Scion (Norseton Wolves Book 4) (7 page)

Ashley suppressed a chuckle as she gathered up the pile of Uno cards.

“That was mean,” Ótama said with a pout.

“It was not mean.” Ashley tamped the cards into a tidy pile and shuffled them, grinning like an idiot, probably, and she didn’t care. The Afótama matriarch embodied so many contradictions, she made Ashley’s head spin. She was small, but powerful. Naïve, but tenacious when necessary. Sweet, but aggressive. Ashley couldn’t picture the tiny brunette making much of a Viking, but she swore that’s what she was—the only daughter of the chieftain Alfarinn, and probably the most dangerous witch in the country. Ashley was happy she was a wolf and wasn’t susceptible to the choking intensity of Ótama’s energy, even at its baseline. She’d heard from some of the folks in the mansion that it was incredibly humbling.

“Those are the rules of the game,” Ashley said. “Sometimes, your opponents get a bunch of really great cards, and their goal, obviously, is to use them to make
you
pick up a whole lot of cards to keep you in the game longer.”

“I never did like games of chance.”

“Yeah, this one definitely has the potential to raise your blood pressure. If you want to play something a little more cerebral, there’s always checkers. Or chess. I never learned to play chess, though, so I wouldn’t be much of an opponent for you.”

“Nor did I. Perhaps we could find the rules of the game in a book and learn together.”

“Or we could just Google them.” Ashley snapped a rubber band around the stack of cards and returned to the shelf used to store games in the Norseton mansion’s library.

“I find Google to be terribly distracting. I do not believe I wish to fall down that rabbit hole today. Only two days ago, I went to do a search for a recipe to give to Muriel and ended up on some purveyor of filth’s website.” She pressed her hand her heart and gave her head a solemn shake.

Ashley cringed and carefully extricated the checkers from the stack of game boxes. “Sorry about that. Eventually, you’ll develop a gut feeling for what’s not safe to click on. I imagine Internet porn would come as a shock to someone from your era.”

“
Pah
.” Ótama waved a dismissive hand and fixed her cloak around her. Beneath it, the ancient princess had on modern clothes, but the best Ashley could tell, she wore the old-fashioned cloak as a sort of security blanket. Fiddling with it seemed to give Ótama something to do with her hands. “The content did not disturb me. I am not as naive in some regards as you children insist on believing.”

Ashley pressed her lips together, praying the laugh she tried to tamp down didn’t find an exit route via her nose. Ótama looked to be around thirty, which might have been damn near elderly back in her day, and her habit of referring to people in Ashley’s generation as children amused Ashley and the rest of the staff way too much.

“What bothered me was the fact that they wished to receive money for it.” Ótama scoffed. “What could possibly be worth thirty American dollars?”

“Well, just between you and me, the premium stuff is unabridged, newer, and the clips have better sets and props than the stuff you get at the freebie sites.” Ashley set the checkers box on the table and lifted the lid. “Not that I’ve been looking.”

Ótama leaned in, holding her cloak closed at the neck, her bright eyes awash with mischief. “But is it worth thirty dollars? My descendants manage my funds. I do believe they would investigate such a charge on my credit card statement.”

Knowing Queen Tess and her cousin Nadia as Ashley did, she suspected they would
indeed
investigate the charge, if only to see if it were accidental. “That could potentially be awkward.”

“That is why I have you, is it not? You are supposed to teach me to be independent.”

“Okay, so here is one of the most important lessons I’ll ever give you—get a prepaid card and use that for unsavory Internet stuff.”

“Oh, you are a crafty one, Ashley.”

Ashley shrugged. “I kind of had to be, given the way I grew up.”

Ashley was having a better understanding of exactly how she’d grown up the longer she spent away from her birthpack. There’d been nothing normal about her upbringing, or about how much of her education about the world had been suppressed. She didn’t know how fucked up her life was until she’d had something to compare it to. The more she thought about it, the more depressed it made her.

Ótama chucked Ashley’s chin and clucked her tongue. “You are not one of mine, so I cannot read your mood, but I can tell from looking at you that something is bothering you.”

