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“You are the mate of the vampire king,” Maddox reminded him. “You have triumphed over adversity and found your own power.”
“Uh huh. So where’s my father now?”
“I really couldn’t say, boy.”
“I want to find him. So I can kick his ass. You don’t know what it’s like,” Will said. “To just be left somewhere. To be helpless, and have your whole life fucked up…”
Maddox did not know what it was like. But he knew precisely how it had been. He remembered the day of Will’s birth clearly, some twist of fate bringing him to a scent and a cry from bags of garbage that should have been still and silent. It was a sound of innocence and pain, and it had cut through him in a way few other sounds did, now that he was cloaked in eternal night.
A teenage girl was hurrying away, her hands over her ears, her sneaker-clad feet pacing swiftly over the pavement in a pained gait. The sound continued. She had left her babe left to exposure. How Spartan of her.
It was not his job to save infant humans, but Maddox found the cry to be the kind of irritant to his conscience he could not ignore. He went to the dumpster and reached in, ignoring the debris and filth of human existence.
The baby stopped crying when he lifted it. That’s all it wanted, just a simple little thing: touch. It wanted to be looked after, watched over. It did not want to be alone. The blanket over its still sticky wet body slipped, revealing a light pelt of uncommon fur and the mark of maleness. He was perfect in every way. He was also fast getting cold, and hungry. He needed milk and a mother.
Maddox could not provide any of those things, so he did what he could. He delivered the baby to the safe box at the fire station, and he waited until it was discovered less than five minutes later by a very nice lady who immediately set about doing all the many things the baby’s mother would have done if she were capable of any of them.
After that, he’d lost touch. The truth was time had passed without his notice. Important formative years for Will passed Maddox by in the space of a breath. He’d barely thought about the baby in years when he saw Will’s file and made the connection.
“Hello?”
Will was up at his desk with a demanding expression on his handsome young face. “Where are you right now?”
“I’m here, pup,” Maddox murmured. “I’m here.”
“And where’s my father? Or my mother?”
“I really don’t know.”
“I want to find them. Will you help me?”
“Of course.”
What else could Maddox say? The truth was always destined to come out eventually. The moment Will became wolf, events were set in motion. What would be would be.
3 THE ARREST
Will was excited. For the first time in a long time, perhaps for the first time in his life, he had some reason to hope that he was going to find out the truth about what he was. Who he was. Like every orphan and abandoned child in state care, he had wondered where he had come from. He had concocted stories in his head about a father he had never known. At one stage had had been convinced that his father must be a pirate. Then he’d turned thirteen and decided he was actually probably a rock star. It made sense, after all. Both pirates and rock stars were highly desirable men who travelled about a lot and wouldn’t know if some woman they’d slept with was busy tossing their progeny into the nearest dumpster. While dealing with that crushing maternal rejection, Will had always clung to the idea that his father would have loved him if only he'd known. Finding him would right all the wrongs of Will’s violent and tragic past in a way no contemporary lover ever could.
But to Will’s great disappointment, Maddox didn't help. If anything, Maddox took absolutely every opportunity possible to avoid the subject. He was forever going on about king this and document that, taking meetings, going out. The days of Will being the center of his attention were over. He was now just one of the inhabitants of the house, someone Maddox acknowledged but had almost no time for.
“I want my birth certificate,” Will said, ambushing Maddox as he came down the stairs one afternoon several days after their initial conversation. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.”
“You were abandoned, so it is unlikely to contain anything of use.”
“I still want to find it.”
“You can order them online,” Lorien drawled from a nearby armchair. “It’s called the internet.”
Will didn’t use the internet as much as his contemporaries. They were obsessed with the thing. Constantly making tick tacks or something like that. He’d never really seen the point in dancing around like an asshole in the hopes someone would tap a screen elsewhere. What did it fucking matter to him? He didn’t have a phone and the only computer in the house was in Maddox’s office.
“Can I use your computer to get my birth certificate? Or will you order it for me?”
“I’ll order it for you,” Maddox promised.
But three days later, Mad had not ordered it. When Will asked again, he made some comment about being too busy. Will had never had an abundance of patience, but he knew better than to nag at Maddox. He was stressed out enough about being the vampire king of New York, an office that kept him busy with all manner of incredibly tedious and boring tasks.
It felt as though Will never actually saw him anymore, and it felt as though Maddox didn’t even think about him at all. Lorien appeared to have been deputized to keep an eye on him, and Will would rather not have seen Lorien. The ninety-year-old vampire dripped with cocky youth that put them at natural odds.
