All Chapters of Meant To Be Daddy’s: Claimed By My Fiance’s Father: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

128 Chapters

111: Information

DAMIENThe man in the first room had been sitting against the wall for long enough that the cold had gotten into him properly. I could see it in the way he held himself, shoulders drawn in, as still as someone desperately trying to preserve body heat.He looked up when I came in.I crossed the room and crouched in front of him and held the gun where he could see it clearly.“Tell me about Cael Ashford,” I said.He looked at the gun before raising his gaze to me. Then he looked at the wall behind my left shoulder and said nothing.I stood up and went into the ceiling.The sound in the stone room was enormous, filling every corner and coming back at us from all directions, and the man flinched so hard his head hit the wall behind him.The plaster from the ceiling came down in pieces.I looked at him through the settling dust.“Tell me about Cael Ashford,” I said again.He pressed his lips together.His jaw was set hard and he was silent like someone who had been trained for this and wa

112: To catch a break

SERAPHINANadia was in the chair beside my bed when I opened my eyes.She was awake, sitting with her knees pulled up and a cup of something warm between her hands, watching me particularly with a sad smile stretched across her pretty face.Yesterday had felt like a dream so waking up and confirming that it was real and I was rescued, back home with the people I loved. “Morning,” she said in a honeyed tone. “Morning.” I sat up, rubbing my eyes with the back of my palm.She leaned forward and put her arms around me over the blanket and held on for a moment, the Nadia version of a hug which was always slightly more forceful than the situation technically required.“How do you feel?” she murmured into my shoulder.“Like myself,” I sighed. “Which is better than yesterday.”She pulled back and looked at my face, reading it the way she normally did, looking past what was presented to whatever was underneath.“The bruise is worse this morning,” she said. “Colour-wise. That’s normal though.

113: Accusations

DAMIEN“My men will take you to the pack hall,” I said to the women. “You’ll have water and somewhere comfortable to sit and I will be there in five minutes.”The woman on the floor looked up at me. She didn’t move immediately.“You have my word,” I said. “Nobody in this building is going to hurt you.”Brennan moved forward and said something low and calm to the group and they went, not quickly and not without looking back, but they went.I turned.Seraphina was still at the bottom of the stairs. Nadia had appeared behind her and Agnes was in the kitchen doorway and everyone in the entrance hall was looking at me as though I had just witnessed something they didn’t have a framework for.I didn’t either. Whatever just happened was trouble waiting to tip over and the weight of the exhaustion already sank deep on my shoulders. I crossed to Seraphina.“I’m handling it,” I said.“Do you want me there?”“No.”She looked at me. “Are you sure?”“This is coming from Cael,” I said, keeping my

114: Crossroads

SERAPHINAI didn’t know what to do with my hands or my body. That was the specific problem. I had been standing in the entrance hall watching Damien walk away toward the pack hall and now I was in the entrance hall not walking anywhere and my hands were doing nothing useful and my brain was doing too much.“Eat something,” Agnes said from the kitchen doorway.“I’m not hungry.”“That wasn’t a suggestion.”I went into the kitchen and sat at the counter and Agnes put a plate in front of me and I ate because arguing with Agnes about food was a losing proposition and I had limited energy for losing propositions today.“Where is Alpha Damien?” I asked.“In the hall with those women and the elders.”“And then?”“And then wherever he goes next,” Agnes said. “You know how he is. He’ll handle it.”“I know how he is,” I said. “That’s why I’m worried.”Agnes looked at me with the expression she used when she agreed with something and wasn’t going to say so.I finished enough of the food to satis

115: Goodbyes

SERAPHINA “Leaving for where?” I asked.Shane picked up a practice pad from the edge of the mat and set it down somewhere else for no reason, just to have something to do with his hands. “I don’t know yet. Not Blue Moon or here.”“That’s not an answer.”“It’s the honest one.” He looked at me. “This place takes something out of me. Every week I’ve been here, I feel it. Like I came in with a full tank and something has been draining it slowly without asking.” He shook his head. “Everything is messy and dangerous and I came here to teach kids how to fight and instead I’ve driven across three territories and watched people get shot and been in the middle of things that have nothing to do with me.”“That’s not—”“I’m not blaming you,” he said. “I’m not blaming anyone. I’m just telling you how it feels to be me in this place.”I looked at him.He was telling the truth. That was the thing about Shane, he was almost incapable of performing something he didn’t feel, and what was on his face

116: Goodbyes??

