“She’s crowning,” Dr. Alberto said. “One more push.”
“Okay,” Cail said. “This is it. Let’s meet our daughter. Push, sweetheart.”
A burst of pain still broke through before sweet, blessed relief as their baby’s cry filled the room. Elain collapsed back onto the bed, Cail taking over her left hand while Ain went to cut the cord. She also finally realized Brodey had been filming it with Elain’s cell phone. She hadn’t even thought about that in the rush to just get there.
“Please tell me you didn’t get a shot of my wookie on video, Brod.”
He leaned in to kiss her. “No, babe. I was careful.”
“Is she okay?” Elain asked.
“She’s gorgeous,” Ain said. “Looks just like you.”
Cail and Brodey were fussing over Elain while Ain was fussing over their daughter. A moment later, he had her in his arms, bringing her over and gently laying her on Elain’s chest.
Emotions flowed through her, unchecked, as she held her baby for the first time.
I wonder if this is how Maureen felt.
No, it couldn’t have been. Maureen had been mourning her mate’s absence and knowing she wouldn’t live long if they weren’t reunited. Elain had all three of her mates there.
Ain leaned in, his forehead touching Elain’s, his gaze boring deep into hers. “I love you so much. You have no idea how happy you’ve made us. Our family just got bigger again.”
Elain lost track of time. Between her men and the med staff, they got her and the baby cleaned up, and their family and friends started arriving.
None of her three men wanted to leave her side for a moment.
And Elain realized there was one thing they hadn’t done yet. One thing not settled.
As the baby nursed, Elain met Ain’s gaze. “I think I decided on her name, but it has to be okay with you three.”
Ain stroked her hair. “As long as it’s not Stabby McFluffykins—”
“Hey,” Brodey griped. “I think I’ve proven myself to be a reliable dad.”
“Ellie Sulwen Lyall.”
Her three men froze. For a moment, Elain worried that maybe she’d made a horrible, terrible choice.
Ain leaned in again, tears in his eyes. “That’s beautiful.”
Brodey had also teared up. “Perfect.” He leaned in to kiss her.
She looked up at Cail. He was smiling and wiping tears away, too. “Absolutely.” He leaned in for his kiss.
* * * *
Elain’s mom and dad brought in Connor and Joss. Cail took Connor and carried him over to the bed. Elain barely remembered to check that her mental shield around her thoughts was securely in place.
Approximately ten weeks older than his little sister, Connor was, compared to Ellie, an absolute moose.
A handsome, miracle of a moose who would, Goddess willing, never know how damned special he was.
That an ancient being close to a goddess gave up her powers and immortality to save his life.
“Hey, buddy,” she said.
His blue eyes opened and he looked at her.
He was her son. Their son.
She loved him.
She would give her life for him.
And she could never let her mates know the truth about him.
Ever.
Ain had let Elain change his memory of the events to protect Connor. The three men she’d live and die for, the three men who’d waited over two hundred years to find her, their One, was the one woman who had to keep this secret from them.
Oh, and she couldn’t let Lina and Mai know about Connor, either.
Gigi knew, but she wouldn’t tell. No one could make her tell, and neither Baba Yaga nor Callie could read her mind. Ryan knew, but he was apparently immune to Baba Yaga reading his mind. And she still didn’t know for sure if Baba Yaga knew the truth about Connor because she’d engineered things to go down that way, or if Elain still needed to keep that a secret from Baba Yaga, anyway.
“Hey, what’s wrong, babe?” Brodey asked, frowning as he stared at her.
“Just tired and emotional.” At least she didn’t have to loophole her way around that statement.
Of course it’d be her sweet bonehead who would sense the direction of her thoughts, if not their actual content.
“Of course she is,” her mom said. “She just gave birth. We’ll go wait outside and give you some time alone.”
“When can we go home?” Elain asked Ain once they were alone again, just the six of them, counting their two babies.
