Moon Child (The Year of the Wolf #2) - Serena Akeroyd Page 0,58
fascinated by him. The chubby, bright pink cheeks, the strange way his skin bunched on his arms and legs as his body began to grow, and the mop of silky hair on his head.
He was perfection.
Even if he did crap a lot.
A snicker whispered into my mind, and because I recognized the source, I sent my gaze higher to my mate.
“Thought you were sleeping.”
“I was, but…” She shrugged.
I heaved a sigh. “I was thinking too loud, huh?”
Her lips twitched, but it was a happy sigh as she cupped the back of Knight’s head and carefully rolled him so that he was cooing beside her. “They were beautiful thoughts. They made me happy.”
My brows rose. “They did? Why?”
“To hear your love for him, to feel it, is an honor.”
I’d admit my cheeks grew a little red at that. “I’m not as patient as Ethan or Eli.”
“Which is truly saying something, as neither of them are, what you could say, patient by nature, hmm?” She laughed softly. “But you’re you, Austin. I don’t want you to be anything other than that. Just you. And that’s all Knight needs you to be.” She cast me a look. “He’s too strong-willed for his own good.”
I winced. “He’ll shift when he’s young.”
“Eli already told me that he thinks that too. It concerns me.”
“Why? He’ll be safe here, and when he has his covenant, hopefully he’ll be granted a mate early so that he isn’t plagued with all the crap Eli had to go through.”
“No, that isn’t what worries me. What bothers me is that you four might butt heads.”
“It’s a rite of passage, Sabina. That’s how it works.”
“In my world, we have those too, and they never end well,” she whispered worriedly.
Anger hit me because I knew what she was talking about.
Something about me made it easier for her to open up, to talk about this kind of stuff, but it left me dealing with the repercussions of her insecurities. It was, I’d admit, hard on me to think she might believe us capable of hurting our son.
“You have to know we’d never hurt him.”
She gulped. “I know you wouldn’t. But I saw it every day with my father, Austin. And it happened even more after Lara came into her powers. She was strong, he saw that, and he hated her for it. I tried to defend her, but it was no good.”
Though her words pained me, I just said, “It never is.” I thought about what Lara told the Rainford alpha earlier this evening, about how just because something was the way of it, that didn’t mean it was right, and I commented, “Your parents had an unusual dynamic.”
“She was his slave.”
“Like in a BDSM way?”
Her snort of laughter came as a surprise. “No! My dad wasn’t a Dom, he was just a sadist,” she said dryly. Sadly. “He was so much older than her, and did things to her that kept her under his control. She was still young—he married her when she was barely sixteen. She’s not even in her fifties now.”
“What kind of things did he do to her?”
She peered up at me. “I know if I asked her, she’d lie, but there was a reason my father was so much harder on Lara than he was on Cyrilo, Jana, and me.”
“You think he saw something of himself in her?”
“No. I don’t think she was his.”
Whatever I’d expected her to say, it wasn’t that. “Wouldn’t she have been too scared to cheat? Or do you think she was just looking for kindness from someone?”
“No, she adored him. To the point where she’d do anything for him. Anything he asked.”
Her somberness made me reach over and cup the back of her head. Encouraging her to look at me and not Knight, I asked, “I’m not Eli or Ethan, mate, I can’t read between the lines as well as they can.”
She crinkled her nose. “You know I hate it when you compare yourself to them.”
I bit the inside of my cheek to hide a grin. “Sorry.”
Sabina heaved a sigh. “It’s okay. Just this once.”
Well, that had me told. I laughed, before I asked, “Explain?”
“Three times in my life, I remember him losing everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything. We went from riding the highs to surfing the lows.” She pursed her lips. “As difficult as it was living on the carny circuit, it wasn’t that much different than those times. After all, we were always traveling, I think we only