Chapter 82

Dominic

I checked the time again. It had only been forty minutes since Mira left.

There was no way she was even close to being finished as trials of this sort could take hours if the council wanted them to. I feared that there were still members of the opposition who could try to sway the results.

All I could do was wait and trust in Mira’s capabilities and the strength of our bond to solidify our future together. The future that would begin as we exchanged vows and oaths in our Mate Ceremony. And after that ceremony, a time that I was so anxious for it made my whole body ache with the need for her.

I left myself become distracted with imagining our first time, an activity I had been doing more often recently as this day loomed before us.While we both knew it was somewhere on the horizon, neither of us knew all that would happen around us and between us since that night she found me in the woods.

I will never forget the first moment I saw her, even in the hazy memory of my rage-filled outburst. Out of nowhere, in the dark of the woods, a golden being appeared like the north star guiding me out of darkness. Then it all went dark again as the wolf fought back before I collapsed again from my injuries.

It took me weeks to remember that part of the story, and by then I was already falling in love with her.

You’re a goner, brother.

It is always a good sign when your wolf makes fun of you. I smiled anyway. Being with Mira had taught me that love made you stronger, not weaker.

Needing distraction, I turned my brain to a problem I was trying to solve: the mystery of my mother. After what my father revealed to me about her death, the subject was simmering on the back burner of my brain constantly.

I had arranged a meeting with my father’s Beta, Trenton. He had grown up with my father and stayed with him throughout the years. Their bond was brotherly, even given the parameters of Pack customs. If anyone could tell me more about my mother, it was him.

“Thank you for coming,” I told him, shaking his hand then accepting as he pulled me into a larger embrace.

“How could I resist the call of the crown prince?” He said as he squeezed me with a vice grip around the shoulders. I didn’t often meet people larger than me, but Trenton’s barrel-chested bulk always made me feel like a child. “And soon to be bridegroom to a most winsome lady, the lucky lad.”

“That’s why I was glad you could come to me,” I told him, leading him to a seat in our living room. “I didn’t need the public to see me skulking about the day of his wedding. We’ve drawn enough attention to ourselves already.”

“And are we skulking, Dominic?” Trenton’s bushy grey eyebrows moved up and down suggestively, but the question was sincere.

“I might be,” I said, taking a serious tone. No need to stand on ceremony with him. “I wanted to ask you about my mother.”

Trenton was quiet, his face unmoving, the gears turning as he formulated a response. I knew he was capable of lying to me and I wouldn’t push it, but I also got the sense that he might tell me the truth.

“What do you want to know?”

“My father told me he didn’t believe the story of her death, that it didn’t seem accidental or like a fluke in the universe.”

He listened, and I went on.

“I don’t remember much about that time— I suppose you remember how ill I was as well— and can’t help but feel that something is unfinished. Like there is a hole she left in our lives, and I need to fill it in. Not just for me, or my father, but for her.”

“That sounds like grief, Dom,” he said gently. Trenton was one of the only people I allowed to call me that. “It can rip you apart and you’ll spend your whole life trying to stitch the pieces back together.”

“It’s more than that,” I said with a bit of defiance. “Just please, if you know anything that could help me…build some context, finish painting the image I have of the woman who raised me.”

Trenton looked angry for a moment, then blew out a long exhale and rolled his head around until his neck cracked. Then he looked back at me.

“Do not tell your father we spoke of this,” he said, holding out a hand. I took hit, sealing a promise between us. “There were rumors, shortly before she got sick. It always struck me as odd, the timing.”

“What sort of rumors?”

He hesitated, then gave in knowing I would not back down. “There were rumors that she was having an affair.”

Now it was my time to be quiet and stare at him. I closed my mouth so I didn’t catch flies, and looked off into the distance beyond Trenton’s head.

“Do you think it was true?” I finally asked him.

“Not a bit,” he said without thinking. “I saw the love between your parents, the way they both changed for the better when they were courting and then became Mates. It would’ve taken a strange shift in the cosmos to tarnish that love.”

“Then what does it mean? What were they saying?”

He put his hand on my shoulder to calm me, like a child asking ‘why’ too many times in a row.

“Jealousy, I imagine,” he said, sadness creeping into his voice, “there are always those who despise happiness in others. And some that want to claim it for their own.”

“Claim it?”

“There was a man, a doctor I believe— I don’t remember exactly where she met him,” Trenton said, his eyes misty with memory. “He became…interested in your mother, in the charity work she did, in the social life she led. In my mind, he became obsessed with her.”

A chill went up my spine.

“Some said she was inviting his attention, calling her all sorts of nasty things,” he continued, “and it wouldn’t surprise me if he started some of it himself. He was rich, I remember that, and money can buy opinions.”

“Do you think he would have hurt her?”

“Hard to say,” Trenton sighed. “But then your mother got sick, so fast that the entire medical staff felt they could do nothing but ease her pain as she declined. And that man was never seen or heard from again.”

Trenton’s words were echoing in my head long after he’d left my apartment. He had given me the information I had asked for, but it was not at all what I wanted to hear. There was still more of the past to dig up, and I would follow the trail to the end.

“Sir?” Wyatt said, halfway into the room. “I knocked, not sure you heard me. Were you talking to someone?”

“Just myself, Wyatt,” I said, coming out of my reverie. “I could never be a hermit. How are things on the outside?”

“Well, sir,” he said, his face rippling with a mix of emotions, “Mira’s trial has ended.”