by Sadie Moss
“Hey, Molly, what’s up?”
“Alexis.” Her voice was hoarse and strangled, and she didn’t say anything beyond that one word.
My heart jump-started in my chest, thudding out a painful beat as my grip on the phone tightened. “What? What is it?”
I heard her drag in a breath, and when she spoke, her words were halting. “I’m… I’m with Sariah. We’re at the north pack; we came to check on Annabel. She was having some cramping and wanted to see if there was anything we could do.”
“Okay.”
My brows drew together, and I shot a glance back to my mates, who were still gathered on the porch. Noah caught my eye with a concerned look.
“We started examining her and I… I don’t know, something just seemed off. All the symptoms only added up to one thing. So we got her to take a test, and—she’s pregnant.”
The world stopped.
My heart lurched.
The phone slipped out of my hands, and I bent down, scrabbling in the grass to retrieve it before practically yelling into the receiver, “Did you have her take more than one? Five! Or more? Just to be sure?”
“Alexis, she took seven of them. She’s pregnant. I’m positive.”
I almost dropped the phone again, but I tightened my grip, clinging to it with numb fingers. “H—how?”
There was a shuffling sound, and then Sariah’s voice came through the speaker. “We don’t really know. But my guess—and this is just a theory, we’ll have to do more tests to see if we can find out for sure—but my guess is it’s because of the Source.”
My legs folded like pieces of wet string, and I sank onto the grass, resting my elbows on my knees as I dipped my head, trying not to pass out. “What do you mean?”
“Annabel was down there with us. In that cave. We all breathed the air down there, and I could tell, even then, that something was strange about it. When we fought Doctor Shepherd by the pool, we all got splattered with it. Not a lot—not enough to turn us into what he became. But it must’ve been enough. It pushed our DNA that last step, changed us just a little more.”
I couldn’t breathe. The grass between my legs was nothing but a green blur as tears gathered in my eyes.
“That’s our theory, anyway.” Sariah laughed softly, sounding almost as dazed as I felt. “We’ll try to confirm it, but honestly? I don’t know if it matters.” There was a quaver in her voice, and I knew she was crying too. “We can have children. All of us who were there. Your baby won’t be alone, Lexi.”
Molly came back on the line and told me she would come over to our house later to talk about it more. Excitement and joy resonated in her voice, and I sent up a silent prayer of gratitude to whatever god of luck or fate had brought her into my life.
By the time I hung up, all my mates were gathered around me, having figured out something strange was going on. I couldn’t even speak, couldn’t even find the words to tell them yet, but they just wrapped their arms around me and held me as deep, wracking sobs shook my body.
On the soft grass, in the bright sunshine, surrounded by the four men I loved most in the world, I purged myself of all the grief I had been carrying with me, a sadness deeper and broader than I’d realized.
With each sob, each tear, I let a piece of it go.
And in the space it had taken up, I made room for something better.
Epilogue
Two Years Later
“Ba ba! Ba baba!”
A wet glob of mashed sweet potato sailed through the air, landing on my nose.
The conversation around the table didn’t even pause—everyone here was used to my daughter’s antics and didn’t think less of a shifter alpha with mashed up vegetable on her face.
“Wrong mouth, sweet pea.” I chuckled, wiping the sweet potato off with a finger. “That’s supposed to go in your belly, not mine. Plus, you missed.”
“Her aim’s getting pretty good though,” West joked, turning away from his conversation with Molly and Elijah to wipe off a spot on my cheek. “Before you know it, she’ll be feeding you.”
I pulled a face. Her dinner definitely looked less appetizing than mine. She could pack away food just like her momma could—much to Jackson’s delight—but I preferred the burgers, steaks, and other goodies whipped up by my men to mushy sweet potatoes, thanks.
My mates and I had named our daughter Sophia Marie, after Jackson’s mom and Noah’s grandmother, and the day she was born, my heart had seemed to double in size. I swore she was the most perfect thing I’d ever seen.
Sophia was a true wolf shifter baby. The first one ever, as far as we knew, which meant we often found ourselves in uncharted territory. She had shifted for the first time just after she turned one year old, and it had scared the hell out of her. It’d scared the hell out of me too, and it’d been awful watching my little baby girl cry and howl in pain like that.
But her body knew what to do, even if her parents didn’t. She’d shifted back from a wolf cub to a human baby a few hours later, and thankfully, she adjusted to the shifts much faster than I had. By the third or fourth time she did it, the pain hardly seemed to bother her. Molly and Sariah theorized it was because she was a natural-born shifter, which meant her DNA wasn’t fighting it the same way all of ours had.
West rested a hand on my knee, squeezing gently, before blowing kisses to Sophia, who giggled and waved her hands, sending more chunks of sweet potato flying. Val casually picked one out of her hair while she talked intently with Rhys, Carl, and Noah. She leaned over the table toward them but left one hand resting on the back of Addison’s chair.
Addison—her daughter.
A little over a year after we’d settled into our new communities outside Salt Lake, Val had come to visit me, looking more uncertain than I’d ever seen her before. She’d told me she’d been doing some research and had located her sister and daughter, and she’d asked for permission to contact them. We’d talked it through with my mates, Elijah, and the Elders, and everyone had ultimately agreed.
It’d been a risk. What if her sister or daughter couldn’t handle the truth? What if they saw her shift and freaked out? Went to the authorities?
But after everything Strand had taken from us, I couldn’t deny Val the chance to reunite with her family. So many of us would never have that opportunity; I refused to make those who did have living family members choose between the pack and their loved ones.
