The Alpha King’s Secret Heir

Chapter 5: What Leo Knows

Leo woke at six-thirty, which he did every morning regardless of what time he went to sleep, an internal clock calibrated to some frequency that had nothing to do with parental convenience.

Aurora heard him moving in the adjoining room and was awake before he appeared in the doorway, standing in his dinosaur pajamas with his hair pointing in four directions, looking at the unfamiliar room with the alert curiosity of a child confronting a puzzle.

"This isn't our apartment," he observed.

"No. We're staying somewhere else for a few days."

He processed this. "The man with silver eyes?"

"His house, yes."

Leo nodded slowly, the nod of someone accepting information and filing it for later review. He climbed onto the large bed beside her and looked at the ceiling, which was high and ornately molded in a way that their apartment's acoustic tiles were not.

"It's very big," he said.

"It is."

"Are we in trouble?"

Aurora turned her head to look at him. At five he was already perceptive in ways that caught her off guard. He had her eyes, dark brown, and the structure of his face was her own but arranged differently in ways she couldn't always articulate, angles that were his father's even when she didn't want to acknowledge that.

"There are some things happening that I need to take care of," she said. "While I do that, we're safer here."

"Okay." He sat up. "Can we have breakfast? I'm hungry."

The straightforwardness of children, she thought. The mercifully undramatic way they accepted the world's changes when those changes didn't directly threaten something they needed. She had raised him, she thought, to feel fundamentally secure. Whatever chaos surrounded them, he knew she was there. That appeared to be sufficient.

Mrs. Caldwell appeared with breakfast in the small sitting room attached to their suite: scrambled eggs, fruit, juice for Leo, coffee for Aurora, and an efficiency that suggested she had been doing this for a very long time. Leo ate with focused dedication and asked if there was a dog, because the house seemed like the kind of house that had a dog.

"No dogs," Mrs. Caldwell said, with the faintest of smiles.

"That's a waste," Leo said seriously.

After breakfast, Damon appeared in the doorway of the sitting room. He knocked on the open door, which Aurora noted as a deliberate gesture, asking permission to enter a space that was nominally hers for the moment.

Leo looked at him.

Damon looked at Leo.

The resemblance was not screaming. It was quieter than that, the kind of resemblance that emerged gradually as you looked, settling into certainty slowly. The jaw. The way they both held their shoulders. The particular steadiness of their eyes when they were paying attention to something.

"Good morning," Damon said to Leo.

"Good morning," Leo said. "Are you the silver-eye man?"

"I am."

"My mom says we're staying here for a few days."

"That's right."

Leo considered him. "Do you have a dog?"

Something shifted in Damon's expression, so brief Aurora almost missed it. "No."

"Mrs. Caldwell said the same thing. I think it's a waste." Leo picked up a piece of cantaloupe. "What's your name?"

"Damon."

"Damon," Leo repeated, trying the shape of it. "That's a superhero name."

"Is it?"

"It sounds like it should be." He put the cantaloupe in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. "Are you my mom's friend?"

The question landed in the room and stayed there.

"Something like that," Damon said. He looked at Aurora briefly. She gave him nothing.

"Okay." Leo seemed satisfied with this. "Can I go look at the house?"

"Leo, we should ask first," Aurora started.

"Of course," Damon said. "I'll show you around, if you'd like."

Leo immediately slid off his chair and went to stand beside Damon with the complete trust of a child who had been told the world was generally safe and had no reason yet to disbelieve this. He tilted his head back to look up at the considerably taller man.

"You're very tall," he said.

"You're very small," Damon replied.

"I know. I'm five. I'll get bigger."

"You will."

They walked out into the hall together, Leo asking questions at his usual pace, which was approximately one every forty seconds without waiting fully for the answer to the previous one before generating the next. Aurora stayed in the doorway and watched them go.

She had told herself, for five years, that Leo was fine. That he was better off without the complication of this world, this dangerous and incomprehensible world of alphas and packs and territorial politics that she had barely understood even after the night that brought him into existence. She had told herself she was protecting him.

Watching her son walk down the corridor of his father's house with his small hand gesturing at a painting on the wall while Damon listened with complete attention, she wondered, not for the first time, whether what she had actually been protecting was herself.

She went back inside and finished her coffee.

Later that morning, after Leo had been installed in a room that turned out to have a collection of building blocks large enough to occupy several dedicated adults, Damon found her in the library.

"He's extraordinary," he said. Simple. Not performed.

"I know." She turned from the bookshelf. "He's going to ask who you are. Not today, but soon. He's already processing."

"When he asks, tell him the truth."

"The whole truth? Or a version appropriate for a five-year-old?"

"Both of those can be the same thing."

She studied him. "You're not what I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"Honestly? Someone who would use Leo as leverage. Someone who would make demands immediately."

"I do have demands," he said. "I'm not making them today because today is not the right time. But they exist."

"What kind of demands?"

"The kind that involve being part of my son's life. Not occasionally. Consistently." He met her eyes. "I lost five years. I don't intend to lose any more."

Aurora had known this was coming. She had known it from the moment she confirmed Leo's age last night. She had rehearsed this conversation in her head a hundred times during the small hours while her son slept.

"That's fair," she said. It was the most honest thing she could offer him.

His expression shifted slightly. He had not been expecting her to concede so directly.

"There's also the matter of the Ashclaw Pack," he said, returning to a more controlled register. "Sit down. You need to understand what we're dealing with."

She sat.

He told her.