“Tomorrow morning,” Ain said. “And this time, we’ll do it the traditional way, if you don’t mind. With me actually driving the vehicle and all of us inside it. Call me old-fashioned, but that unnerved me.”
Elain felt her face redden.
Cail cleared his throat and arched an eyebrow at her, the noise getting Connor’s attention and making him look up into Cail’s face. Brodey tossed her a knowing smirk she might have normally considered sexy had she not just given birth.
“Okay, I realized a little while ago I could do that,” she admitted, loopholing herself around the time-frame. “After what happened in Maine. I told Callie, because I was hoping Mai could do it after what happened by getting Callie’s powers. Then Mai finally did it this morning, and I just…I panicked when the baby was coming. I knew we wouldn’t make it all the way to the hospital in time if we drove.”
She felt the tears coming and couldn’t stop them. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you guys I could do it. I didn’t want to give birth at home or on the side of a road, and I knew we wouldn’t make it. And I wanted you guys here.”
She felt even worse when her men crowded close, trying to comfort her.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Ain said. “I didn’t mean to come off sounding—”
She squeezed his hand. “No. It’s okay. I should have told you guys I could do it. I’m just…overwhelmed.”
I’m really beginning to hate that freaking word.
Brodey knelt so he could look her in the eyes. “Sweetheart,” he softly said. “I saw what you and Lina and Mai did to that meth house. We can accept anything you can do. We love you. We know Lina’s able to do that. Well, sort of able to do it. We knew that Callie and Gigi and Baba Yaga have powers. We figured your powers would grow. This wasn’t exactly unexpected.”
“I just wanted Mai to be able to do something first,” she tearfully whispered. “To have something.”
Brodey started to say something, but Ain interrupted him. “You can’t tell her no more secrets from us,” Ain said.
“Like hell I can’t.”
“That’s not how this works,” Ain quietly said. “And you know it.”
Brodey rolled his eyes. “I don’t mean Seer stuff—”
“This is Seer stuff,” Ain said, meeting his gaze.
Brodey finally looked down. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” he mumbled.
“None of us do,” Cail said, reaching out to stroke Ellie’s head with his free hand.
“I didn’t sign up for this,” Brodey said, anger suddenly darkening his tone. “She didn’t sign up for this. Why can’t they pick someone else?”
Elain’s heart wanted to rip itself to pieces as tears formed in Brodey’s eyes, rolling down his cheeks. “Everything we’ve been through. Everything we’ve survived. Everything she’s been through. Don’t we all deserve a fucking break? I just want to be a dad and I want her to be a mom. Raise our kids and love each other like a normal family.”
She reached out and stroked his cheek, feeling the rage building in him, similar to how she’d felt it in Fiona and Ortega.
It would eat him alive from the inside out if she didn’t figure out how to stop it, how to turn it.
Elain took a deep breath, trying to pull together her own strength. “Brodey, please,” she said. “You have to accept this.”
He covered her hand with his. “Why? We know Baba Yaga put plans into play. Why can’t we demand she take us out
of them? Refuse to participate? I can’t speak for Lina and the gang and what they want to do, but we’re parents now. Twice. And I don’t want our kids growing up in all of this. Whatever the hell this is.”
He closed his eyes, leaning into her touch, his tears falling to the sheet covering her.
She met Cail’s brown gaze first, then Ain’s grey eyes stared into hers.
“Talk to him, sweetheart,” Ain silently told her through their mate bond, knowing Brodey couldn’t hear.
She nodded, then watched as Ain said something silently to Cail, who nodded.
“I think this guy needs a fresh diaper,” Cail said. “Want to come help me, Ain? We’ll update everyone out in the waiting room.”
“I’m not a fricking baby,” Brodey groused. “If you want to give us alone time, just say so.”
Ain and Cail each kissed Elain before walking out, closing the door behind them.
