AGAIN MY HEART: Her Alphas Regret

HOME

LEILANI

I am all but a panicked mess as I rush out of the staff room. My mind was riddled with the worst possible scenarios of what could have happened to my son as I rushed out of the room to find him.

“Have you seen Avi?” I asked Steph, who was behind the counter, currently ringing up customers.

She turned to me briefly, her brows set in a frown as she shook her head. “I thought you were with him in the staff room. Weren’t you feeding him?”

I was. He was the reason I took a break, because the moment he started clinging to my leg, I knew it wouldn’t take him a few minutes more to start crying out of hunger.

I had been in the staff room feeding him. He was done eating and playing on my lap. I knew when he crawled down, but I didn’t think he would leave my sight.

“I was,” I replied absentmindedly as I looked around the space behind the counter, checking the fridge and every space I knew he could crawl into.

“Are you sure you didn’t see him crawl out?” I asked Steph again, just to be sure, and she shook her head.

“No.”

I muttered a curse as I hurried back in the direction of the staff room, calling out Avi’s name as I checked the room again because there was a possibility I had totally lost sight of him in my state of panic.

There was no sign of him yet, so I continued to the storage room, knowing those tiny legs of his could literally take him anywhere. He’s been the reason I wake up at night in cold sweats ever since he learned how to wobble on those legs. He’s barely eight months old, and he has already figured out how to walk. Every night, I dream of him wobbling out of my sight and into danger somewhere.

I am convinced that Alpha King Aesir might’ve realised I didn’t terminate the pregnancy even though he paid me to, and he has sent trackers after me so they can do the one thing he paid me to do.

Was it an irrational fear and totally unreasonable? Yes. I was very well aware of how irrational it was to think of such stupid possibilities, but my brain wasn’t on board with that, and it wouldn’t stop showing me scenarios of my son getting abducted. And just worst-case scenarios of what could happen to him.

Rationally, I knew he had to be somewhere within the shop. Just because I couldn’t find him in the storage room, the staff room, or the restrooms, and the pantry cold room didn’t mean he was abducted. There is no way King Aesir could’ve figured out that I was in Xenyre. How would he? He didn’t care enough to even ask for a DNA test, so what would he care if I decided to keep the baby? He wanted me gone, and that was what I gave him. There is no way he’d have people looking for me to kill my son.

No.

I shook that thought out of my head as I walked back to the café. Avi had to be somewhere in the shop, probably bothering the clients. He is too sharp and too energetic for his age.

I barely made it past the first table when Avi’s chirpy, almost inaudible voice rang through the café. “Ma–ma.”

I pivot, my gaze immediately snapping in his direction as his giggles fill the expanse of the café.

'Mama' is the only word he could say so far, and it is his favourite word to say, alongside the occasional gibberish when I am cooing at him.

The weight on my chest lifted as I approached the table, and I finally saw the faces of the customers who had him. I couldn’t help but sigh in relief upon seeing the familiar faces of the couple who had become regulars ever since I opened the café. They were one of my very first customers and have been coming to the café almost every day for the past two months.

It’s been a year and a month since I left that god-forsaken kingdom and all its bad memories behind me. It's been approximately four months since I arrived in Xenyre and three months since I opened the café.

Why Xenyre? I couldn’t tell for sure. After leaving Eitbjorn, there wasn’t exactly a destination in mind.

And the minute I set foot in Xenyre, something about the kingdom, the surrounding air, made me feel like I was finally home, even though I didn’t know anyone here.

I stopped at the table Avi was currently disrupting. “I’m so sorry for this. I didn’t know when he left my bosom. Disrupting your evening like this…”

The woman was quick to wave me off as she smiled at Avi, who was currently settled on her lap. “Oh, please, no need to be sorry. Avi is a delight to have around. Besides, he didn’t disrupt anything. Leila, right? That’s your name?"

“Leilani.” I corrected her. “But you can call me Leila.”

Even though the nickname brought back horrible memories of my aunt. At least there were good memories with my foster parents, too.

“Leilani, it means royal child. Did you know that?” Her husband asked from beside her. He was staring intently at me, his eyes reddened.

He’s strange, and that makes me wary. I want to take my son away from them. So I handed him over to Steph.

The woman turned to look at her husband, and they seemed to be communicating through their mind link for a minute there. I knew they were werewolves, so that wasn’t a surprise. Her gaze found me again, and she smiled. “You are my daughter, Leila. My princess.”

I could barely contain my shock as I stared at them. It seemed as though I had woken up in an alternate reality, and everything I thought I knew was a lie.

