His Bastards, My Revenge

My husband died in a border skirmish with an enemy pack.  The woman Wren he loved died with him. She came from the pack we'd hated for a hundred years.

They left me two sons who weren't mine by blood.

Eighteen years passed.

I raised those boys like they were my own. I even got them into the Alpha King's Guard — the kind only a handful of pups make in a whole generation.

But the day they were chosen, my husband, dead all these years, walked back through the door with his forbidden lover.

She smiled at me like we were old friends.

"Thank you for turning our sons into the pride of the Guard."

"We couldn't have stayed hidden all these years without you."

Then my husband said he wanted the marriage over. He wanted to marry her. He wanted his sons back.

I didn't cry. I didn't argue.

I just smiled.

"Okay."

"Mom! Mom, we made it!"

I was standing at the stove when I heard them yelling from the den.

Callum and Cassian burst through the door and grabbed me before I could even turn around.

"We're in. Both of us." Callum said, breathless. "Something happened when we shifted — this mark, silver, right under the skin, both of us. The overseer said he's only seen it a handful of times in his whole life."

"The trainers said we've had the best marks in the yard all year, too," Cassian said. "Every drill, every night. That wasn't luck either."

I pulled back just enough to look at them properly. Eighteen years old today. They'd both gotten taller than me years back and I still wasn't used to it.

"My boys. Look at you," I said, and reached up to ruffle both their heads at once.

My husband, Rourke, had been dead that long. I raised these boys alone the whole time, and everyone in the pack knew it, and most of them never let me forget it either. A widow with two sons who weren't hers, working herself to the bone for a dead man's mistakes.

I never told anyone different.

"You two did that. Not me."

"Mom, you're the one who trained with us every morning before school. You're the one who sat up with us the whole week before the trials."

"You don't get into the Guard because someone sat up with you."

"You do if you almost quit twice and she wouldn't let you." Cassian said that one, grinning, and I swatted his arm.

They'd always been good boys. Grateful ones.

"You've spent eighteen years giving everything to us," Callum said. "Once we're settled at the Vanguard halls, you're not lifting another finger."

"Cassian's right. Let us take care of you for once."

Their birthday was in two days. I'd always booked a private room at the same place in the pack for it, every year since they were small. This year felt bigger. Two sons in the Alpha King's Guard. I wasn't going to let that pass with cake and a candle.

I called the nicest hall in the pack and booked the whole banquet room.

I was still scraping dishes when there was a knock at the door.

It was my neighbor from two doors down, a loaf of bread still warm in her hands.

"Word's already halfway round the pack. Two sons from one den, both in the Alpha King's Guard. I've never once seen that happen, and I've been in this pack sixty years."

"They worked hard for it."

"I'm sure they did." She said it gentle, not unkind. "Shame their father never got to see it."

She pressed the bread into my hands before I could answer, told me the knee balm I'd mixed her last month worked wonders, and that she'd send her daughter round for more.

I thanked her and shut the door.

Two days until the banquet.

I set the bread down on the counter and went back to the stove.