Elain carefully slid over to her left, making room in the bed and trying not to disturb Ellie. She patted the mattress on her right side and Brodey crawled onto it with her.
She curled an arm around his head, holding him against her shoulder. Pressing her lips against his forehead, she, nuzzled the top of his head. “We need to talk.”
“I don’t want to talk.” He reached across her and stroked Ellie’s hand, the baby’s fingers closing around his. “I want to be a dad. I want to be your mate. I want to take care of both of you. All three of you.”
Elain closed her eyes and sent out a mental feeler, trying not to recoil from his pain, bracing herself against the mental impact, which reached far deeper than she first imagined.
His sisters. His parents. Other brothers they’d lost.
Letting Kimberlie go because she wasn’t their One, the One for all three of them.
“I know you went to Bolivia before,” he whispered. “I wasn’t trying to spy. I saw the luggage tag when I was emptying the garbage. It was an accident. It kills me that maybe you’re going to be somewhere or doing something, and I might not be there to protect you or them. That something might one day happen to you and you just disappear and never come home because we have no clue where you are or how to find you.”
She hugged him tighter, exploring, using her gut instincts to send out her energy, her love for him, to meet and turn that growing darkness and rage inside him, to diffuse it.
Absorb it.
After a few minutes, he took a deep breath. “What are you doing, babe?” he softly asked.
“What?”
“I feel it. I feel you doing something.” He looked up at her.
“I love you, Brod. You have to accept this and you have to trust me. Life isn’t perfect. Yeah, I wish this was all different. But think of the good I can do.” She wished she could tell him about Connor, about one miracle she’d already managed.
About how they could change the world one child at a time.
Turn the darkness back one child at a time.
Connor. Fiona. Colleen.
BettLynn.
“I can’t lose you,” he said, his tone shredding her soul. “Any of you. It’ll kill me.”
She felt it turning lighter, though. His energy. “I think we’re going to be around for a long, long time,” she said. “Maybe even to the point where we’re going to one day be looking for a way out.”
He shook his head. “Never. Eternity with you still wouldn’t be long enough.”
Elain thought about Bertholde, about Baba Yaga.
About Gigi and what she said after passing her powers to Elain through occluding Connor.
She pressed another kiss to his forehead. “Don’t be so sure about that, sweetie. Eternity is a long damn time.”
Chapter Nine
Ellie turned out to be a healthy, perfectly normal baby, with perfectly normal and healthy vital signs and test results.
As far as wolf shifter babies went.
“I couldn’t have asked to witness an easier, more textbook delivery than that,” Dr. Alberto had told Elain and her men that evening before she’d left the hospital for the night. “Other than the…unexpectedly quick arrival of the parents. I expect everything with her to be absolutely normal.”
She gave them a knowing wink since the nurse currently making rounds with her was a clueless human.
“Thank you, doctor,” Ain said.
“Don’t thank me.” The cougar shifter physician smiled. “Elain did all the hard work. I just played catcher.”
Late that night, while the men were seated around her bed, Ellie in her arms and nursing, Elain decided to let go of one secret.
She focused on Brodey and Cail, who she could feel were desperately in love as fathers with Ellie.
“I have another confession to make,” she said.
“What?” they echoed.
She glanced at Ain, who nodded, offering her an encouraging smile.
“I know who Ellie was in her past life.”
The two men’s focus swung from their daughter to Elain. “Who?” they asked.
“She was Mercedes. Mercedes died the same afternoon not long before Ellie was conceived.”
Brodey reached out and stroked the baby’s fine, downy hair. “Okay,” he softly said.
Cail had a finger in the baby’s hand, her tiny digits wrapped around his. “Okay.”
“You’re really okay with this?”
Brodey shot a glare at Ain. “How long have you known?”
“I asked him to let me tell you,” Elain said. “I wanted to make sure, after she was born. I didn’t want to say anything just to find out I was wrong.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“It doesn’t bother you Mercedes was Rodolfo’s daughter?”