And, fortunately, it’d gone better than we could’ve hoped for. Addison and Val’s sister, Kim, had been shocked and elated to learn she was still alive. Finding out she was a shifter was an even bigger shock, but they’d moved past it relatively quickly. It helped that by that time, stories of Strand’s other shady experiments had spread far and wide, so our explanation of the Shifter Initiative fit with what they already knew about the company. They’d both eventually moved here to be closer to Val, and a few other pack members with living relatives had reached out to their families as well.
West squeezed my knee again, and when I looked up, his gaze darted subtly to his left. I tracked the gesture and saw Sariah and Aaron sitting close together at the far end of the table, speaking in low, intimate voices as if they weren’t surrounded by nearly a dozen other people. Something he said made her smile and duck her head, and when she looked up at him through her lashes, a faint blush tinged her cheeks.
“Oh, boy…” I murmured, shaking my head even as I grinned.
Those two had been dancing around each other for months. I knew Sariah cared about him, and it was obvious to anyone with eyes that he was head over heels for her. Having mate bonded to four men, I recognized the symptoms, but the walls she’d built around herself to help her cope with life at Strand had taken some time to come down.
Aaron had never pushed, which was a big part of why I trusted him with her heart now. Her older brother, though? I wasn’t sure he’d ever trust anyone with it.
“I’ll help you handle Rhys.” Reading my thoughts, West leaned down
to nuzzle my hair and press a kiss to my neck. “He’ll come around. Shit, he knows better than anyone what a mate bond means. It saved his life. It saved all our lives.”
I chuckled, leaning into his touch. “I don’t know if it saved him—”
He lifted his head, kissing my lips to cut off my words. When he pulled away, his chocolate brown eyes were warm. “Saved. Definitely saved.”
A dazed smile tilted my lips, which still tingled from his kiss. Maybe he was right; I certainly felt like he and his pack mates had saved my life.
Sophia slapped her hands against the messy blobs of sweet potato dotting her high chair tray. On her other side, Jackson picked up the small plastic spoon, howling softly as he airlifted a bite from the bowl toward her waiting mouth.
She swallowed it down happily as the buzz of conversation continued around us, and my mate’s amber gaze lifted to mine.
A memory floated through my mind—of the two of us curled up together on a rock under the moonlight, our naked bodies sharing warmth as we talked in low voices. For a few hours that night near the base in Montana, in the midst of chaos and uncertainty, we had imagined our future, told stories of the life we wished for.
It had felt decadent and indulgent then, to speak our wildest dreams out loud. But as I glanced around the table again, I realized how far we’d undershot the target.
As big as our dreams had seemed, the reality was even better.
A soft cry sounded from the room next to ours, and all five of us stirred sleepily.
“I’ll go, I’ll go.”
Rhys went from groggy to alert in the space of those four words, and he slipped out of bed, pulling on a pair of gray sweats.
“I’ll go with you.”
West yawned and leaned over to kiss me before crawling over Jackson to slide out of bed too.
They left the room together, bare shoulders brushing together, hands joined, as they went to comfort our daughter. A few moments later, her cries stopped, turning into soft giggles and coos.
I gazed up at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of their baritone murmurs mingling with her sweet little voice.
“What are you thinking about, Scrubs?” Noah’s gray-blue eyes found mine in the dim light, and he reached up to brush a lock of hair from my cheek.
I turned my head toward him, resting my ear on the pillow as a smile stole over my face. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Just… listening.”
His gaze grew unfocused as he perked his ears, and one corner of his mouth tilted up as he heard what I had. “It’s nice, isn’t it? Peaceful.”
“Yeah. That’s a good word for it,” I whispered, sighing contentedly.
He leaned forward to kiss me, his lips brushing against mine in a soft, unhurried manner. When my fingertips trailed over the bare skin of his chest and along his sculpted obliques, he rolled toward me, slipping between my legs and settling his body over mine.
“Sophia is the best present you could’ve given any of us, Scrubs,” he murmured, dropping his head to kiss me again. “She’s gorgeous. Just like her mommy.”
And smart, just like her daddies. Brave like them too.
My mates and I hadn’t wasted a single minute debating who her biological father was. As far as any of us were concerned, it didn’t matter one bit—she had four men who worshipped her, who would do anything to protect her, and that was what counted.
Noah kissed me again, slow and easy, as we breathed in each other’s air. His stiffening cock nudged my entrance, pressing slowly inside as he kissed every inch of my face, neck, and jaw.
His lips landed near my ear, and his whispered words brought a smile to my face.
“I think we should try for a boy next.”
When he slid all the way into me, I opened to him, my body wrapping around his as my legs hooked around his waist. Still half asleep, Jackson reached a hand out toward me, skimming the bare skin of my side as he moved closer.
A slow, powerful wave of pleasure washed over me as Noah moved inside me, heat radiating from my core and working its way outward.
He pulled back from our kiss, framing my face with his hands and gazing down at me as we rocked together.
When I looked into his eyes, I saw it.
The same thing I felt with each of my mates every time I looked at them. The thing I’d been missing for so much of my life and now would never be without.
The thing I would die for.
The thing I lived for.
My home.
THANK YOU FOR READING!
I absolutely loved writing this story, and I hope you loved reading it just as much! If you did, please leave a review (even a sentence or two makes such a huge difference).
This is the final book in The Last Shifter series, but don’t worry, I’ve got plenty more books in store! Be sure to check out my next series, Academy of Unpredictable Magic.
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Also by Sadie Moss
Magic Awakened
Kissed by Shadows (prequel novella)
Bound by Magic
Game of Lies
Consort of Rebels
The Vampires’ Fae
Saved by Blood
Seduced by Blood
Ruined by Blood
The Last Shifter
Wolf Hunted
Wolf Called
Wolf Claimed
Wolf Freed
Academy of Unpredictable Magic
Spark
Trials
Thief