Page 3 of Alpha’s Secret Baby Girl (Nightfall Island Alphas #1)

Seven Years Later

The headache had been pressing behind Gwen’s eyes for hours now.

She knew the warning signs and had tried to get out of work early, but her boss had said, “There’s no going home early on a Holiday Friday night,” and sent her back to taking orders.

Her jaw hurt from how much she’d been grinding her teeth against the pain when she was filling drink orders.

It took all of her strength to maintain an upbeat, cheerful demeanor.

“Can I get you folks any dessert?” she asked as she approached a table of ten people, including a father, mother, and their eight grown children. They were here to celebrate a birthday.

“Sure you can,” the father of the family said, leering at her with that familiar unwelcome gleam in his eye. “When can you stop by the house?”

His wife gave Gwen an apologetic look. “We’ve got cake at home.”

“I’ll just get you your check then,” Gwen said. “Together or separate?”

“Together,” the man said quickly.

She was just printing out the order when her headache suddenly spiked. Her eyes widened and she gasped, her stomach rolling and her knees buckling. She collapsed to the floor, clutching at her head. Her vision blacked out, and a strange buzzing rang in her ears.

Images formed in the darkness. People. At first, they were indistinguishable blobs, but then they began to take shape, forming faces.

She recognized them. Kira and Michael, from her old pack.

They wavered in ripples of heat waves, then disappeared.

A strange sense of dread filled Gwen. Kira’s face twisted, and her mouth dropped open in a silent scream.

More figures burst through the haze. Wolves, dozens of them.

She didn’t know their names, but she knew they were from the pack.

They were in danger. They were being hunted.

Then Lianne appeared. Her infectious six-year-old smile was beaming up at Gwen, looking exactly as Gwen did in pictures from when she was that age.

Same wavy blonde hair. Same green eyes. Confident in ways her mother never was.

Even her smile faded to horror, and she screamed, a silent, soundless scream that seemed to darken the fog even more.

Suddenly, it was gone. The headache disappeared.

Gwen was kneeling on the floor, a crumpled receipt in her hand.

Her chest heaved with the leftover adrenaline from those horrible images in her head.

Quickly, she pulled herself upright. Her legs trembled, but when she glanced around, she didn’t see anyone staring. Nobody seemed to have noticed.

She took the cheque to the table, received payment, then headed into the back. The restaurant manager, Trevor Dump, was watching basketball on his TV, eating Parmesan fries, and drinking a Coke. The office was crammed full of his old High School sports trophies.

“Trev, I have a wicked migraine,” Gwen said, rubbing her temples, though they no longer hurt. “I need to clock out early.”

Trevor frowned at her. “Thought you wanted extra shifts.”

Gwen grimaced. “I do. But with this migraine…”

She trailed off. Trevor heaved out an annoyed sigh but waved her off. “Sure, sure. Let me know if you need tomorrow off.”

“Will do,” Gwen muttered. “Thanks, Trev.”

Her hands didn’t stop shaking until she was halfway home.

The vision—no, the hallucinations—had been happening more often lately.

She’d always had difficulty with them. Sometimes they came true, but usually it was only exhaustion talking.

She shouldn’t even be thinking about that old pack.

They were nothing to her. Maybe it was just that she was feeling guilty about not contacting Kira in a few months.

That had to be it, right? That, combined with these intense days. The restaurant barely covered the bills, so she had taken on some extra work online to try to build a buffer and give Lianne a better life. The exhaustion must be catching up to her, making this old infirmary flare up again.

That’s all it was. An infirmary. Some sort of mental illness, one that fortunately didn’t seem to have passed down to Lianne.

And whether or not some of these hallucinations seemed to have come true…

well, that was only a coincidence. A shudder ran down her spine as she shook herself, trying to push aside those uncomfortable thoughts.

As for the pack… well, why should she even be thinking about them?

After he rejected her so publicly, she left.

