Page 73 of An Unending Claim
“Mon ange, this will take hours if you don’t let me get through it.”
“You have a point. I’ll save my questions for the end.”
“While I was home, I met my fated mate.”
I opened my mouth, but he shot me a look and I swallowed my question, adding it to my list for when he was done.
“Do you know about fated mates and how they are different from true mates?”
“A little, but I didn’t spend much time with shifters after I left for France.”
“Fated mates don’t have a choice like you do. Once I met her, my body would not work for anyone else.”
“You mean…”
“Your mom would have been committed to a man who could never give her anything except… emotional love. We wouldn’t be able to complete a mating, I couldn’t give her sexual intimacy, more children, anything but a companion and someone to help her raise our child.”
He reached out and took my hand. “I would have done it for you, but I couldn’t live with doing that to your mom. She… she insisted that she didn’t care, but… I couldn’t take the chance that she would one day resent me. And then there was the woman I was fated to. She would be doomed to the same fate as me and Marissa. She could only feel physical desire for me, and finding a man who would accept that was unlikely. Not to mention the pain that we would endure from the separation.”
He stood and pushed his hands through his hair. “Despite all that, I was going to stay. But when your mom found out what staying here meant for my fated mate, she refused to be with me. She said she couldn’t live with herself if she was too selfish to give me up, which only made me love her more. It took her a long time to convince me to go. The only reason I gave in was because she realized that without mating, there was nothing that would convince her father to accept me. Xavier wasn’t as… well, he had a little more sanity back then. But it was Marissa who kept him grounded, and she was afraid to risk my life if that balance was upset and we didn’t have the mating bond forcing him to accept it. She promised that she would keep you safe, give you everything I wanted for you.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at me with a soft expression. “She loved you more than anything in any universe, Peyton. Eventually, I agreed to go back to my world and give myself a shot at a normal life with Georgia—your…stepmother, I suppose—and Marissa convinced me that the only way for any of us to be happy was for me to stay away. That it would only cause all of us unnecessary pain. I… damn it, Peyton. I don’t know how the hell she convinced me not to be in your life. I’ve questioned it every day since I left.”
“Do”—I swallowed hard, not sure I wanted to know the answer—“do you have other kids?”
He hesitated, then nodded. “You have a younger sister and brother—twins, actually.”
I wasn’t sure how to process that, so I remained silent and he continued, as if he sensed how much I needed it.
“I didn’t come back until you were almost twelve. After Georgia… well, she found some of the papers I showed you earlier. After you were born, Marissa begged Owen to bring the birth certificate and sonogram photo to the contact I set up. Just in case she ever needed me. She named me as your father on your official birth certificate, and luckily, Xavier never requested the original, because she had a doctored one made for your grandfather. Georgia found the papers and unmailed letters I’d written to you over the years.”
“Does she hate me?” Was she the reason he’d never come back even after he’d set up my escape?
“No.” He smiled softly. “She was beyond pissed at me for hiding it from her, but more so for the fact that I’d let Marissa talk me into staying out of your life.” He tilted his head and studied me for a second. “They’d all like to meet you if you’re ever up for it.”
“Um… maybe.” I needed time to process all of this before I made any decisions about the future.
“Fair enough. Well, I went to Jude and asked for his help to come back. He lent me the amulet I’d used nearly a dozen years earlier that opened a portal to your world. I couldn’t get close to you without alerting Xavier and I didn’t know how that would affect your life, so I waited, hoping to catch you the next time you left Castile territory.”
“Except I was never allowed to leave.”
His eyes filled with despair and his shoulders sagged. “If I’d known… well, one day, I spotted Owen and followed him. When I explained who I was, and showed him the papers, he told me about Marissa and begged me to help you. He didn’t tell me just how bad it was, probably because he knew I would have barged in and tried to save you, which would have likely resulted in both our deaths. He told me he feared for your life more with every day that you aged, but he promised to protect you until I could get everything in place. So I went back to E.V.I.E. and acquired all of the papers I needed. In my world, I had the connections and the favors to get it all, and amazingly, ours were exactly the same as what you use in this realm. Jude provided me with the necessary help to have the applications and such slipped into the records here. Although I never told him your name, so no, he wasn’t aware of the fact that Nathan’s mate was also my daughter.”
That made me feel a little better about Jude, but I was still pissed that he’d been so fucking cryptic the last time we spoke with Nathan.
“I set up the bank accounts, school, your dual citizenship, all of it in your legal name. And just so you know, Owen didn’t know anything about my plans. Not one detail. He didn’t want Xavier to find you if he went digging into his mind or used the hive mind to force him to talk. However, Owen knew you were alive and the details of your escape, including the truth about me. Which concerned us for two reasons. If Xavier found out my name, we didn’t want him putting it together and looking for you under your new—real—last name. Also, Jude had explicitly told me I could only use the amulet if no one but Owen ever found out about it. If Xavier knew, that power-hungry son of a bitch would have done anything, hurt or killed anyone, to have access to one.”
“That’s why you stayed away?” Part of me understood. The other part was still hurt and angry as hell.
“Well, there were several reasons. I didn’t want to inadvertently be a tool for Xavier to find you. I even considered killing the evil son of bitch, but if you were ever found, I didn’t want suspicion to be cast on you. I thought about…” He looked sad again, but then he chuckled as he sat back down on the couch. “Georgia is still salty over the whole thing. She begged me to bring you home with me, but I just couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t?”
“Peyton, you’d been through so much. How could I bring you home to a family who would eventually leave you all alone again someday, with no option for going back to the place where you would be among your kind?”
“What do you mean, ‘my kind’?”
My dad sighed and leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees. “Until a few months ago, immortal shifters did not exist in my universe.”