The Clinic Swapped My Donor, So a Billionaire Alpha Fathered My Baby novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: What I Did Behind Her Back

Anselm's POV

I left Medina at midnight without telling her.

That was the first thing I did behind Marit's back.

I did it with a clear conscience, because the alternative was to stand in her corridor again and hope.

The Hall sits on a ridge above Snoqualmie in a hundred acres of old fir.

A long gravel drive runs up to it, with lamps all the way.

I had grown up in it.

I had never once come home to it without feeling forty years of my mother in the walls.

She was in her study, as I'd known she would be, at a desk I'd been forbidden to touch since I was six.

She had a lamp on, a pot of tea, and a ledger open in front of her that she closed as I came in.

"You've heard about Gunnar," she said.

"The herald brought it to my door."

"Sit down, darling."

I didn't.

"Tell me about the Mother's Word," I said.

She was good.

She did not blink, and she did not look away, and for one second she nearly looked surprised.

"I wondered when you would ask," she said.

"You said it on her doorstep," I said. "'It has already begun.'"

"I did," she said.

"Then you knew. The night I told my father's story to a human nurse on the floor of my own house, you already knew."

She folded her hands.

"Every pack mother knows," she said. "It's the oldest thing we have. A she-wolf who carries a wolf's pup can ask anything of him with her voice, and his body will obey. It lasts until the pup eats on its own. Then it passes."

"Why does no man know it?"

"Because men who know it become afraid of their wives, or they become cruel to them." She smiled. "We swore an oath, Anselm. A long time ago. No mother tells a man, and no mother uses it to take what a man won't give. I told no man. Your father worked it out himself, and he was the happiest husband in the Cascades."

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