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“Good think I’m so damn obsessed with vampires.”
A laugh escaped me. “I’m probably not pregnant.”
“Probably not,” he agreed.
We both grew quieter, lost in our thoughts.
“Spitfire,” Kai finally said.
“Mmhm?”
“I’d like to tell you about Elle, before we officially move in together tomorrow. I think you deserve to know.”
“Okay,” I said quietly.
His fingers curved over my hip. “You’re not going to walk away?”
“Nah. I’d be too hungry.”
He snorted, and my lips curved upward when he said, “That’s good enough for me.”
Another moment passed before he started talking. “I was still eighteen when we met. You know how it is—there’s no choice involved. She was short, with light skin and dark, curly hair to here.” He tapped lightly on my collarbone. “Her family had died a few years earlier in a yacht accident of some kind, but she had a friend living in town, so she already knew about us. There was no kidnapping involved. The first few minutes after we met, when I’d finally shifted, she just looked at my wolf with this critical expression in her eyes. And the first thing she said, in the middle of the damn grocery store, was ‘I thought my mate would be bigger’.”
My heart dropped for him. “Are you kidding me?”
He chuckled. “Nope. I was just as big back then as I am now—six-five, and nearly two-fifty. It’s impossible for werewolf men to be small. And she hadn’t seen me naked, so she couldn’t have been talking about my cock. For the life of me, I still don’t know why she said that.”
“Maybe it was supposed to be a joke?”
“No. She didn’t do sarcasm. I think she was just bitter, because of everything she’d been through. There could’ve been some kind of mental illness involved too, but she wouldn’t talk to me about it. Maybe if I had been that sick, for that long, I could’ve understood. But I wasn’t, and I don’t. Anyway, that first line was basically a glimpse at my next nine months.”
He continued, “My wolf only hunted for about a month before she got so sick that she begged him to bite her, and he did. Becoming a werewolf apparently made her healthier just long enough to talk a doctor into some fertility treatments. The cancer never disappeared—it was a damn miracle that she got pregnant at all.”
A moment of silence passed as I took all of that in.
As I tried to imagine what kind of pain Kai must’ve been feeling, when his mate was cruel and hateful, and dying at the same time.
“We only had sex once. I didn’t want to—she talked me into it. I didn’t know about the fertility shit. I’m pretty sure she used a turkey baster to suck my sperm out of her afterward, or something along those lines; the whole thing was fucking messed up. She went on and on about how shitty I was in bed, how I hadn’t gotten her off, how I was so damn clueless…” he shook his head hard enough that I felt the motion. “It messed my head up, badly, for a while. But I knew Iwasawful in bed, because I didn’t know what I was doing, and she kept criticizing me for something I didn’t want to do in the first place. Still, some part of me was so damn shocked when you reacted that way to my touch, in that bathroom, because of how everything went when I was with her.”
He let out a long breath. “I didn’t believe her, when she told me she was pregnant. I honestly didn’t. My parents struggled for years and years, and they loved each other. What we had was nothing like that—and she was so damn sick. She didn’t tell me until a few months later, when I found out about the fertility shit and we were yelling at each other, that she’d only done it because she wanted to experience pregnancy before she died. She didn’t even want a kid.”
He went on, “That was the moment that I decided that I would walk away from her after I had that baby in my arms, if she survived it all. That I would deal with her for coparenting if I had to—but that I couldn’t live with her anymore.”
We were both silent for a few minutes.
Kai’s grip on my body was tight, like he needed me to ground him while we were talking about Elle. And maybe he did.
He finally said, a bit quieter, “The next few months were absolute hell. She got sicker—and crueler. I’d stopped caring what she thought, or said. We hated each other so damn much. And finally, when she hit thirty-two weeks in the pregnancy, she calmly told the doctor that she was done. That she’d had the last experience she wanted, and now she wanted the baby out, and wanted to medically end her life.”
He pushed forward, “She talked about Lucas like he didn’t fucking matter—like he wasn’t a tiny, perfect,livingcreature that we’d created together. They tried to talk her out of it, and then I tried to talkthemout of it when they agreed with her, but they refused. And she refused.”
I was holding my breath, then.
Waiting to hear the story that no one in town really knew—the one that only Kai could tell me.
The one that had determined so much of his life, and Lucas’s.
“The next day, they did the surgery. She didn’t even fuckinglookat him, because she didn’t care about him. She told me that herself. That this wasn’t about him, she said, it was abouther. And he was so tiny—so fragile. It was too early. They took him to the NICU, and even though I didn’t want to stay with her, I stayed. I watched her take her last breath, and I didn’t shed a damn tear. She hadn’t cared about our son any more than she had cared about me. And when she was gone, I walked into my son’s room, and I cried like a baby because he was so damn tiny—and so damn weak. I stayed beside him for the next few months, until he was healthy enough that we could go.”
