she asked, surprised.
“I figured he owed me, so...” I shrugged. “Don’t worry, Mom. I’m fine, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but first...”
“First, you want to know your father’s name,” she finished for me, looking resigned.
“I do.”
“Are you going to try to see him?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that I’m ready to find out.” I paused. “Why did you lie? Why not tell Dad? I think he would’ve forgiven you.”
“I considered it long and hard, but in the end, I realized what an idiot I had been for cheating on him. He was the same amazing man I’d married. I was the one who’d failed him. He didn’t deserve the hurt the truth would have caused him. It wasn’t easy to keep up the lie, and the burden served as payment for my mistake. But I think it preserved our family. Our happiness was untouched by my mistakes.”
I wanted to say that I was the one paying for her mistakes now, that she had only delayed the hurt, but I wasn’t here to fight. Besides, I would take any amount of pain if Dad could be spared.
“I know I have no right to ask anything of you,” Mom continued, “but maybe it would be best if you stay away from him. He has changed a lot since we...” She lowered her head unable to finish. Her hands rested on her lap, fidgeting.
“How do you know that?”
“He’s an alpha, the leader of a prominent family. His name is often on the news, and not necessarily for good reasons.”
I felt the color drain from my face as a list of well-known werewolves flashed before my eyes. I winced as the name “Ulfen Erickson” rose to the very top. I swallowed thickly, waiting for her lips to shape the syllables that would give me all the reasons not to ever approach the man. Except, Mom surprised me with a different name.
“Your father is Travis Hillworth.”
Chapter 15
The knowledge of my father’s identity settled down in my gut like a heavy boulder. I had heard the name Travis Hillworth plenty of times, and like Mom had said, it was rarely in a good light, the more I thought about it even Ulfen Erickson sounded better than him.
I left Mom’s house in a daze. Once inside my car by the curb, I surfed the web on my phone, looking at pictures of the man and his family. He was tall, about 6’4”. He had dark brown hair and eyes. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and sweaters, which he actually managed to pull off. His face was long and his aquiline nose crooked. He was married and had a daughter and a son—my half-sister and half-brother. That idea gave me all kinds of nausea. I had more siblings, both older than me, which meant he had stepped out on his wife with my mother. What in the world had possessed him to do that? And how had my mother gotten pregnant when that was a rare occurrence between werewolves and non-werewolves?
Could it have been that thing Jake mentioned? What had he called it? Cravedark?
As I drove back to the office, I struggled with the concept of my mom cheating on Dad with a werewolf. It made absolutely no sense and seemed entirely out of character. Mom had loved Dad, and they had been happy together. When he died, she was devastated because she’d lost the love of her life. If that was how she’d felt about him, then why the hell had she cheated on him?
There was so much more that Mom and I needed to discuss, so many questions that needed answers, but life was moving at breakneck speed, and this would have to wait.
Once at the office, I waited for Rosalina to arrive. She was uncharacteristically late and seemed flustered when she finally got here.
We got a little bit of work done, making phone calls and rearranging appointments and plans. She understood that the priority was helping Damien find a cure so we could save Josh, but I could tell that putting things on hold stressed her out. We had enough money to cover our upcoming loan payment and other bills, but our salaries would take a hit, and after that, we would have to dip into our savings account, which we’d barely started to build. One month and it would be drained completely, negating all our efforts.
Crap! Dani had been right. I shouldn’t have signed my name on the dotted