Semua Bab ERASED FROM HIS PACK, CARRYING HIS HEIR : Bab 11 - Bab 20

CamilleI waited until I heard the bedroom door click shut before I let myself move.I'd sat at that table for another twenty minutes after his lie, eating food I couldn't taste, smiling at the right moments, asking about the meeting he claimed had run late. He'd answered in monosyllables. He hadn't looked at me once.I don't know what you're talking about.I stood up, carried both plates to the sink, and set them down harder than I meant to. The clatter echoed through the empty kitchen, and I stood there with my hands braced on the counter, breathing.He'd seen her. I knew it the way I knew most things about Ethan Cross—not from anything he said, but from the shape of his silence. Three years of watching him from the edges of his marriage had taught me every tell. The way his jaw had locked when I said you saw her. The way he'd set his fork down like it had suddenly gotten too heavy.He'd seen Elena. And he'd lied about it.Which meant one of two things: either he was protecting her f

Part One"You went to the grove again."Camille didn't look up from the window. "I always go to the grove.""That's my point." Ethan stood in the doorway of her chambers, arms crossed. "Six years, Camille. Six years of kneeling in front of an altar while my pack falls apart around me.""Your pack." She turned then, and her smile was thin. "Our pack, Ethan. Or have you forgotten the rite?""I haven't forgotten anything.""Could've fooled me." She walked past him, toward the corridor, and he caught her arm."Where's Jasmine?""With the nurse. Where she always is." Camille pulled free. "You'd know that if you ever looked at her."The words landed. Ethan's jaw tightened."I look at her.""You look past her." Camille's voice stayed level, but something underneath it had teeth. "She's six years old, Ethan. She asked me last week why her father never comes to her lessons. What was I supposed to tell her? That he's too busy being disappointed she wasn't born with a—""Don't.""—a cock? Is tha

It happened on a Sunday.Dorothy had closed the shop early, and Felix had gone to the market for her, and it was just the two of us at the kitchen table with plates of toast and the morning light coming through the window."Mom," Remah said, "who's my father?"I stopped chewing.I'd known the question was coming. I'd known it for six years, the way you know a storm is coming when the air changes. But knowing didn't make it easier when it finally landed."Why do you ask?" I said, stalling."Because everyone has one." He said it like it was obvious. "Dorothy has one. Felix had one. The kids at school talk about theirs. So where's mine?"I set my toast down. "Remah—""I'm not a baby." He sat up straighter. "I'm six. I can know things."Six going on forty, this child. I took a breath."You don't have a father," I said. "Not one who's here. I had you alone, Remah. Just me. That's the truth."He looked at me for a long moment, and his eyes were far too sharp."That's not possible," he said.

Ethan didn't go home.He walked. For hours. Through the city, past shops and houses and people who didn't know his name, and he thought about the woman in the alley and the boy with her eyes and the son he'd never known he had.I've already buried one.The words wouldn't leave him.He found himself at the edge of the city, where the buildings thinned and the trees started, and he sat down on a low stone wall and put his head in his hands.Six years. Six years of telling himself he'd done the right thing, that Elena had never loved him, that the bond had been an arrangement and nothing more. Six years of Camille in his bed and Jasmine in the nursery and the pack whispering behind his back.And all that time, Elena had been here. Alone. Carrying his child.Carrying two of his children.He stood up. Started walking again. Didn't know where he was going until he was standing outside the pack house, and then he was inside, and then he was in the corridor outside Camille's chambers.She was

Camille hadn't meant to follow Jasmine.She'd meant to go to the grove—to kneel one more time, to beg one more time, to try one more time to make the goddess give her what she'd paid for. But she'd seen Jasmine slip out the back door, quiet as always, and something in her had followed.And now she was standing at the end of the street, watching her daughter sit on a kerb with a boy she didn't recognize.A boy with dark hair and gray eyes.A boy who looked like Ethan."Jasmine," Camille said.Jasmine looked up. Her face went pale."Mom—""Come here."Jasmine stood. The boy stood too, protective, his small body angled between them."It's okay," Jasmine said to him. "I'll see you tomorrow.""Are you sure?""I'm sure."The boy looked at Camille. Camille looked at the boy. And something in her chest went cold."Who are you?" she asked."Remah.""Remah who?"He didn't answer. And that silence told her everything.Camille walked Jasmine home without a word. Jasmine kept her eyes on the pavem