SERAPHINAShane told me to stay in the corridor.I didn’t stay in the corridor.Clarissa’s apartment door was unlocked, the handle turning without resistance when Shane tried it, which should have told us something. We went in and she was at the desk with papers spread across it, going through them with the focused efficiency of someone on a deadline.She looked up when we came through the door.Something moved across her face. Not a surprise exactly. More of an annoyance that her timeline had been compressed. She was wearing a leather pant and jacket that made her look completely different from how I’d remembered.“Back off,” she said.“Clarissa—” Shane started.I was already moving.She came up from the chair fast, faster than anyone who spent their days teaching history and psychology had any business moving, and she met me halfway across the room. Her forearm came up and deflected my first strike cleanly, the technique automatic, no thought required.She’d been trained and defin

117: Loses

DAMIENNadia arrived at the hospital forty minutes after I called her.She came through the doors already reading the situation, her eyes finding Seraphina first and then me, and she crossed the lobby without stopping and put her arms around Seraphina without a word.“Stay with her,” I said quietly to Nadia. “Don’t let her go through those doors.”Nadia nodded over Seraphina’s shoulder.I went to find the doctor.His name was Farrell, a surgeon in his fifties with the unhurried manner of someone who had learned that rushing the delivery of information didn’t improve it.“The bullet entered the upper back,” he said. “It missed the spine. That’s the good news and it’s significant good news.” He paused in the way that preceded the rest of it. “The trajectory caught the edge of his right lung. We’ve addressed the immediate damage but his body has been through a serious trauma. He’s young and his healing should work in his favour.”“Should,” I repeated. “What does should mean?”“His physio

118: Loses (2)

SERAPHINAThe nurse at the medical desk had started recognizing me.Not warmly. In the way that people recognized someone who had been to their desk too many times with the same question.“There’s no update yet,” she said, before I opened my mouth.“I just want to know if he’s—”“The moment there’s an update, the doctor will come out and speak to you directly.” She looked at me with practiced patience. “The best thing you can do for him is sit down and let us do our jobs.”I turned away from the desk.Alan was sitting in the chairs near the window where Damien had been half an hour ago. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor, and he looked nothing like the Alan Voss who had sat in Damien’s reception room with his expensive jacket and his performance composure.He looked like a father.I sat down beside him.He looked up. “You really care about him?” he said. Not accusatory. Genuinely asking.“Yes,” I said. “He’s a good person. He’s been a good frien

119: Catching Cael

SERAPHINAHe opened his eyes once.Just once, just long enough for them to find my face, and he grabbed my wrist and said, “Find Callum. Get to Clarissa. Whatever she knows, get it out of her.”Then he was gone again, his hand going slack, his eyes closing.“Damien.” I pressed my hand to his face. “Damien, stay with me.”He didn’t respond.The hospital staff were already coming. Someone had called it in the moment the explosion happened and now there were three of them with a stretcher moving toward us across the car park and I stood up and stepped back because the only useful thing I could do was get out of their way.They worked fast, checking his airways, his pulse, his pupils, running through the assessment with the practiced speed of people who had done this before and knew exactly what they were looking for. One of them asked me something. I looked at her. “What happened?” she said again, slower.“There was something under his car,” I said. “An explosive. He was reaching for th

120: Captured

SERAPHINAThe monitor showed Clarissa walking down the corridor and I watched every frame of it, my hand on the van door, my body already prepared for the moment.Callum was beside me, watching the same screen, his breathing even and controlled in the way it got when he was seconds from something.Clarissa reached the door at the end. It opened before she touched it.Cael stepped through and the monitor showed us his face and even on a small screen in a surveillance van it hit me somewhere physical, the wrongness of seeing my father’s face on a man who had walked through a door in my parents’ house and done what he’d done.I pressed my hand flat against the van wall and breathed through it.On the monitor, they were talking. Clarissa’s voice came through the earpiece clearly.“I got the papers,” she said. “It wasn’t easy. They were watching the building.”“But you got out,” Cael said.“Barely.”He reached for the bag. She let him take it, let him open it, let him see the papers inside.

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