Page 363 of Alpha Mates

My frown deepens. He takes a seat beside her as she sets her mug down, his expression grim. I cautiously lower myself onto the opposite couch, and they both take a deep breath.

I knew this wasn’t going to be easy, but I hadn’t expected this, whateverthisis.

I just wanted to talk to them, make sure they know I don’t want their interference in the family I’m building with Julian. I gave up on them as parents a long time ago. And for now, I didn’t want them as grandparents either.

Maybe that could change. One day. If they did. But I can’t even start that conversation with the way they’re looking at me.

But they’re not really looking at me. They look at the floor and the walls. They look at the space between my eyes and my chin. They look at their clenched hands and mine, and everything else butme.

“Still too hard, huh?” I ask with a hollow chuckle.

“No,” Dad says, finally meeting my eyes for the first time. As always, he struggles to keep it without my shades there to smooth the way, but for once, there’s no shame. “It’s not that, Aiden.”

“What is it then?” I ask, tired of this weird shift and the way they’re sitting there as if someone died.

His expression cracks, and Ma’s too. I watch her eyes fill, and my frown deepens.

“It all went so wrong,” he croaks, “and I don’t even know how.”

Ma makes a soft sound, like a wounded animal. It’s damning, hearing it from her lips. She lifts a hand to stifle anything else from slipping free. Beside her, my father’s lips tremble, shaking before suddenly, he breaks. In that moment I see a man I don’t know.

My father was a harsh man—harsh voice, harsh eyes, harsh face, and a harsh, unwavering hand.

There was a time he wasn’t, but I could barely remember who he was then, or the family we used to be. Sometimes, dreams offered me a mother who woke me up with kisses. A father who took me out on his back for runs whenever he could. I saw a boy who smiled more than he cried, and ran headfirst into everything because he hadn’t learned fear yet.

I used to think that child died with the rogues—and that when what was left finally came home,hisparents did too. Wewere the remnants. Me first, and then them, who must’ve moulded themselves to be the right parents forme, this new child that wasn’t theirs—the one with red eyes, a temper, and a habit of breaking his own fingers when he was scared.

They had to be harsh, especially my father. But he’s not harsh now as I watch him crumble.

He’s sombre. Sombre, like he’d been on the roof the last time I saw him, when he finally seemed to understand. Soft, like he used to be. But his tenderness is not comforting. If who he was before had found his way back to life, then seeing him now doesn’t feel like coming home.

It feels like watching a version of my father from another world through a looking glass, because I don’t know this man. He’s not my father. He’s not harsh, so this mildness is only disconcerting.

“We didn’t know what to do, Aiden,” my mother mumbles as she lowers her trembling hand. “We just—” she shakes her head as the tears spill. “We didn’t know what to do.”

I assume they mean with me. They must, because otherwise, what else could they be talking about?

I came here to speak about our future, but now they are randomly confessing past sins as if I were their priest, not their son.

“Nothing was ever supposed to hurt you,” Dad says, his voice trying to harden around that declaration, but it fractures and falls apart, like him. “Nothing. But then,” his gaze drops as he shakes his head, “they got you.”

Max whines softly, pained by the reminder of the torment I had to endure alone because he wasn’t with me yet, and neither were they. The sadness overwhelms him, and I can feel it, but it’s not mine. It’s separate, like an amputated limb that I keep expecting to feel the phantom pain of.

“We failed you in the very worst way, and we didn’t know how to deal with it,” he says, “how to keep them from knowing.”

I nod, relaxing as the familiar rhetoric surfaces. It stings as it always does, but I appreciate the familiarity of it.

“No, Aiden,” Ma groans as she shifts further up the edge of her seat. Her eyes are pleading as she looks at me. “We weren’t trying to hide it because we were ashamed of you. We hid it to protect you.”

“Protect me?” I echo as I feel my lips spread into a bitter smile. “And how did you work that one out?”

“Rogues had you for an entire month, Aiden. They changed you.” Her tears slip past her lashes, catching on the wrinkles beneath. “If people knew, they might not have wanted you as alpha. The pack, maybe, but the Council? They would never have allowed it, and the one thing you always wanted was to be alpha.”

The skin over my heart burns—right where the Code is inked. It burns like it did the day I first got it done, then festers, spreading until it fills mychest and then my soul. The same soul that had been clawing towards that role from the moment I could put a name to it.

Julian told me that he’d never wanted to be alpha, but I couldn’t remember a day when I didn’t.

My parents knew that. Of course they did. They were the ones who stayed up at late watching me try to memorise the Alpha’s Code. Let me sit in on meetings even when I was too young to understand what was going on, because being there made me happier than any game they could’ve put in front of me. It was all I wanted, and they knew it.