Ashley put on a smile and scooped checker pieces out of the open box. “Don’t worry about it. My mind’s just going places it shouldn’t.”

“I see.”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it. I’ll work it out.”
Somehow.

She’d spent the past month being so angry in general. At first, she was angry with Vic, then her parents, then herself. For a while, she was angry with
everyone
—just
generally
angry—and being so impotently mad was exhausting. Her uterine hitchhiker wasn’t helping matters any, either.

She hadn’t told anyone, but everyone would know soon enough. Mrs. Carbone had already figured it out. It had taken her one sniff. She’d probably known even before Ashley did. Ashley hadn’t been able to believe it. She kept taking tests, expecting one day she’d pee on one and it would tell her all the previous ones were just flukes. But that was unreasonable. The midwife was pretty sure that the kid was going to stick, but Ashley had to do her part to make sure that he or she did. She
wanted
that baby—she wanted one person to love her just as she was and not because she was some kind of pawn. She’d do anything to protect it, even going away if she had to. Although she was growing quite comfortable in Norseton and for once in her life felt productive in a genuinely useful way, she’d leave if she and Vic couldn’t see eye to eye. The baby was innocent of everything that had happened in the past. If he couldn’t get
that
through his thick skull, she’d do all she could to cut off his access.

And speak of the devil…

His energy lapped at her from across the room, seeking her out. She pushed down the standing hairs on her neck and shook off the chills.

“Hello, Mr. Carbone. Do I need to be somewhere soon?” Ótama asked him.

“Nah, your schedule is clear for the day,” Vic said. “Do you mind if I grab my wife for a few minutes?”

Ashley pinched the bridge of her nose.
Fuck.
The last thing they needed was a mansion full of people to potentially overhear them screaming at each other.

“It is fine with me if it is fine with her. I think I will visit the kitchen and see if your mother has brought me any new treats. She is working today, is she not?”

“She just left. Knowing Mom, though, she probably put enough leftovers into the fridge to keep you going back all night.”

“Splendid.” Ótama gave Ashley a nod of farewell, pulled her cloak around her, and padded to the hall.

Still, Ashley didn’t turn.

It didn’t matter. Even if she hadn’t been able to hear the falls of his booted feet, she would have felt his approach. His energy lapped at her and sought her out as if she were some
thing
that belonged to him and he demanded back.

He pulled out the seat Ótama had vacated and slid a couple of clear vials across the table.

She looked from the drugs to him, and read the sheepishness on his expression. She would have been more shocked at his relative shyness if she weren’t feeling so damned sheepish herself.

He knows.

She pulled the little bottles closer and wrapped her fingers around them. They were more valuable per ounce than gold, and the fact he’d brought them to her meant he knew about his imminent fatherhood.

He’s not upset?

He cleared his throat. “Uh—Mom pulled those out of today’s FedEx delivery. You have to let the doctor know they have to be stored in a refrigerator. He probably hasn’t administered it before.”

“
She
. I have a midwife. And it came fast. I didn’t know your mother would be able to get it so quickly. There’s usually a waitlist for it. Moon shifter packs have to stockpile it.”

“I guess she was motivated. She’s been waiting a long time for grandkids.” His voice was quiet, tone even.

Careful. He’s being careful.
If a man from her pack had used that soft voice on her, she’d know he was trying to keep his temper in check. She wasn’t reading aggression off him, though. His energy was more or less neutral, almost artificially so.

She drew in a long breath and let his scent—the one that pervaded her skin and their entire freakin’ house, even when he wasn’t there—hit the back of her nose.
Tea.
She put her hand over her mouth to suppress a giggle. He’d been drinking his mother’s tea.

“She’s probably not going to give you five feet of space when the time comes. Sorry in advance.”

“No, no. I appreciate it.” Suddenly, Ashley wished she had a cloak like Ótama’s to fidget with as she sat chatting. She needed some excuse to look away from Vic’s intense gaze. Anything beyond the fact that she didn’t know what to do with him, which was silly. In wolf culture, as a mate, she wasn’t supposed to have a say, but that had never felt right to her. Sometimes, men needed to be called out on their bullshit. She was certain that was why Adam was a
good
alpha—because he had a good wife, and he
let
her be a good wife.

