The Alpha King’s Secret Heir

Chapter 15: What Begins

Six weeks later, Aurora's floral workshop took over the small building adjacent to the Moonclaw mansion that had, until recently, been used for storage.

This had been Mrs. Caldwell's suggestion, offered so practically and without ceremony that Aurora had agreed before fully processing what saying yes entailed. Which was, apparently, exactly the kind of approach Mrs. Caldwell used when she wanted something to happen and anticipated resistance.

The space was larger than Aurora's previous workshop by a significant margin, with windows on three sides and stone floors that were excellent for working and cold enough in the mornings that she kept a dedicated pair of thick socks at the door. She brought her equipment over two Saturdays in a row, with Leo riding in the back of the van treating each box as a significant cargo operation, and Damon appearing without being asked and carrying things without being directed and not once making a comment about what anything was or where it should go.

On the second Saturday, when everything was in place and the space was beginning to look like hers, Leo stood in the middle of it with his arms out and spun once, slowly.

"It smells like you," he said.

"Does it?"

"Like your other place. But bigger."

She had not realized until that moment that this was true, that the smell of her work had followed her here, the particular combination of green stems and cut flowers and the slight earthiness of good soil that had always meant: Aurora's space. Her smell, in a new building.

"Yeah," she said. "I think we're going to be okay here."

The work settled back into its rhythm. She had been honest with her clients and her assistant about the disruption, vaguer about the reason for it than she might have been with closer friends, and most of them had been accommodating in the way that people were when they valued the work and trusted the person doing it. Three new clients came through a referral from Councilor Petra's office, which she suspected was not coincidental.

Leo started at his new school in the area on a Monday. He came home that afternoon with dirt on his knees and the name of a new potential friend, a girl called Rosa who had a very good collection of rocks and who had let him look at all of them, which Leo considered a significant social achievement.

That evening at dinner, Damon asked him about it with the same attention he always gave Leo's reports from the world.

"She has a geode," Leo said. "The inside is purple. She showed me."

"Did she let you touch it?"

"She said next time. But she showed it."

"That's trust," Damon said.

Leo nodded seriously. "I know."

Aurora watched them over the rim of her water glass. The dailiness of it. The passing of food and the ordinary conversation about geodes and school and what they had both done that afternoon. The way Leo had positioned himself between the two of them at the table, equidistant, as if calibrating a balance without knowing he was doing it.

After Leo was in bed that night, she and Damon sat in the small sitting room with the fireplace. It had become a habit, this hour after Leo slept, the two of them in that room with tea or wine or sometimes neither, talking or not talking with equal comfort.

"He's settling," Damon said.

"Yes. He adapts quickly when he feels safe."

"He feels safe here."

"He does." She looked at the fire. "So do I. I want to say that directly because I think sometimes I forget to say the actual thing."

He looked at her.

"I feel safe here," she said again. "With you. I didn't expect to, and it took me time to acknowledge it, but it's true."

"Thank you for telling me."

"Don't be polite about it. It's a significant thing for me to say."

"I know," he said. "That's why I'm being careful with it."

She looked at him in the firelight. Six weeks of this. Of meals and conversations and Leo between them and the work of building something that was not nothing and was becoming something real.

"The mate bond," she said. "When you said it was like finding your north. Does it still feel like that?"

"It feels like that every time you're in the room."

"Even when I'm disagreeing with you?"

"Especially then. The disagreement is part of who you are. The north doesn't move because the weather changes."

She was quiet for a moment.

Then she moved across the small space between them on the couch and settled against his side, which was warm and solid and entirely itself.

He put his arm around her shoulders. No comment. No ceremony. Just: yes. This.

They sat with the fire and the quiet and the house around them holding its breath and its history and its new daily accumulations.

"Damon."

"Yes."

"Leo is going to need the wolves explained more thoroughly. Not now. But before it starts happening for him. I want to be part of that conversation."

"You'll be part of all of it."

"And I want him to understand that being human is not a lesser thing. Whatever power he develops. His mother is human and that is not a compromise."

"I agree completely." He paused. "Aurora."

"Yes."

"For what it's worth, and I don't say this to pressure you or to move things faster than they should go, but for what it's worth, I have been sure about you since the moment in the market when I couldn't find you and felt the absence of it. I understood then that you were specific and irreplaceable and not something I was going to talk myself out of." He was quiet for a moment. "I thought you should know that, separate from everything else."

She turned her head to look at him.

"I'm getting there," she said. "To that level of sure. I'm not all the way there yet."

"I know."

"But I'm closer than I was three days ago."

"Good," he said. "That's all I need."

She turned back to the fire.

Outside, the night was clear for the first time in weeks, the rain finally breaking into a sky that had stars in it. Leo was asleep down the hallway, dreaming whatever uncomplicated dreams five-year-olds dreamed when they felt safe. The house was quiet around them in the way that houses were quiet when they contained the right people.

Aurora Hayes, who had spent five years making herself sufficient and self-contained and certain that the world she had retreated into was adequate, sat in the firelight in a house that was becoming hers and felt, for the first time in a long time, that adequate was not going to be good enough anymore.

She wanted more than adequate.

She was, finally, beginning to believe she was going to get it.

And in the morning, Leo would wake at six-thirty as he always did, and come to find them both, and the day would begin the way all the best days began: with small feet on old floors and a child's uncomplicated certainty that the people he loved would be exactly where he expected them.

That was enough.

That was, in fact, everything.