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“Mrs Hartwell,” I bowed. She was one of the most impressive people I’d ever met. Equally, I hated this alpha almost as much, nay, more, than she hated me. “You see me on the point of retiring.”
“You look well. Your father. How is he?” Long ago, her charming enquiry into the welfare of my beta family had charmed me. Now I knew a polite veneer when I saw one. Perhaps, once, her questions had been genuine, but tonight they were nothing but a ploy. Her condescension towards lowly betas and tradespeople.
“He turned the business over to my sister.” I replied for the pride I felt. My sister had managed the business far better than I would have. A head for numbers, an instinct to find new business—my sister proved herself every day, and what brother wouldn’t swell with pride in their younger sibling’s success?
“Mary? She was a girl when I last saw her. And your mama?”
“Died last winter.”
“I’m sorry for that… She was an excellent woman. I admired her greatly. We both did.”
“You’ve not stopped me, madam, to discuss people we both know you have no interest in.”
I detected the shift in her scent and nearly crowed in victory. Her bitter scent betrayed her. She knew herself at a disadvantage—why, I had yet to learn. “Direct. Then I will ask you straight. Why did you never return for my daughter?”
Her question surprised me. How could it not, after how she had threatened me if I should ever make my claim on Trix known?
“Because you told me not to. You could not have made your point more clear on that morning ten years ago. We’d an agreement, though. If she needed me, if anything changed, you’d write, and I’d return. Doesn’t a True Mate bond, a Lovers' Circle, count as a change in circumstances?” Her cheeks grew red. I growled, never hating anyone as much as I did this woman. “Or did you and your mate, in your superior wisdom, decide that such a connection was still not adequate to accept a printmaker’s son into your family?”
“I get to decide if you are worthy!” Her words burst forth, disproportionately angry. A pathetic attempt to exert her dominance.
I shook my head and began to walk away. I recognised her for what she was desperate and grasping for control.
“Stay, boy,” she growled. “She is my pride and joy, my first born. And after what you did to her, she had to retire…”
“Beatrice has always been her own woman—even then. What passed between us? That is between me and my mate. Do you understand? Or are you like those other alphas, unable to accept that their child is grown, and capable of making her own decisions! She is a wondrous creature. When she and I…” I shook my head. I wanted to kill something. There was a good thing in being a soldier, one could brawl and fight and get rid of all this anger bubbling inside of me by throwing a punch at proud alphas from good families who were permitted to do as they pleased and sneer down their noses at alphas who came from below. “Good evening, Madam.”
“I told you to stay.” Her bark was weak. My anger stronger with resentment, with fury on my mate’s behalf. “You were nothing then. Oh, you had potential, to be sure, why else would I have paid for the commission for an uneducated Scotsman? Get him into the cavalry. Have him rise to the rank of Colonel. But Beatrice was made for greater things. She did not need you as a millstone about her neck.”
It came to me. “You lied to her. Didn’t you? You let her believe I left because I wanted to. You never told her that you sent me away. That you threatened me and all I held dear… You threatened my life. My father’s business. The futures of all that I love, all for some material aspiration for your daughter who never had a materialistic bone in her body.”
She stiffened into her full height. Though tall for a female alpha, I still towered over her. “Don’t you dare,” she hissed. “She’ll never believe you over me. My daughter will always take my side. I’ve… I’ve done everything to ensure that she had the happiest, most promising life! Without me, she would—”
“She would have had her mate. Her true mate.” I spat. “Instead, she had to face life alone. Never again. Never again will you come between me and mine… Did you ever consider the feelings or desires of your child? How she might have lived if she’d had her mate by her side? No, of course not. You could never be wrong. And yet you have destroyed her happiness.”
“Beatrice is happy! How dare you imply otherwise?”
“Madam. I have an intimate knowledge of my mate. She is in my very blood. When I tell you I’ve never seen her so uncertain, I do not lie. You’ve quashed something in her. I tasted it tonight. She was ever a danger to herself, and in removing her mate—in removing me—all you accomplished was leaving her to run wild. She went into heat in public. You are all blessed that Pax is an alpha capable of restraint. She could have been raped. Did you consider that? I would never have permitted such behaviour, and in my care she’d have been supported in her desires. Together, we’d have found a way for her paintings to hang wherever she wanted. You put her in danger.”
“Never! You were the one always dangerous to my daughter. And if there is one thing an alpha does not permit, it is for danger to touch even a hair on the head of the omegas under their care,” she sneered.
I shook my head. There was something brittle about her, nothing like the woman I remembered from my youth. One I’d looked up to, for being so supportive of her omega daughters, for caring for them enough that she’d paid me what seemed then a small fortune to keep an eye on Beatrice, knowing she wanted to explore and wise enough to let her so long as there was someone keeping a weather eye on her. Perhaps this… Ugliness… had come into being when her mate had died. I knew that feeling well enough. That gnawing rage and grief knowing that the one you are physically tied to was gone.
“I understand the complexity of your emotions. You know what it is to have your mate taken away from—“
“How dare you,” she hissed, her entire body shuddering with rage. “My Charles! Losing my husband, my mate is nothing compared… How dare you?”
“When you’ve lived with that pain for ten years, perhaps you will learn why I dare.” It was cruel to throw Charles Hartwell’s death in her face, but I could not find any sympathy for her. She was broken, defeated. I would leave her like that, and perhaps one day she would appreciate the pain I’d lived with. The resignation, and the bitterness. “Goodnight madam.”
It had taken ten years, but I suddenly realised how little I cared for her opinion. How the opinions of the people in my immediate circle were those that mattered. This tired woman meant nothing to me. A weight lifted off my shoulders. I no longer cared if she wanted me to stay away from my mate or not. That would be Beatrice’s decision and hers alone. I turned away from my enemy and all she represented.
“You bastard! I should have done something about you then. Ensured you never saw her again.”
It came back in a rush.
Ten Years Ago
Edinburgh