It had been the only thing to do, leave the pack and all their cruelty.

That was the first choice Gwen made that had actually made sense, leaving.

She had never felt the need to shift, never felt her wolf’s presence strongly, so relocating into the city had been easy enough.

It was better than being in a pack that treated her like their favorite punching bag.

She missed Kira, though, and Kira’s younger sister Chelsey.

Kira and Gwen had first bonded through their shared outcast status, and Chesley had naturally been pulled into their little group.

The three of them did their best to stay in touch, and sometimes the two sisters would come to the city to visit.

But they didn’t talk very much anymore, other than the occasional email or the obligatory ‘Happy Birthday’ phone call.

The bus arrived at her stop, and Gwen got off.

It was still early in the night, not yet eight.

Frustration built in her chest. Now that she was practically home, she was starting to regret asking for the night off.

As tired as she was, she could have lasted another few hours.

The loss of tonight’s income was going to hurt.

She’d have to redo the budget for the next paycheck to make sure she could get all the bills paid.

But even those frustrations melted away when she got into the house. Lianne was in her PJs, sitting on the couch with her babysitter, Kelly, as they read bedtime stories. Lianne’s eyes lit up when she saw Gwen.

“Mommy!” she jumped up and ran to her, throwing her arms around her stomach. “Ha! Kelly said I wasn’t allowed to stay up all night, but I did!”

Gwen laughed and kissed Lianne’s head. “I came home early, Annie-Lee,” she teased, using her pet name for her daughter. “I hope you didn’t give Kelly too hard a time.”

Kelly laughed. “She was a perfect angel.”

“Uh-huh,” Lianne agreed, then yawned, her small frame sagging into Gwen’s side.

Gwen kissed her again and picked her up. “Kelly, do you mind cleaning up while I put Lianne to bed?”

Normally, Kelly would get Lianne to sleep and then do some light cleaning in the house. Gwen didn’t want to put her out of the income she’d been planning on having, not when Gwen knew her family was struggling since her mother got sick. Kelly looked relieved as she nodded.

As Gwen read stories and tucked Lianne into bed, the exhaustion from the day gradually gave way to sleepiness.

Learning she was pregnant was one of the hardest days of her life.

She hadn’t known what to do, didn’t know if she could reach out to Raf—to him, to tell him about being pregnant.

But then she remembered the laughing look on his face when he said, “I was bored.”

She couldn’t trust him. Not with her baby.

Becoming a single mother was challenging, but it had worked out in the end.

Her love for Lianne carried her through the rough days.

She couldn’t imagine a different life. The only regret she had was wondering if she was enough for Lianne.

If there was something Lianne was missing out on by not being part of a pack.

We’re our own pack, she reassured herself when she turned off the big light and turned on the night light. Lianne rolled to her side, her hands tucked under her cheek as she closed her eyes.

Exhaustion started weighing heavier on Gwen; the earlier tension of a migraine was starting to pull at her temples. She went back to the kitchen, where Kelly was cleaning up.

“I need to head to bed. Will you be alright heading home on your own?” Gwen asked, one hand resting on the back of her aching neck.

Kelly hesitated. “I have a lot of homework to do, and home is pretty noisy right now. Do you mind if I stay and work here?”

“Go ahead,” Gwen told her. “Let me know how many hours you worked tomorrow, okay?”

Gwen headed back to her room. Normally, she would shower after coming home, but her limbs felt loosened at the joints, her muscles aching.

She washed the makeup off her face and threw her hair into a braid before she collapsed into bed.

Her eyes shut instantly, her body sinking into that space between sleep and wakefulness, that hazy place where dreams were real.

Lianne was screaming. The ocean crashed and roared around her, and she screamed.

Her voice echoed in Gwen’s ears, but no matter how much Gwen pushed herself, she wasn’t getting any closer.

Darkness closed in. It clawed at her throat, plucking at her hair and peeling back her skin.

