Page 23 of The Alpha's Heir

“Tell us what?” My angry reply reverberates around the room. Has she taken another lover and moved again to pastures new? Where the hell is she?

“Aiden, Amber. Please join me at the table. We have a lot to discuss.”

He directs us to an old stone table where there are already two boxes set out.

“I didn’t realise. I thought you knew. I thought you were here to find out more about her. I told your father, but I am not surprised now, after everything he did, that he didn’t tell you.” As we sit, I get a better look at my mother's other mate. He’s handsome, I’ll give her that.

“Please, just tell us, Alpha Laird Rory. Where is our mother?”

“I’m so sorry, truly I am. She’s dead. She died the year after she left you.”

I’ve never had an outer body experience, but I have shifted and allowed Lizzie to have control and right now that’s how I feel, except Lizzie doesn’t have control either. Neither of us are in control.

My mother is dead. After all this time, she isn’t even alive. She wasn’t alive all this time. I thought she was rejecting me and evading me and ignoring me. All the times I cursed her for not loving me, or coming back for me or for not sending me a note, she was dead and gone.

My brother's voice penetrates my shocked haze. “Dead? How?” I can tell from his voice he is holding on to his emotions tightly. He sounds like he is straining to talk.

“Aidy.” I can’t keep the sob out of my voice as I reach out to my big brother, the only other person in the universe who understands the devastation I feel right now. Why?

“It's okay, Amber, I’ve got you,” he assures me before turning back to the Alpha Laird. “How could you take another man's mate, take a woman away from her children, leave little pups with a no-good father and no bloody mother?”

“She wasn’t your father's mate. She had one fated mate and that was me. She was nothing more than a plaything to your father. Sure, he made her Luna when she fell pregnant with you, Aiden, but she was never his to keep. Not that he wanted to keep her, he just didn’t want anyone else to want her.”

This is the first time Alpha Laird Rory has lost his composure in front of us and it stuns us into silence as he continues to tell us his tale.

“We found each other quite by accident. I was visiting the English Alphas as part of my training when a little redheaded pup ran past me heading for the riverbank and I caught her just before she jumped. Her mother was so relieved, and then the scent hit me. Her mother was my mate. I couldn’t believe it. The mate of the Alpha I was visiting was my mate too. That was enough of a shock, and then I uncovered the truth.”

He can’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. “He didn’t even mark her. She was nothing to him, and because she hadn’t been claimed, our bond just grew and grew. I was prepared to go to war for your mother, but she wanted to keep things amicable. She wanted you to have both your parents and so we approached Alpha John and explained the situation.”

Anger apparent in his expression, Rory doesn’t stop. Maybe now that he’s started, he can’t stop. “He was furious at first, demanding to know if we had embarked on an affair, but I assured him that we hadn’t, that I couldn’t. To mess with the mate of an Alpha is punishable by death. But now I knew they weren’t mates, fated or chosen, she was mine to claim.”

Rory pauses to drink from a goblet before carrying on with his recollection. “We came to an agreement. Your mother and I could have shared custody of the two of you if we left quietly. That night, I received word that my father had been hurt in a hunting accident and I had to return immediately to my own territory.”

His expression turns darker as he explains more. “Your mother obviously wanted to wait behind with you two, she wanted to have everything in place before she left the territory, so I left her behind thinking she would be safe with her pack. No-one knew she had found her mate and was leaving to be with him. We had no reason to suspect anything.”

He pauses to look at us; I am visibly upset, and Aiden is shaking with pent-up anger. “I know this is a lot to take in but it's important that you know she loved you and being separated from you both killed her. Your father's wickedness killed her because if he couldn’t have her, he didn’t want anyone else to either.”

Replacing the goblet on the table, he stands and walks to the open hearth before turning back to us. “By the time I had arrived at my territory and realised my father was fit and well, there had been no accident and it was all a ruse to get me away from your mother, I knew something bad was going to happen. I thought your father would have you all killed or that he would hide you away.”

Tears fill his eyes. “I found my Coral broken on the road with just a thin dress on despite it raining heavily. He had banished her and told her if she ever returned, he would behead you both. He had mutilated her, thoroughly abused her and sent her on her way without so much as a coat.”

I gasp in horror. How could that bastard do that?

“The bonds that tie us together are sacred. The bonds between a parent and their children are almost unbreakable. It is one of the most powerful phenomena known to our kind. The bond presides over all other bonds and… the only way I can explain is, if you ever see a fated mate couple reject each other, it is immensely painful and can destroy them. The broken bond between a parent and child acts like cancer, a disease, and slowly kills the parent.”

I struggle to understand his lesson. There is so much to take in and I am still reeling from the fact that my mother is dead. “I accepted you both the moment I found out about you so that my bond with your mother was secure. I never had an issue accepting you because I knew you both had a claim on Onyx River, with you being John’s heir, Aiden. I loved your mother and wanted her to be happy. Me accepting you both made her happy.”

He’s starting to reach an important point, I can feel it. I sit at the edge of my seat and Aiden leans forward too. “However, your father banishing her and breaking the bond between you was enough to kill your mother. I tried my best to save her, but I couldn’t. My love and our bond would never have been enough to heal her broken heart and soul.”

Alpha Laird Rory stops for a moment when his voice breaks but quickly continues on. “She loved you both so, so much. You were everything to her. She would cry and talk about the times she had been cold towards you both because deep down she always knew John would use you to hurt her. She worried nonstop about who was caring for you both, who was loving you and if you would ever forgive her for not being strong enough to fight your father.”

We all have tears in our eyes; this is not the outcome I expected or wanted. It was something I had never even contemplated. All this time, I thought she simply didn’t love us and that we weren’t good enough for her. However, tragically, us being torn away from her caused her heart to break and it killed her.

My father. Even up until a few days ago, he tried to blame her, he tried to cover up what he had done.

As soon as I have my knives back and we return to the Onyx River, I will allow Aiden to remove his throat before I chop his fucking head off and mount it on a big stick. He killed my mother. He murdered her.

I will make him pay.

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