WRONG LOVE 3: HEIR

Chapter Seventeen: What Happened to Klark

The cabin was small and sparse, warmed by a single fire that Klark tended without looking at any of them for a long moment after they'd settled around it.

Nathan sat rigid on an old wooden chair. Jace stood near the door, unable to sit, every part of him coiled with the specific dread that had been building since his father's face went pale at the sound of his brother's name. Malachar remained near the entrance, watching everything with the patient stillness of someone who had learned centuries ago that silence extracted more truth than pressing ever could.

Klark finally spoke, staring into the flames.

"Once upon a time," he said quietly, "a wolf fell in love with a vampire."

Nobody moved.

"I was an omega," Klark continued. "Nathan was already alpha by then — had been for decades. I was never meant to matter much beyond the family name. Omegas didn't choose who they loved. Not in those days. Not with anyone outside the pack, and certainly not with a vampire."

"But you loved her anyway," Malachar said quietly. Not a question.

"I loved her anyway," Klark confirmed. "Completely. The way you love something you know you're not supposed to have, which somehow makes the loving more consuming rather than less." He was quiet for a moment. "Her name was Isolde. She was gentle in ways vampires weren't supposed to be. She made me laugh in a family that had very little laughter in it."

He looked at Nathan.

Nathan's jaw was tight, his eyes fixed somewhere on the floor.

"She got pregnant," Klark said. "Shockingly. Impossibly, the way everyone keeps saying about your daughter now. We didn't understand it then any more than you understand it now. We just knew it had happened, and we were terrified and thrilled in equal measure."

"You kept it," Jace said quietly.

"We kept it," Klark said. "Hid it as best we could. She wasn't part of the pack, wasn't part of the court — we found a small isolated place, much like this one, and we waited." His voice caught. "And then she died. Giving birth. Whatever the pregnancy demanded of her body, it took everything she had, and she didn't survive delivering him."

The fire cracked in the silence that followed.

"I raised him alone," Klark continued. "For years. Hid him from everyone. Told myself I could protect him if no one ever knew he existed." He closed his eyes briefly. "But children grow. And he grew into something I couldn't hide anymore. Something that frightened even me, eventually."

"What was he," Malachar asked quietly.

Klark didn't answer directly.

"Nathan found out," he said instead. "Word travels, even in isolation. He came to see for himself what I'd been hiding, and when he saw—" He looked at his brother. "You banished me. Do you remember what you said?"

Nathan's voice, when it came, was barely audible.

"I said you'd brought something unnatural into this family," he said. "That you'd endangered all of us by keeping it secret instead of ending it the moment you understood what it was becoming."

"You cast me out," Klark said. "For eternity. Your own brother."

"I didn't know," Nathan said. His voice cracked. "I didn't know she'd given you a child, Klark. I thought — I thought you were simply consorting with a vampire out of some rebellious defiance. I never understood there was a son."

Klark looked at him for a long moment.

"You banished me anyway," he said quietly. "Without asking. Without wondering why an omega who'd never caused trouble in his life had suddenly disappeared from pack gatherings for years at a time. You decided I was a danger and removed me before you understood what you were removing."

Nathan had no answer for that.

The silence stretched long and uncomfortable.

"What happened to the child," Malachar said finally. Quiet, but firm. "You said he became something too dangerous."

Klark's hands tightened where they rested on his knees.

"He became something the world had never named," he said. "Faster than any wolf. Stronger than any vampire. He could move between shadow and daylight in ways neither of our kinds could fully explain. And the older he grew, the less control either of us had over what he was becoming."

Klark's face didn't change, but something in his eyes went distant and hollow.

"I killed him," he said quietly. "With my own hands. Because he had started hurting people — not out of cruelty, I don't believe, but because he didn't understand his own strength, didn't understand what he was capable of until it was already too late. He was thirteen years old when I ended his life. My own son."

The room held that horror in complete silence.

"I have lived with that," Klark said, "every single day since. Longer than any of you have been alive. And I have wondered, every single one of those days, whether there was another way. Whether I simply failed to teach him, failed to guide him, failed in every way a father could fail."

Jace felt something cold settle permanently into his chest.

"But Nathan," Klark said, turning to look at his brother directly, "what I don't understand — what I have never understood in all these centuries — is why you banished me before you knew the full truth. You didn't know Isolde had given me a child. You banished your own brother on assumption alone."

Nathan looked at him.

For the first time in the conversation, something like genuine grief crossed his face.

"I was afraid," he said quietly. "Afraid of what loving a vampire meant for this family's standing. Afraid of the war it might reignite if word spread. I acted out of fear, and I have regretted it every day since, though I never knew how to find you and say so."

Klark studied him.

"Fear built on assumption cost me everything," he said. "My brother. My pack. Eventually my son."

Jace couldn't stay silent any longer.

"My daughter," he said, voice tight with barely controlled panic. "Is she going to become what your son became? Is that what you're telling us?"

Klark turned to look at him.

Something in his expression shifted — not quite sympathy, but the specific recognition of a father who had lived this exact fear once already.

"Your daughter," he said slowly, "is a threat to all three races. Human, wolf, and vampire alike. From what you've described — the vampire elder's fear, the court's panic — she carries characteristics of both bloodlines fully, completely, in a way my son never fully manifested until adolescence."

"What does that mean," Jace said.

"It means," Klark said, "that she may become something even I don't have the knowledge to fully predict. And it means the old wolves — the ones who remember what happened to my son, who fear the precedent she sets — will stop at nothing to see her eliminated before she grows into whatever she is capable of becoming."

The cabin went completely silent.

Jace's hands had curled into fists at his sides.

"Nobody," he said, voice low and dangerous, "is touching my daughter."

Klark looked at him with something that might have been pity.

"That's exactly what I told myself once," he said quietly. "About my son. I promise you, the resolve is real. But so is what's coming for her. You need to be prepared for both truths at once."

Malachar stepped forward from where he'd remained silent near the door.

"Then we prepare," he said. "Better than Klark was able to. With more resources, more allies, more warning than he ever had."

Klark looked at the ancient vampire for a long moment.

"I hope that's enough," he said quietly. "I genuinely hope it is. Because I have lived a very long time with the alternative, and I would not wish it on anyone."