Ayn's Healing

Chapter 17 - Kari

I am looking down at my mom sitting on the steps below me. I am trying to guess what she is planning to do next - shift into her beautiful wolf Lily and bite my neck off? It would be out of character for our kind Luna, but I can almost imagine it in this context.

"Come to the study", she says, getting up briskly and grabbing me by the hand.

I watch as she mind links my father and I am wondering if she wants to offer him dibs on my throat. I hear her voice one more time, ordering an omega to bring us coffee and then it is forty-five minutes of total and complete silence, with the exception of her tiny steps that draw countless infinity signs from one end of the room to the other.

At last, when my father arrives, she runs towards him and throws his arms around his neck. My dad gives me a disoriented look over her shoulder, to which I can only bow my head in a terrified expectation of what I will get to hear.

My mom disentangles herself from her mate and pushes him silently towards a chair. From her calm demeanor I can sense that she already has a strategy in her mind. I am just not sure how much pain is in it for me.

"Xander, the Moon Goddess has given our son a second chance. He has found a mate". She speaks slowly, articulating clearly every word in the Luna voice I have never heard her use when addressing my father.

"Oh, bless! I like that Astrid girl." My father jumps out of his seat and heads towards me, as my mother's voice echoes again in the room:

"It's not Astrid. It's Ayn."

My father stops midway and I watch his face carefully for signs of deadly rage, preparing myself to bolt. I am not disappointed, as immediately the tell-tale expressions appear on his face: the furrowed eyebrows, his eyes shifting to purple, the corner of his lip twitching to briefly show a sharp canine. My mother tries to extend her calming touch, but he pulls his shoulder away.

"Well, this is...special." he mutters through clenched teeth."What do you plan to do, Kari?"

"What do you mean with this question, Xander??" my mom looks irritated at him "Are you asking if he's planning to reject her?"

"Teresa, let the male answer my question. He is a future Alpha and should decide what is best for him...and for the pack. He didn't reject his first weakling of a mate, maybe the Goddess is giving him a second chance to make the right decision."

"Don't speak like this of Lara." I manage to articulate, surprised that my father held onto his dislike for my first mate for all these years. He furiously turns towards me, and I feel Storm slightly wincing under my father's purple eyes. Maybe my wolf has finally overcome his learning disabilities.

„You may have forgotten, Kari, what the breaking of the bond did to you...and the pack."

I didn't forget. I remember very precisely how the pack doctor's blood tasted when I shredded his neck, disabling him and leaving the pack without medical care for weeks.

I see in my mind's eye my mother's swollen red eyes as she was crying next to the bed, where I was hallucinating and vomiting before Lara's and the baby's farewell ceremonies.

I remember how I trained when I came back from mourning. My father was arranging to take over some of my training sessions together with Timo, so I don't end up decimating his warriors.

I also painfully realized how deep I had dragged them in my disaster, and how much they have had to worry for me and, by extension, for the future of our pack.

„I am sorry" I say, as I always do when those events are brought up, but this time my apology does not appease my father, because he still rages close to my face.