Page 47 of The Alpha Wolf’s Secret Baby Boy

“He’s gone! Daniel is gone!” the woman weeps, and I gasp when I recognize the voice.

I march forward, pushing past Dorian, and freeze on the spot. My blood turns cold when I meet the hazel eyes of the woman I made passionate love to last night.

“Poppy…?” I murmur, noticing the fear in her eyes through her tears.

But she shakes her head, and just as Connor’s mate, Ingrid, comes rushing out from the crowd that had gathered outside Dorian’s house and helps Poppy to her feet, Poppy drags her eyes from my face and turns to Dorian.

“Daniel is missing, Alpha Dorian,” Ingrid explains calmly while gathering a sobbing Poppy into her arms.

Poppy looks at my brother with fear and dread all over her face. “Please, Alpha Dorian. You must find him. You must find my son.”

My jaw drops, my blood turning colder than ice.

“Y-your son…?” I blink fervently in disbelief while Poppy refuses to look at me.

I stand cemented in place, shock rendering me paralyzed to the spot.

Dorian asks the important questions, and Poppy still doesn’t look my way, as if I’m not even standing there.

Where was he last seen?

What are the circumstances around his disappearance?

And what does he look like?

When Ingrid answers the last question, describing who I can only picture as the boy from the other day—the one who bumped into me outside the pack center when he was playing with his friends—my heart sinks.

“How old is he?” Dorian asks, and this time, Poppy is the one who responds.

“T-ten,” she says quietly, still avoiding my face. “He’s ten years old.”

Realization slams into me like a freight train going at full speed, and it crashes the moment Poppy finally meets my eyes. My world splits in half, my heart shattering into a million tiny fragments.

“Is he mine?” is all I ask, my voice tight but controlled.

But when Poppy doesn’t respond, I have my answer, and it’s worse than if he wasn’t mine.

Chapter 12 - Poppy

The look in Damian’s eyes is frightening, raw anguish mixed with anger.

He’s just put the pieces of the puzzle together, discovering, in the blink of an eye, that I have a child, and it’s his child, too.

My heart palpitates with fear as I take note of every detail: his clenched fists, tightened jaw, and eyes dark and narrowed as he glares at me. The vein on the side of his neck pulses so violently that it looks like he’s about to burst it. Blow a fuse.

I gulp hard, the question knocking around in my skull like a marble in a bucket. Is he mine?

What’s the point of my response when Ingrid just described Daniel as if she were describing the Valley Walker alpha’s younger self? And I just revealed that my son is ten—the right age if I conceived him when Damian and I were seeing each other.

But when a growl rumbles in his chest, fear trickles down my spine like hot, molten lava, and settles in the pit of my tummy. There’s nothing left to do but hang my head, as a tiny, tentative “yes” leaves my lips.

I feel Damian’s rage long before I see it, the red-hot anger radiating off him and throbbing in the air around us. I look up and meet the fury in his dark eyes as he glares at me, his breathing uncontrolled as his chest heaves rapidly.

My body is still trembling after visiting the school this morning, following through with my scheme to run away with Daniel. I met Ingrid at her house, and she promised to show me a way out that would avoid the border patrol for long enough that we could get away without being discovered.

Ingrid and I went to the school, only for the teacher to tell us that Daniel didn’t come to class.

We were spurred into a search then, dread and panic already slipping into my bones when we discovered the wilted garden outside the school building. Amid the dead grass was Daniel’s bag, and I knew my son had been taken.