Cail snorted. “She saved Jim’s life and died fighting cockatrice.” He scowled. “Unless you know something bad about her that we don’t?”
“No. She had a good soul. But I kind of want to keep this quiet for now, if that’s okay.”
Brodey’s glare had softened. “But she’s not Mercedes anymore. She’s our daughter.”
“Exactly.”
“Have you ever tried to see who we all were before?”
“No. I’m not sure I’m ready to know that yet.”
“I’m fine with it,” Cail said. “Give her a better chance this time around. She’s our daughter, and I love her. She’s just a baby. Her past is in the past.”
“Me, too,” Brodey said.
Elain and Ellie were discharged the next morning. Her men had spent the night there in the maternity suite with Elain and the baby, refusing to leave them, while Elain’s mom and dad took Connor home with them.
Elain’s whole body hurt, but she refused painkillers, even ones they assured her were safe to take while breastfeeding.
She was a fricking wolf shifter, for crying out loud. If she couldn’t tough out a little postpartum pain when she had Immortal power coursing through her veins, then she wasn’t worthy of the damn title.
Especially when she suspected there might be times in the future she’d be dealing with a lot more pain than that. Best to build her tolerance now.
And being in pain would give her a ready-made, loophole-free excuse if she snapped at Brighton.
Elain and Brodey rode in the backseat on the way home, flanking Ellie’s car seat on either side, holding hands across the top of her. Ain and Cail had spoken to Elain before leaving the hospital, while Brodey was out finding them coffee, about Brodey’s state of mind.
Elain was still concerned about him, but hoped that once they settled into what might pass for a crazy-assed routine with them, Brodey would be able to relax and regain his laid-back attitude.
It figured that her bonehead, the one most in tune with his Alpha wolf, would be the one to freak out the hardest. Delayed reaction to everything they’d been through, no doubt, and a naturally protective instinct that was part of what made him a fantastic mate and an even better father.
She just had to ease him through this.
&
nbsp; Brodey had built up in his mind a fantasy of what their future would be like once she’d joined them as their mate, and it had quickly been razed to the ground, burned, and the scorched earth salted beneath it as all the other crazy stuff emerged about her lineage and her future calling. They couldn’t have some television-show-perfect sitcom family with nothing more serious to worry about than a hurricane hurting their cattle.
And Elain had far more dangerous things to worry about than getting run over in the grocery store by a runaway cart. She’d have to be a warrior, and get Brodey over the fact that just because she was a mom now didn’t mean she could opt out of the process.
They’d all have to fight damned hard if they were going to make a happily-ever-after future come to pass for all of them.
Otherwise, Lina and Mai’s nuclear bomb visions might be what greeted them, and Elain didn’t even want to contemplate that horrific what-if.
Unfortunately, she knew the bulk of that battle would lie upon her shoulders. She felt it, instinctively, that she would be the one to lead the charge much the way Lina’s previous incarnation led troops into the Battle of Hilmelgamos. The form, time, and location of that battle, however, remained to be revealed to any of them.
Once they were safely home in Arcadia later that morning, Elain thought she might get some sleep. Then came what felt like an endless procession of local friends, most of them shifters or at least shifter-aware, some of them not.
At least Brighton had made himself scarce upon their return, and after giving them what Elain suspected were more obligatory well-wishes on his part than a genuine expression of uncle-ly love.
By five o’clock that afternoon, Elain had hit her limit and retreated to the master bedroom with Ellie. The men had already set up a bassinet in there, so Elain wouldn’t have to get up and go all the way to the nursery for now. Their idea, not hers. She was fine with putting Ellie in the same nursery with Connor, but her men…
They loved Connor. That was obvious. They doted on him and cherished him. But Ellie was a newborn, and while Elain might only be breastfeeding her for a couple of months or less before Elain was ready to switch her to a bottle due to sharp little shifter baby teeth, her men didn’t want to miss a second of anything.
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