Other voices joined Lianne’s scream as everything dissolved around her.

***

The scent of sea air settled in Gwen’s lungs as the ferry pulled into the docks on the island.

Her pulse thrummed in her throat. Lianne gasped and laughed, clapping and pointing out the seagulls in the air, the seals on the beach, and the dolphins leaping out of the ocean.

She was delighted by everything she saw, but Gwen could only feel dread.

This place was the one place she had never wanted to come back to.

Kira waited on the dock. She bounced on her toes, a wide smile on her face. When she waved eagerly, Gwen waved back. Her arm felt stiff, her smile frozen on her face. This wasn’t a safe place. It wasn’t right to be back here. What if Rafael—

He’s not here, she reminded herself of the conversation she’d had with Kira before deciding to come back to the island.

Rafael wasn’t here; he was attending to some business on the mainland.

Only Michael was here on the island, and Gwen doubted he’d notice her enough to report back to his brother.

Kira hadn’t mentioned Randall, so it must mean he wasn’t around either.

It was safe. For her and for Lianne.

“Gwen!” Kira enveloped her in a hug. “Ohmygoodnessitsbeensolong!” she exclaimed in one breath.

Gwen laughed and hugged her back. Something inside felt lighter already.

She would be able to tell Kira about these visions, be reassured that she just needed a good, solid rest. Kira took the two of them walking down the beach, and soon encouraged Lianne to start busying herself collecting seashells.

“So what is this about?” Kira asked, her expression careful. “You always swore never to bring her here.”

“I wanted to leave her at home. But I decided I didn’t want to leave her with the neighbors that long.” Gwen bit her lip. “Something… happened.”

Kira nodded, letting her speak at her own pace. Gwen explained the nightmares she’d been having and how they had grown more intense, to the waking hallucinations. She kept expecting Kira to tell her she was being crazy, but instead, Kira’s expression only grew more serious.

“I’ve been having dreams like that, too. Less detail than yours, but they’re there. I decided to look into my ancestry because of it. You know… the witches.” Kira lowered her voice and glanced around anxiously as she spoke, even though they were alone on the beach.

Gwen watched Lianne as she picked up a starfish on the sand.

She was about to tell her to put the starfish back, and not in her little bag with her shells, but Lianne carefully carried the starfish to the tideline and placed it in the water.

Lianne patted the starfish and raced back up the beach, collecting a second starfish.

“You think this is our witch heritage?” Gwen asked Kira, not looking at her.

“It might be.”

Both of them were descended from a coven of witches that had moved to the island three hundred years ago.

The magic was meant to have bred itself out as the witches mated with the wolf shifters, but having that witch ancestry was cited as the reason why Gwen, Kira, and Chelsy had such weak wolves.

Shifters and magic weren’t meant to mix.

If it weren’t for the pact made by witches and shifters way back when the witches first arrived, the three of them may have been kicked out entirely, even though they didn’t have magic of their own.

“I believe that something is igniting our magic heritage,” Kira murmured. “These aren’t just nightmares. They’re visions, and I think they’re warning us of danger that is coming for the pack.”

Gwen’s stomach clenched. She wrapped her arms around herself. If that was the case, she needed to get Lianne and get off this island. Get away from the pack and everything that came with it.

Kira touched her shoulder. “You’re thinking of leaving again.”

She hesitated but nodded.

“Rafael isn’t due back for several days. You’ve come all this way. Why don’t you stay for a few hours, at least? Show Lianne some of your old haunts? And we can do a bit more research, compare notes.” Kira peered at her anxiously. “Please. It’s been so long.”

Gwen bit her lip. She should leave. She should get her daughter out of here.

But Rafael wasn’t here. And it had been so long since she’d been able to just be herself with her friend.

Plus, it would give them the opportunity to go through their visions and compare notes.

Maybe they’d figure out what was happening. She forced a smile and nodded.

“Alright. A few hours can’t hurt.”