Page 64 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

“You’re a decent man.” She says it slowly, and she sounds surprised to mean it. “Even when I don’t want to believe it, I can tell you are.”

A laugh scrapes out of me with no humor in it. “Don’t go grading me this early. You haven’t seen enough.”

She stands, stretches, and pats my shoulder on her way past the chair. “You’re right about that. I shouldn’t grade you early.” Her mouth tips. “Maybe you’re saving the real you for later.”

She moves to step past me. I catch her wrist before she clears the chair, and I look up at her in the porch light.

“You can trust me.” I keep my hold light. “I’d never hurt you. I’d never hurt Mia. Not in a hundred years, not for anything.”

Old fear surfaces in her face, gone as fast as it came, and she studies me a long moment. Then her fingers come down and rest over the back of my hand lightly before she draws her own free.

“Never say never,” she says.

She walks inside. I stay where I am and watch the door swing shut behind her.

I sit out there until the beer’s warm and useless. Then I climb the stairs and go to Mia’s room.

The small lamp throws everything gold. I lower myself onto the edge of her bed and stroke the dark hair off her face, and I look at her. My chest hurts at the sight, and I don’t know how to handle these emotions.

“I missed all of it,” I say quietly, my words ragged. “Your first steps. The first time you laughed. The first word out of your mouth.” None of it lives anywhere in me. There’s no memory to even mourn, just a blank where ten years should be. And somehow, after everything, with Jessa the one who kept this child a secret from me for a decade, I’m the one sitting here lined with guilt.

Because she did come, and someone who knew me turned her away.

What would I have done if I had been the one to meet her?

I look down at my child, and my heart tightens. “I wasn’t the best version of myself, but I’d like to think I would have cherished you back then.”

Mia shifts under the blanket and settles. She’s sleeping now, not the awful slackness from the festival. Just a tired kid, deep under.

“One day you walk into this house as mine,” I tell her, so low it’s almost nothing. “Out in the open. But you’ve got to wait for it, and so do I.” I tuck the blanket to her chin. “Looks like I went and hurt your mother somewhere along the way. I have to fix that first. Before anything else, I have to fix that.”

I can’t make myself stand up. I sit and study her face, the stubborn brow, the mouth that’s her mother’s, and I’d happily lose the rest of the night to it.

There’s a rustle from the other bed. Bella pushes up onto an elbow and knuckles at one eye.

“Uncle Marcus?”

“Go back to sleep, Bell.”

“What are you doing in here?”

“Came to check on Mia.” I keep my voice low.

She blinks at me. “Can I have a goodnight kiss?”

I lean across and press my lips to her forehead, then ease her down and pull her blanket up. I tuck Mia in once more on my way past, and I let myself out.

I stop outside my own door, hand on the wood, and open it slowly. Jessa’s already under, turned on her side, one arm flung across the pillow. Even sleeping, the strain hasn’t left her. Rest hasn’t touched the tiredness around her eyes, even now. She walked through hell with nobody’s hand to hold, and she did it carrying my child, abandoned and humiliated.

What she told me tonight I don’t think I will ever forgive myself for. I might not have been the person that did that to her, but it was inadvertently because of me. I pull the door shut and leave her to sleep.

Downstairs, once the house has gone fully still, I step out the back and call Adrian.

“Mia was poisoned with wolfsbane,” I tell him the second he picks up. “At the festival.”

A beat of dead air. “I’m ten minutes out,” he says. “Don’t say another word on the phone.”

He’s there in eight, pulling on his pants as he comes up the porch steps.