brain?”
“To put it in layman’s terms, yes. If you think I’ve spent the last two weeks drinking scotch and smoking cigars, enjoying time off, you’re wrong. I’ve been barely lucid.”
“But you’re lucid now,” he says matter-of-factly, arching a brow. “You look fine to me.”
“And how are you?”
“Don’t fucking act like you care how I am in the slightest.” He smirks. I can’t tell what that means. He might be teasing me.
I grit my teeth, meeting his eyes. I remember seeing him for the first time and being so startled by his appearance that it took me aback, and I had to regain my composure before approaching him, asking him to become a murderer for hire. One of his eyes is nearly white. The lightest, softest gray in existence, while the other is split between a dark, bright blue and deep, steel gray.
“How is Fallon, then?”
“She’s fine. She sleeps, eats, and poops, and that’s all.” He shrugs, but the smile he’s biting back is undeniable. If I were a different man, I’d smile along with him. But his face changes, that smile gone in an instant, and he asks, “How’s yours?”
My heart quakes as my chest tightens. This is the real reason he’s here, and we both know it.
“What have you told Maeve?”
“About what you babbled while your brain was falling out of your ears? Nothing. I gauged whether she knew, but that was it. She thinks I’m criminally insane for even suggesting you have a kid. I danced around the details when Ryatt and your grandfather Isaac, who didn’t leave until three days ago, by the way, grilled me over every second I spent on that island. No one knows, and I kept it that way for your sake, but I’m keeping it a secret from my mate as it stands, and I can’t do that for very much longer.”
I fold my hands in my lap, unsure where to even begin, or if I even want to.
“You need to tell me the details.”
“Why? So you can go tell the world about my past transgressions? I’m sure the media would love to spin the story of the royal prince’s bastard daughter.”
“Is that what she is to you? A bastard? A mistake?”
“She wasn’t planned, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“You’re only twenty-six,” he reminds me, draping his arms over the armrests. “You said she’s… six? So you were a teenager when she was conceived?”
“She just turned seven last week.”
Soren shrugs, giving me a hard look. “Do you have a relationship with her?”
“With her–or her mother?”
“Either–”
“Neither.”
Soren exhales deeply as he scans my face. I can’t tell based on his expression what he’s feeling. I’ve never been good at that. He could be furious or sad for me. He could be confused or excited, and I wouldn’t know.
“Why not?”
“It wasn’t the right time for me.” A lie.
“So, you, what? Abandoned them?”
Real, unfiltered rage bubbles up, simmering through my blood. “No. I didn’t abandon them–”
“Start from the beginning, for fuck’s sake.”
“I don’t understand what gives you the right to know in the first place,” I growl, and he… grins at me then laughs.
“I’ll fuck off right now,” he says cooly, “and go tell Maeve. I’m giving you a chance to clear the air between us first so I can have your back when the family rains hell on you for keeping this a secret. Because no one knows, do they? Not your parents, not your grandparents, not anyone on Maeve’s side of the family?”
“No. They don’t know about her.”
“Why not?”
“Because we agreed to keep me a secret in the equation.” I bristle as the words leave my tongue like it’s even remotely close to the truth. “For her safety. Their safety.”
“From what?” He laughs.
“The press.”
Soren, to his credit, seems to understand this aspect of it, at least. Ever since the day Maeve brought him onto the balcony with their daughter, the press has been going ballistic, trying to find any snippet of information they can on Soren, the consort, or whatever the male equivalent is, to the Queen of Eastonia. The family has been busy squashing rumors, some of which have truth, about his past and origins. A new persona was created for the public to gnaw on, something tame compared to who he is and what he’s done.
But he knows if he leaves the castle, he’ll be bombarded with flashing cameras and shouted questions. It would be relentless. Overwhelming. Enough to drive a man mad. So, he’s stuck in this castle until the chaos dies down, which could be weeks, if not months.
Welcome to the family, I suppose.
“I know what you’re going to ask, so I’ll make this as clear as I can,” I say calmly. “Skye was born when I was nineteen, and Marianna was eighteen, and only her mother knew about the pregnancy. We had a brief fling.” Another lie there at the end because the truth of what we were–what she was to me–it’s far more complicated. “That fling resulted in a child, but by the time she found out, we’d already broken up. It was mutual.”
I stay perfectly still, holding his gaze in the way I trained myself to, a way that makes it look like I’m okay with this… intimacy between us.
“And then what?” he asks, unimpressed, maybe even reading through the fault lines beginning to crack open behind my eyes.
I lick my lips, finding them dry. “Marianna wanted them both to have a normal life, and I agreed. I ensured that they were taken care of financially. Marianna moved on, found her mate, and married. The rest is history.”
He blinks a few times before chuckling, “Yeah? So you don’t even have a relationship with your own daughter?”
“I met her shortly after she was born.” I was there. I was in the room when she came into the world, and the woman I loved saw her for the first time. It’s a memory that I guard with my life, the very memory I was desperate for Hannibal not to see. A memory I was willing to die for.
“So she’s got a mate–a husband, no less, and yet you wanted me to take her and put her and your daughter into hiding? You said she’d understand and that she’d know what to do–”
“Yes.”
He leans forward, motioning in annoyance with his hands. “Blake, come on. You’ve got to give me something to work with here.”
“What would you like me to say?”
“Anything that’s going to make it easier to continue hiding this from my mate,” he says slowly, his tone almost pleading. “You’ve backed me into a corner, man. I don’t appreciate it.”
“I am not in Skye’s life, and that was Marianna’s decision. I’m honoring her wishes–which were to keep my distance, so I am. Bringing my family into the equation would bring harm to Marianna, whose only priority is giving Skye a normal, easy life.” The fissures widen as regret storms through my system. “Skye is seven now. This coming to light will only bring harm to her. She’d never be able to step out in public again without guards. She wouldn’t be able to go to the park, or even to school, without people running over each other to get a glimpse of her.”
“Denying her your side of the family isn’t harming her?”
“It’s not.”
He pauses for a beat before asking, “Is she like you?”
I close my eyes. I fucking hope not. When I open my eyes again, he’s still looking at me. I can’t give him an answer because I honestly don’t know. “She’s happy and safe with her mother, and I’m respecting Marianna’s wishes. That’s all that matters. I–I was tortured, that’s true.” My jaw works as I look for the right words to convey what it felt like… dying. Slipping away into an abyss I couldn’t swim out of. My only thought had been Marianna. Her face, her skin, her scent. Her fingers tracing my cheekbones in the quiet, cool darkness of the backseat of my car—the one night we let go, and let things be.
Just for a moment.
“Hannibal wants me for something. He needs me. I wanted you to let me die because then her memory, her location, the fact that… we have a daughter who may, if the Goddess sees to punish us, have powers similar to mine…. If I had died, he wouldn’t have ever found her. He couldn’t use them against me. That’s why I told you to leave me behind and hide them.”
Soren watches me closely then exhales deeply, his gaze downcast to his lap.
“So what now, Blake? You keep this secret from your family forever?”
“Do not tell Maeve.”
“I… I won’t, but you need to tell her soon. For my sake. She’ll fucking kill me for keeping this from her, and you know that. You know her. She will find out sooner rather than later on her own.”
“It doesn’t matter. They don’t live here in Moonrise. They’ll never cross paths.”