Page 183 of Claimed

My father’s face. He’s younger. No lines around his eyes. No gray around his temples. He’s smiling. Reaching. Emotions well up in me that I know come from this woman’s memories. Memories of warmth, love, connection. Longing. I see my face when I was an infant. Giggling. Happy. Warmth within my father’s embrace because he’s holding her with one arm, me in the other. A unit. The feel of the strong bond shatters as color drains from my infant face, as that small face morphs from giggling to gasping for breath with lips turning blue, eyes morphing between brown and silver while the baby cries a blood curdling cry that weakens until it’s faint whimpering. Everything around the images shatter and splinter into curling and melting shards of blood-slicked glass and pain. So much pain. Aching, throbbing agony. Grief. The most immense grief-stricken and agonized screaming fills my mind while everything in the visage shrivels to floating flakes of ash.

Her voice cuts through the distorted images, which continue to strobe in my field of vision.

“I couldn’t stop,” she whimpers. “I couldn’t stop and I’m so, so sorry. It was like a drug. A drug that felt so, so damn good,but it got me into a stranglehold until it was all I wanted. All I thirsted for. And eventually all I had because it took your father’s love. It took motherhood away. I never got to watch you grow. I never got to be the object of your adoration. Even as a newborn you cried so much when it was just us two. A happy baby when it was us three but when it was us two? It’s like you knew I didn’t know how to be your mother. You only felt safe with him.” She sniffles. “The pain at realizing what I was doing, Greyson? Leaching from you… because I felt it growing day by day and it called to me. Called to be taken and that’s what I did. I kept taking and taking and taking until you were barely with us. I almost took all your light in order to leach your bright, beautiful magic and feed the hungry mouth with the gnashing teeth, the darkness in me. And all your magic wanted to infuse with mine. And he despised me. Your father? He despises me. My actions nearly cost him you. And they cost him me – the woman he adored. Because he couldn’t bear his emotions for me. They hurt too much. Because I wasn’t worthy. So he took himself away, you away, and shackled my magic, leaving me an aching void.”

This gut-wrenching pain I’m feeling of hers is wracking my body, rattling my bones. The agony she feels is acute.

Stacy shouts my name and I know it’s because my body is bucking, convulsing.

This woman has tormented herself over how she lost everything, how she ruined her family. In the hospital parking lot, Dad told me… wolf shifter blood mixed with witch blood is a potent combination.

She was practicing dark magic and she used it too, to keep my father blind to it while she played a part, much like the part an addict plays – lying to their loved ones about their addiction that they indulge in secret – only my father was so smitten with hisbride and so under her spell that he missed the signs until it was almost too late. I’d become so sickly that he could have lost me.

Her memories show me whimpering in my cradle while she rides my oblivious father’s knot.

Aunt Lyrica, Aunt Mimi’s older sister – she sensed something was amiss with her niece, showed up without an invitation and removed Dad’s blinders with her own magic, using a coven leader’s ability to veto Soleil’s spell on him. Dad immediately saw his mate for what she was. An addict who was forsaking their child for more power, leading him around by his dick and making it so he didn’t see what was happening directly under his nose.

I see the betrayal on Dad’s face, see the pain he was in as it brought him to his knees with my limp, whimpering, small body in his arms.

The trust was broken and he said he tried to forgive her, let her coven help her, but he caught her practicing dark magic again. He couldn’t trust her alone with me and said I’d do nothing but scream every time he left my presence, and he finally put a stop to it after she pleaded with him to not leave us alone together because she couldn’t stop.

Dad told me some of this in the hospital parking lot, the rest of it.. I see right now. What I got from him came out in a flurry because he knew I had to leave to find my mate, save her from her brother, but he spat it all out and I left with him doubled over in that parking lot, his hands clasping his knees, looking absolutely wrecked, looking like he was reliving it.

My father reported her to the SCC and they put her on trial. Lyrica used magic to sever the bond, as requested by my father and approved by the SCC. My father told the Young coven he wanted them to have nothing to do with me. They agreed toleave me be until I mated unless I came to them myself. They knew mating would show me who I am. Who I’m supposed to be.

“I love you both to this day,” she says to me, hauling me out of what feels like a prison in my head as I see and feel her memories. I grab her wrists and pry them off my face. But I don’t let go of them.

“What have you done to my mate?” I demand.

“I’m okay, Grey,” Stacy says. She’s standing up.

“Stay there,” I demand gutturally and see my mate freeze where she stands.

“Grey. What do you need?” Jase is in the space now.

“Where’s Meadows?” I demand.

“Secured. What do you need, brother?”

My eyes hit my mate and I need her safe so I pull and pull and she’s moving through the space, several inches off the ground.

She gasps and hollers my name, looking panicked, but I set her behind Jase. Jase has her now. I’ve set her behind him.

“What the fuck did you do to my mate?” I repeat, glaring at Soleil.

“I’m okay, Grey,” Stacy insists.

Soleil answers brokenly, “Your mate is unharmed. I’ll explain. She removed the necklace. The SCC sentenced me to a twenty-five-years to life ban with my coven head being able to lift it if they chose to. I contacted Aunt Lyrica at the twenty-five-year mark and she refused me. I knew Aunt Mimi would be the same when Aunt Lyrica died. I may be disconnected from my magic, but know you’re now the head of the coven. I know you were grantedmymagic. I hoped we would get acquainted.”

“And I’d lift the ban,” I surmise.

“Your mate is pregnant so carrying your blood, Young coven blood. I hoped it would work. It has. When I reached out to you on the phone I knew I couldn’t wait for you to come around, if you even would…” Her chin juts toward the silver chain on a table. “And now–”

“That necklace was put on you because you’re dangerous,” I state through gritted teeth. “You took this off her?” I ask my mate.

“I had to,” Stacy whispers.

“My fault,” Soleil admits. “I leveraged her maternal instincts and her love for you to my advantage. That necklace was worse than death, my son. I don’t want to live any longer without at least one of the two core pieces of me that were taken. My family. My magic.”

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