That sure surprised her, but she wasn’t hopeful that he’d stay. No, he was a million miles away right then. Only he could close that distance, and he didn’t seem prepared to do it. Still, though, she wasn’t tossing him out, even though her sense of pride told her she should tear a strip off his hide. Nope. He’d have to take that walk himself.
Turning onto her side, she closed her eyes and took a steadying breath. She was just nodding off when the bedroom floorboards creaked. The TV was now off, she realized. Instead of using the bathroom and undressing as he usually did before bed, he sank onto the mattress behind her. He’d come to say goodbye, she thought. Come to admit he wasn’t ready for what had grown between them.
Swallowing around the knot of emotion clogging her throat, Mila said nothing. Just waited for him to say some little spiel and leave.
Adjusting the pillow slightly, Dominic sighed. “I was a replacement baby, you know,” he said, his voice low. “After my parents lost Tobias and became unhappy in their mating, they had me to ‘fix’ it. To bring them back together. To give them someone else to love. Only they didn’t love me. Not really. You’re thinking I’m wrong. That of course they loved me—they were my parents. But it’s not always that simple. It should be, but it’s not.
“I look uncannily like Tobias, and I think that hurt my parents. Made it almost painful for them to look at me. But at the same time, they loved that they had a living reminder of the son they’d lost. I was always compared to him, and I never came out on top. It disappointed them if I didn’t like what he’d liked, or if I wasn’t good at what he’d been good at. It was like they could never quite separate me from him in their minds.”
Mila squeezed her eyes shut, her chest hurting at the picture he was painting. She wondered if he knew that the loneliness he’d felt back then rang clear in his tone. Her cat leaned into him, wanting to soothe.
“I was never allowed in his room,” Dominic went on. “They hadn’t boxed up his stuff, they’d left it all exactly as it had been when he died. It was like a shrine to him. My mother would sleep there sometimes. I’d hear her crying, but I learned fast that there was no point in going to her. She didn’t want comfort. She clung to the guilt, wore it like a badge.
“She often invited spiritualists to the house, and they’d talk of how Tobias was still close. For as far back as I can remember, she used to tell me that the unexplained noises I heard around the house—any creaks, thuds, scrapes—were my brother’s spirit moving around.
“Every year on his birthday, she’d bake a cake for him and light candles, and we all had to sing happy birthday to someone who wasn’t even there. I get that they needed to keep his memory alive. I’m glad they were so determined not to forget him. I’m glad he was loved so much, and I’m damn sorry that he died. But I don’t like that even though they had me, they never let themselves love me. I don’t like that my purpose was to bring them back together, make them happy again. They were never happy. And for a while, I blamed myself for that.”
Rolling over to face him, Mila said, “People are responsible for their own happiness. And it sounds to me like your mother didn’t want to be happy.”
Dominic played his fingers through Mila’s curls. “You’re right, she didn’t. And by leaving, she condemned her mate. She didn’t even leave a note. Didn’t give any warning. Just packed her stuff and went. My father couldn’t handle the distance from her, and so his wolf turned rogue. Mauled two people to death before his Alpha and Beta brought him down. And then there was only me.”
No, she thought, there had only been him for a very long time before that. His parents had never made him feel part of a family. It hurt her heart to think he’d spent his childhood suppressing a shitload of anger for the emotionally absent parents who’d had him to replace their perfect child—Dominic had never stood a chance.
He’d never been special to anyone. Never belonged. Never felt fully secure. He’d learned that it was unwise to expect much