My gaze flicked from her to her husband. The resemblance was there. I can see it now that I wasn’t so occupied with running the café and attending to customers.

I had always been the odd one out in Eitbjorn. I didn’t fit in anywhere, with anyone. My wolf-like ears, which had singled me out a lot in Eitbjorn, were most Xenyans' ears, and some even more prominent. And while I was yet to meet anyone with mismatched eyes like mine, I quickly realised that orange was a common eye colour amongst the people here. Which didn’t make me feel like a weirdo with my amethyst and silver eyes.

But this revelation was far from anything I could’ve expected when I moved here. The Valois were my parents, my biological parents. And as if that wasn’t a shock on its own, they were the royalties of Xenyre, the Alpha King and Luna Queen.

The regular customers at my café, who would come in at almost the same time every day, the ones Avi often loved interrupting, were my parents, and they were the royal family of Xenyre.

Everything inside me felt suspended, as though the world had tilted beneath my feet as I stared at them.

The sitting room around me blurred, and the only thing I could focus on was the faces before me. The sharp slope of the king’s nose that mirrored my own, the plum shape of the queen’s mouth, her almost purple eyes, and the king’s silver eyes. It was as if I had taken one pair of their eyes each. Even the shape of their wolf-like ears. I lifted my trembling fingers to my own wolf-like ears instinctively.

The realization hit so hard my throat burned, and my eyes watered.

“You are my parents,” I mumbled, mostly to myself because it felt like I needed to say it out loud for this to make any sense to me. “I… How can this even be real?”

My whole life, I had wondered where I came from and who my real parents were, and now, suddenly, I had an answer. Yet it felt like a fever dream.

“We know it’s a lot for you to take in…” The king began.

“That was why you kept coming to the café,” I whispered. They were regulars at the café I had opened two months after settling here, and from the minute they walked through my doors, my pup, Avitaj had been drawn to them.

They nodded.

“We knew you were ours from the moment we saw you. We could not stay away. Your mother wanted us to be subtle about it. We tried to be subtle, but we waited so long for the day you’d walk back into our lives and we… We just didn’t know how to stay away.”

I stared at them, wondering if I could believe anything they said. They had explained so much to me about our bloodline—their bloodline—and how they were able to tell immediately that I was their daughter. Something about a Nyxari bloodline and a bond that recognizes kin.

If anything they’ve told me today was true, that means I have the Nyxari blood and some secret ability that only unlocks with our fated mates. Was it foolish of me that somehow I didn’t want to doubt anything they were saying?

A part of me said I should be wary of this couple, but was it such a bad thing that I wanted this to be true? That I wished they weren’t lying to me and they were really my parents?

Something twisted painfully inside my chest as I stared at them, their eyes filled with unshed tears. I swallowed thickly, looking away because I didn’t want to cry. If they were lying to me, I’d hate to come off as desperate. But I couldn’t help that, for the first time in my life, here I was, sitting across two people who looked at me like I was the most precious thing in their world.

“All of this is true. There was an attack when you were a baby. It was immediately after your first birthday. Some people didn’t want your father, a Velkyn, to remain on the throne. You were taken during the chaos.” The queen’s breathing shook, and tears streamed down her face. “We searched everywhere for you. Every kingdom. Every province. Every rumor of a missing child was found. There were years when your father barely slept because every lead that reached us, we never stopped looking. We were told to mourn you, to let go, but we couldn’t. We just weren’t willing to accept any reasons that you were dead and weren’t coming back to us.”

Her voice broke completely at the end, and she tried to wipe her tears with shaky hands.

Something tugged at my heart, the need to pull her in and console her. To tell her it was all right and that I was home now, but I held back because I was just one sentence away from falling apart, too.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with all this information.” My voice trailed off as the tears I’d tried so hard to hold back began streaming down my face.

“You don’t have to do anything,” the queen reached out, grabbing my heart, and I almost f*****g broke down in tears again at the warmth that spread through. “We are sorry. So sorry, Nani… We never stopped looking, never stopped praying. After seeing you for the second time, we secretly had a DNA test. We’re sorry, but we just wanted our princess back so badly. Thanks to the Moon Goddess for bringing you back to us.”

I clutched her back so tightly my hands hurt because suddenly I couldn’t stop thinking about every lonely version of myself that had existed before that moment. I wanted this. I wanted this warmth to remain, so I pulled her into my embrace, crying on her shoulders.

“My little girl, oh my precious flower.” I heard her murmur as she pressed her lips to my temple.

No longer have to feel unwanted, no longer have to be alone. I was home. Home in the arms of my parents.