Moon Child (The Year of the Wolf #2) - Serena Akeroyd Page 0,127

there to discourage me.

I thought about her silver-penny eyes and her dubiousness as Catharina had made her explanations, justified her actions, but they were thoughts I couldn’t seem to avoid and which I desperately wanted to. So, needing the distraction, and seeing the two of them together, I got to my feet and wandered over to my son.

After I grabbed Knight, I sat cross-legged at the edge of the circle, then stared at her. She moved as close as she could, sitting down on her haunches, head tipped to the side, like she knew I wanted to talk to her.

And I did. I had a lot of questions. Today, my brain was abuzz with them. First with my mother, then with Todd, and now with Berry. We’d never managed to pin her down, never managed to figure out exactly why she was here as Berry and not Merinda.

Maybe today was the day for me to get the answers we, as a family, needed.

“Daniel said you can’t shift.”

She dipped her chin.

I stared at her. “Your sons are very bitter where you’re concerned.”

“Earned.”

“I thought you were going to leave us,” I whispered, surprised by the welter of tears that hit me at the prospect. I didn’t want her to go, even if I didn’t understand her or her actions. We’d grown so close since she’d come into my life, and every day, I missed not having her at my side. She was there, in the periphery, but not dancing around my feet like I’d grown used to before Lara had come to the pack.

“Hated.”

My brow puckered at that. “You hate me?”

She growled at that, which had me jerking in surprise, but as I moved back, Knight moved forward, and his hand slipped over the border of the circle and clutched some of Berry’s fur.

“As if I could hate you, child.”

The words slipped into my mind as easily as they did when my mates talked to me.

“I can hear you!” I whispered.

Her head lowered at that. “The Mother is generous in all ways,” she whispered, eying the starfish fingers of my son’s hand as it clung to her fur, which confirmed that Knight, somehow, was reaping another miracle. This child. Kali Sara. What he was capable of…

Then, she robbed me of my thoughts as she told me, “You must know that I only wanted to do what was best for them all.”

My brow furrowed. “You did the worst thing imaginable. You abandoned your sons!”

“And I regretted it. Every day. But I had no choice. I loved the twin’s father, but he wasn’t a good man.” She gulped. “If he had been, Paul would have been able to accept him. But he was a convict. A criminal.”

“Did Paul kill Lucas, their dad? What happened to him?”

“He always said it was an accident,” she whispered, but her head twisted to the side, like she didn’t want to see me doubt her word. Which, of course, put doubt in my mind. “Lucas had tried to steal something from Paul’s office, and instead of dealing with it in-house, Paul wanted to get rid of him. He decided that involving the human cops would work best, so he drove him to town and they got into an accident.

“He almost died, but Lucas was—” She broke off, and when her eyes reached mine, they were loaded with devastation. “He did die. Nastily. Afterward, I was so distressed, I couldn’t cope. I just knew that Paul had done something to force the accident, which essentially ended all our lives.

“Paul knew that our time left was short. Without Lucas, I should have passed on soon after, and with that, he should have as well. He pulled away from Eli, arranged for Maggie May to look after him so that he’d acclimate to her when the time came, and made the decision to give the twins to another woman. I was grief-stricken and, now, looking back, I’d say I had post-natal depression which was exacerbated by the devastation I felt at losing Lucas.”

“But you didn’t die,” I said simply, even though her words affected me more than she could know. “Why didn’t you bring the twins home?”

“Every day, we wondered if it would be my last, but for years after, it never was. I just kept things as they were, because it could have ended there and then. Some days, I wished it would. But the truth is, what kind of safe space would it have been for the twins around Paul?