The Story of the Exile (The Belesone Pack #2)

Chapter 1

"Will you relax? It's not your fault that some idiot put a thought into your head and convinced you that you were mated to someone you weren't," Milo reasoned, pushing Leo's shoulders into a relaxed position.

Hours after promising to help Leo decipher what was going on inside his own head – and with his own fate – he stood in Milo's bedroom, while his Alpha tried to help him pick a suitable outfit to make a grovelling apology in. He just wasn't entirely sure who he was apologising to or why.

It was just the two of them, for now, so he didn't bother trying to press for answers. Katarina had left the house an hour ago, with a guard from the front door, to return to her fathers house for some necessary herbs. They were going to have dinner with the Torlov family; Josanna and Grene had been invited to the house so that Katarina could cook for them. And he was more nervous than Milo felt he should be.

He couldn't help it.

Katarina had been choosing a recipe for that night, when she came over all funny. With Milo upstairs, talking to his father, Leo had waited for her to snap out of it, not knowing how to help. When she did, she explained that she had the answer he was looking for, as if she had sent herself into a trance to find it.

She had seen a vision, where hands were over an earthen bowl that contained a mixture of herbs, a voice chanting an old shifter spell, long forbidden from use. She told him that it would bind an already mated male to a new female of the spell casters choosing.

Leo had been shocked and outraged. By the time Milo ventured downstairs, he had stormed out of the room and left Katarina alone to explain her vision. She hadn't had the chance to tell him who did it to him, but he blamed his own temper for that failing.

Still, he knew she'd tell him in time.

"I feel like a useless sod. How did I not know there was a spell over me?" Leo asked desperately.

He tugged at the collar of his t-shirt and took it off. He looked back at his reflection in the mirror and sighed at himself.

"Do you realize that this spell has been forbidden for a hundred years?" Milo reminded him. "Leo, how the hell were you supposed to know? If anything, I think Constantine might have guessed from the things Katarina told him," he admitted, though it wasn't much help. "And if she's right, that spell maker was useless because their mind drifted between two girls."

Milo objected to listening to his Beta blaming himself for something that wasn't his fault. It was ridiculous and a waste of time.

They were having this dinner so that he could tell Grene he was sorry for the way things had turned out, explain the spell put upon him and tell Josanna that he had found his true mate. Not so that Leo could beat himself up.

Katarina already had an idea of what would cure him from the spell, after seeing the mixing bowl in her vision. The guard was going with her, to her house, so that if her father didn't have the ingredients in his cupboard already, the guard could accompany her to the store to get them.

Milo should have been surprised to think of her father having that kind of stuff in his kitchen. But then he thought of all the things Katarina had confessed to ingesting, when he had first tried to cure her weakness after visions. If he only knew that love and acceptance of her mate was the cure, he could have saved her from that experimentation a long time ago.

"Now, head up, no grovelling at her feet and look her straight in the eye. For all we know, Josanna or Janet did this to you," he bit out, angrily. "They could have hired the same person to cast the spell and got that person so mixed up they just chose both," Milo reminded him of the solution they had already come up with. It was the only way to explain the confusion over which of the two girls were to be his new mate.

Leo nodded and pulled on the white shirt Milo handed him. "Just think," he pondered, with a smile. "in a few days, I'll be doing this for you. Handing you the clothes you'll be getting united in," Leo smiled at his Alpha through the mirror.

Milo smiled back happily and nodded his agreement, helping him straighten out the shirt at the back. "Yeah. I've been thinking about that a lot today," he confessed.

"And your son? Are you going to explain that to me?" he asked, only to see confusion in Milo's eyes as he glanced at him in the mirror.

Leo buttoned up his shirt, while Milo laughed at the reminder of his gasped exclamation just before they found out Katarina was having another vision.

He genuinely hoped that she was already carrying their son. For no other reason than that he wanted her to be happy and he wanted to see their son. But he had a feeling she wasn't. He should have been able to sense if she was pregnant already.

"Katarina prophesied years ago that her first born son to her true mate," he began, feeling giddy about those words. "would be an all powerful shifter. He would have the power to crush or save our world," he explained the simplest version of events for his friend.

Leo turned and stared at him. "All powerful?"

"Yeah. He's been sending Katarina visions for years. From the future," Milo confessed with a fond smile, thinking of all the hope and love he had given his mother over the years, without knowing it. "I think he's like her...that he has her gifts. And I think one of us told him about how she was going to run away. Or he found out how scared she was, so he sent her the visions of himself," he posited, since it made sense. "Probably to reassure her that no matter what, we would be together...because he already existed," he shrugged when he finished, not wanting to dwell on the thought, but enjoying the idea all the same.

Leo continued to stare at him, disbelieving and surprised. Eventually, he shook his head. "You two are one wacky pair," he claimed, before heading off to find a pair of shoes to wear.

Milo stood there, laughing to himself at the truth of that. He still couldn't believe it. He was mated to Katarina and one day, soon or in the far future, they would have a son.

It filled him with such happiness to know that they were going to have a good and happy life together. Now all he needed to do was get that same good and happy life for his Beta...and his true mate.