Second Chance Vows

Chapter 1:

POV: Maya

The wreck was still smoking somewhere behind me, though I could no longer turn my head far enough to see it.

I lay on the cold boulder of the northern road, half in the ditch and half outside it, with the night sky slowly spinning above me. My arms would not stop shaking, but I refused to let go of what they held.

Caleb...

His small body was limp against my chest, his head tucked beneath my chin the same way it used to fit when he was a baby and not a six year old who insisted he was too old to be cuddled. 

He wasn't breathing. I had checked, then checked again, and checked a third time, some desperate animal part of me believing that if I kept checking, the answer would somehow change.

It didn't...

My own blood was pooling beneath me, dark and slowly spreading across the gravel, and I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that I should have been more afraid of that than I was. 

A werewolf's body could heal almost anything with enough time and enough help from the moon. I should already have felt the healing begin beneath my ribs, that familiar burning itch of torn flesh slowly knitting itself together.

But I felt nothing.

Only cold, spreading farther with every heartbeat, as though my wolf had simply stopped trying.

Headlights swept across the ditch. A car door opened slowly, and heels clicked against the road, each step far too calm for someone walking into a scene like this.

I didn't need to lift my head to know who it was.

I would have recognised that scent anywhere, sweet and heavy, like something left too long under the sun.

"Oh dear," Elise said, crouching at the edge of the ditch in a coat that had clearly cost more than the car that had just forced us off the road. "What a mess."

"Help him." My voice came out broken, barely louder than a whisper. "Please. Call someone. Call Nathaniel."

Elise laughed softly, the delighted laugh of a woman enjoying a private joke.

"I did call Nathaniel, actually. Hours ago. He's rather busy tonight." She tilted her head, studying Caleb's still face with the mild curiosity of someone looking at a stain on a carpet. 

"You know, I expected you both to have been dead by now. Wolves are so annoyingly resilient. I had to be creative." Something inside my chest became very still.

"What did you do?"

"Wolfsbane," Elise said, as casually as another woman might say she had brought wine. 

"In both of you. Weeks ago, if you really want to know. A little at a time, in the tea you love so much and in the boy's juice. Just enough that neither of you would notice. Just enough for it to remain in your blood and wait. Your wolves have been dying slowly since before tonight. The crash only finished what I had already started." She smiled.

It was a terrible thing to see up close, how beautiful that smile still was.

"There's no healing this, Maya. Not for you. Not for him. I made certain of that."

My arms tightened around my son, one final, useless instinct to protect him from words that could no longer hurt him.

"You're lying," I whispered, even though I already knew, with the cold certainty of a body that refused to stop bleeding, that she wasn't.

"Am I?" Elise crouched lower, close enough for me to see the satisfied shine in her eyes. 

"I've been very patient with you, you know. Six years of patience. Watching you play Luna in a title that was always going to be mine sooner or later. Watching Nathaniel come to my bed and then go home to yours, pretending, for the sake of the pack, that it meant nothing."

She allowed the words to settle, clearly enjoying every second.

"It meant everything, Maya. It means Elathan will be Alpha one day, and your little boy was always going to be a problem I would eventually have to solve. I'm only sorry I didn't solve it sooner. It would have saved us both this ditch."

My vision began to blur around the edges, the night sky turning into streaks of black and grey. Somewhere far away, I could still feel my wolf, but she was getting smaller, curled inside herself like something that had already begun grieving.

"Why?" I managed.

It wasn't even a complete question. I didn't have enough breath left for one.

"Because you were always in the way," Elise said simply, almost gently, as if she were explaining something to a child. 

"Because I wanted what you had, and I'm tired, so tired, of waiting for your wolves to die naturally."

She crouched even lower, close enough for me to smell the sweetness of her perfume beneath the copper smell of my blood. Something in her expression changed, sharpening the way a woman's face does when she has been saving the worst part of her cruelty for last.

"There's something else you should know," Elise said, almost fondly. 

"Something I've wanted to tell you for years but never found the right moment. Do you remember the hunting lodge? 

The winter when you and Nathaniel were still newly mated, still pretending to be happy. You went to the northern lodge for the pack gathering, and Nathaniel drank far more than an Alpha should have. 

You woke the next morning believing the two of you had finally, properly consummated the bond that mattered."

My chest, already tight from dying, tightened even more.

"That's not true, stop lying to my face... Caleb is..."

"Caleb," Elise said, slowly drawing out his name, savouring it the way she seemed to savour everything, 

"is not Nathaniel's son. He never was."

She watched the words hit me, just as a hunter watches an arrow find its target.

"The man in that bed with you wasn't your husband, Maya. I arranged for someone else entirely. A rogue wolf I paid very well and warned to keep his mouth shut. I made certain Nathaniel was three rooms away, too drunk to remember his own name, let alone remember that he had never come near your bed. You were so desperate to believe it was him. It made everything so much easier."

I stared at her...

The ditch, the blood and the dying suddenly felt distant compared to the enormity of what she had just told me.

Caleb...

Small, warm and still against my chest, his heartbeat silent beneath my hands. So all these years she had known that my son is not Nathaniel's.

Never Nathaniel's...

Six years of loving a boy fiercely, building half of my life around him, all based on a lie Elise had created before he was even conceived.

"Why?" I whispered again, dying slowly, but yet curious. This time, it had nothing to do with the wolfsbane. I just want to know why...

"Because a child with no true claim to the bloodline is much easier to remove later," Elise said simply. 

"I only needed you to believe he belonged until the moment it stopped being useful to me. I would have told you eventually, you know. I always planned to. I just didn't think it would happen this soon, or like this."

She glanced almost carelessly at Caleb's still face.

"You should be grateful, Maya, I just showed you small mercy, I suppose. Your bastard son will never have to learn whose blood he really carries."

She stood, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from her coat before looking back toward her car as though she was already bored with our conversation.

"Nathaniel will grieve beautifully, I expect. He does everything beautifully in public. And then Elathan will have exactly what he was always meant to have, and none of this will have been for nothing."

She turned to leave, then stopped and looked over her shoulder with something almost resembling pity.

"For what it's worth," she said, 

"I really did like you in the beginning. You made it very easy to hate you later, though. That helped."

Then her heels clicked away, slow and unhurried. The car door closed, the engine faded into the darkness.

And I was left alone on the cold shoulder of the road with my son's body growing colder against my chest and my own blood no longer bothering to slow.

I should have been angrier, I should be screaming and cursing at that bitch for everything she has done to me and my innocent little boy.

Instead, all I felt is a silent rage and anger that I could not recognize as my own. It felt so real, and it’s directed to Elise and Nathaniel, the source of my pain. 

“I'm sorry,” I told Caleb, even though he couldn't hear me anymore. 

“I'm sorry I never saw it. I'm sorry I trusted him with you.” I felt the tears flowing freely down my cheeks as I thought about everything I did to make this union work.

“If I get a second chance, I will protect you, my boy. I will fight for us if I get another chance,” I told him, crying and smiling at the same time as I felt the life leaving my body.