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“You are a poet.” But I wanted to hear more.
“And what about you? How do you see us?”
I tilted my head so that I could look at him. Searching back to all of our interactions. Sarah’s introduction to his taste and scent. The raw pathos we gifted. “I don’t want you to be disappointed in me,” I conceded. I released a shaky breath. “You could never disappoint me.”
I thought to what I planned to do after dinner and knew he was wrong.
25
Puck
The minute her feet were up, she’d fallen asleep. We all knew her next heat was near. The Polly before her heat, had been up at the crack of dawn. The one now seemed to prefer her ‘not nest’ or cat napping in the sun.
I had stolen a moment with her before dinner. This powerful woman whose vulnerability came in starts and stutters. Sarah had focused on her strength. But what kept me coming back, what addicted me, was the tumble of emotions which at times she could barely control.
Then after dinner she was fully in command of herself and clearly in the mood to talk.
“This not my story.” She fingered the wood grain. It had been three weeks, not even a month, since she had stormed into Oberon’s office yet it felt like a lifetime ago. She took a moment to collect herself, meeting each of our eyes before she continued her story. “Beatrice and Jack were always meant to be. Eleven years ago she went into heat and managed to have Jack come to our house while the rest of us were out. He mated her but my mother threatened him—I do not know the details, just something my father let slip. Anyway. He left her.”
I growled. It would have to have been a grave threat to force an alpha away from his mate. And Jack wasn’t a man or alpha to abandon his responsibilities.
“She was pregnant. And rather than let our acquaintance know, they sent her to stay here. My father’s friend lived here with her husband, a merchant. This very house. When it came time for the birth, my father and I came to support Bea. I do not know if they discussed it before or if it was a decision in the heat of the moment but when she gave birth to a son, they chose to tell her that the babe had died.”
“What?” Jude snapped. “What happened to him.”
I met Oberon’s eyes. He already knew. His brain faster, more acute than the others, he had put the pieces together.
“The midwife’s assistant took him under her care. Papa and Mrs Markham said it was for the best but it nearly broke my sister. My shame is that if I was in their position I am not sure if I wouldn’t have done the same. I hated Jack for abandoning my sister and the boy had black hair like his father. She’d be an unwed mother, abandoned by her mate, and with a child who looked like his father. I convinced myself it was better that the baby went to a good home.”
“You were a child yourself,” Jude said.
“I was sixteen, but yes. Sheltered from the world and struggling with being an apex omega.” She drew a circle on the table as I put the story together in my head. “For two years I did not think of the baby. At eighteen I came to London for my debut. A farce of a season. Then at a modiste I met that assistant midwife again, now working as a seamstress. We recognised each other. I wanted to know my nephew—”
“No.” The pieces fell into place. How had I not seen it sooner?
“Sophia,” Oberon confirmed.
“Oberon’s sister…You mean Tod is Beatrice’s son?” Jude shook his head.
“Sophia Drexler offered to give me my nephew. But she was his mother and by then I realised taking a child from his mother against her will was wrong. So I could not, no matter how much I wanted to bring my family together. We corresponded. And in the meantime I had begun my career as a thief…but that is another story.”
Oberon stood and went to the side board to pour two glasses of canary which he set in front of me and Polly. “Drink.”
I did but only because he asked. She toyed with the glass, a lost look in her eyes. “A year on, she wrote that she was sick and with no money for she’d been forced to stop working. I visited her, brought a doctor but he said it was no use. Consumption. All we could do was make her comfortable.”
“We’d assumed she was a mistress to some wealthy person,” I whispered.
“She told me she had a much older brother who had been supporting them but recently been thrown in prison for stealing from wealthy alphas. A theft I had committed.”
“I should have guessed,” Oberon chuckled. Then his eyes flashed. “You know who paid—”
“I was the one who paid the debts and blackmailed the judge to let you go.”
“What?”
“How?”
“Fuck.”