I could be a good wife.

The question remained if Vic would let Ashley be one. She wanted to be.

Closing her left fingers around the vial, she pushed back from the table and then fetched her purse from the nearby sideboard. “Um—if I’m lucky, I could get the midwife to jab me without an appointment.”

Vic followed her into the hall, down the stairs, and out of the atrium door. He said nothing as she walked briskly toward the town square, just kept a respectful distance behind her. It was still close enough to keep the hairs on the back of her neck dancing.

Say something. Don’t be like Ma, holding your tongue and acting like you don’t know shit.
She cringed, and paused at the crosswalk to wait for the light to change. Glancing back over her shoulder, she dove right in. “Like I said, I’m going to see if I can get an injection today. This stuff needs to build up. I don’t want to get too close to the next full moon without it being at its peak effectiveness. Last week was scary.”

He furrowed his brow. “How far along are you? I mean, I can guess, but pregnancy math doesn’t make sense to me.”

The light turned, and she stepped into the street. “Six weeks, almost seven.”

“Which means you’re due, when?”

“I have no idea.”

“Right. Right. You can’t tell if you’re going to gestate like a human or like a wolf.”

“Or some average of the two. Last ultrasound said I looked like twelve or thirteen weeks, so who knows what’s going to happen.”

“When were you going to tell me? Did you think I wouldn’t care?”

She stifled a groan. She
had
thought that. “In my old pack, a wolf wouldn’t care unless it were a boy.”

And then that wolf would stop caring about that boy altogether if he decided his son was a threat to his place in the pack. She couldn’t wrap her mind around anyone willingly expelling a much-wanted son to preserve his own stature. Certainly, Vic could, though.

By the time they reached the opposite curb, he was at her side. Her inner wolf seemed to collapse with relief, as if that was exactly where he belonged, and that he’d finally come home.

Silly wolf.

“I was going to tell you,” she said. “Probably right after I believed it for myself.”

He jogged ahead of her and pulled open the clinic’s door. “I’d care either way, boy or girl. Every kid deserves a chance.”

Of course he would think that. He’s a Carbone.
And so was she now. She kept forgetting.

She set the drug vials onto the reception desk and hitched her purse strap higher up onto her shoulder. When the clerk looked up, she said, “Is Jackie here? I need to see if she can squeeze me in for a shot.”

“She was about to run out for a break. Let me get her before she escapes.”

Vic leaned against the wall beside the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. He stared down at her, his gaze long and assessing.

“What?”

“Pregnancy suits you, is all.”

If only I had that cloak…
She’d probably pull it over her head to hide her burning cheeks. She’d never been one for blushing, but apparently, Vic possessed some black magic that kept her burning up. “How so?”

“For one thing, you smell nice.”

“What do I smell like?”

“It’s hard to describe. It’s my scent, plus a little something else. Extra pheromones, I guess.”

“Oh. That’s typical of my species of wolf. It’s supposed to keep daddy from abandoning mama during her time of need.”

“I wouldn’t abandon you.”

“Of course you wouldn’t, now that you’ve sniffed me.”

“No,” he said softly, as if the word would break him. “I wouldn’t abandon you because I
try
to do what’s right, even when it’s hard.”

Even when it’s hard
. What they had at the moment was definitely hard.

“And even if it’s late. I hope I’m not too late. Am I?”

She opened her mouth to give him the answer her brain hadn’t even thought out yet, but didn’t have the chance to say it.

The office door swung open and Jackie stuck her head out. “What’ve you got for me?”

Ashley pulled her gaze away from Vic and all the sorrow etched in his face, and swallowed hard to force down the lump in her throat. He was trying—admitting he was wrong—and she knew how hard that was for wolves, especially male ones.

Maybe there was some hope for them after all.

To Jackie, she said, “Um, it’s that shifting suppressant I told you about. I need to get a stick once per week through the end of the pregnancy.”

Jackie took the vials. “Come on back and have a seat in exam room two. I want to check this stuff out in the drug database. I trust you, I just want to know what all the potential side effects and off-market uses are. Not being wolves, the Afótama obviously don’t have full moon problems.”