Chapter 136 The Proposal
POV: Cormac | London, Neutral Flat
Moira had rented a flat in Clerkenwell, which was far enough from Kensington that Cormac's pack wouldn't see him coming and going, and close enough to the Rookeries that it felt like a statement he hadn't made yet. He didn't know if she'd chosen it deliberately. He'd stopped assuming he understood her choices the moment he realized he'd never started.
Finn was asleep in the back room. Cormac could hear him breathing from the hallway. Even breathing, deep and slow. A healthy born wolf's lungs, already strong at fourteen months.
He was sitting on Moira's couch when she came back from putting the baby down, and he was trying to figure out how to say the thing he'd come here to say in a way that wouldn't make her immediately tell him to leave.
She sat across from him. She didn't offer tea, which was Moira saying she wasn't sure how long he'd be staying.
"You wanted to talk," she said.
"I want to propose."
She looked at him for a long moment. Her face was very still. She had always been good at stillness, which was one of the things he had once loved about her and had later found inconvenient and was now, sitting here in her rented flat, grateful for.
"Propose," she repeated.
"Marriage." He said it plainly because there was no version of embellishing it that would help. "For Finn. For his legitimacy. For what he's owed." He stopped, then made himself continue. "And because I know I was wrong. What I did to you. Leaving the way I did."
"You didn't leave." Her voice was even. "You stopped responding to letters."
"That's a worse version of leaving."
"Yes." She didn't say it cruelly. She said it like a fact, which was worse. "It is."
He didn't argue. He had used up his instinct to argue about the things he'd done wrong somewhere around the third month after Callum's trial, when pack members had started looking at him differently and he'd realized that getting everything he wanted had not made him anything like happy.
"I'm not asking you to forgive me," he said. "I know what forgiveness costs and I'm not asking you to spend it before you're ready. I'm asking you to let me try. To let me be his father. Properly." He looked toward the back room. "He's a born wolf. He deserves to know what that means. He deserves the history."
"He deserves a father who doesn't treat people as pieces on a board."
Cormac was quiet.
"I don't know if I'm that person," he said, finally. "I know I'm trying to be. I know the difference between those two things."
Moira looked at him for a long time. The kind of looking that inventoried something. He let her look.
"Conditionally," she said. "You prove yourself first. Be his father. Show up consistently, not when it's convenient. Not when you need something from having a son. When it's hard and boring and he's crying at two in the morning for no reason." She leaned forward slightly. "If you can do that for six months without disappearing again, we talk about the rest."
He nodded.
"Conditionally," he agreed.
She went and got him from the back room. Finn was awake now, or had been woken by voices, and he was looking at Cormac with the frank animal curiosity of a toddler who hadn't yet learned to hide what he was thinking. Dark eyes. Callum's eyes, Cormac realized, with a sensation that wasn't quite pain and wasn't quite recognition. His twin's eyes in his son's face.
He held out his hand and Finn grabbed his finger without hesitation, which meant nothing, babies grabbed anything, but he felt it anyway.
He sat on the floor. Moira stood in the doorway, watching. Finn released his finger and went back to the soft toy he'd been working on before, pushing it in circles on the rug with the absolute concentration of someone who had identified this as the most important task currently available.
Cormac watched him. The way he moved. The way his brow furrowed when the toy didn't go where he wanted it.
There was something in him that was nothing like Cormac. Something patient, persistent, unbothered by setbacks. He pushed the toy the wrong direction, picked it up, turned it, tried again.
Cormac had seen that quality in exactly one other person his whole life.
He stayed until Finn fell asleep again, right there on the rug, toy still in his hand. He carried him to the back room and set him down carefully and stood at the crib for longer than he'd intended.
He wondered if Callum knew about Finn. He probably did. Callum knew most things eventually.
He wondered if Finn would be better off knowing his uncle before his father. If that particular bloodline's best qualities had skipped sideways rather than down.
He left without waking either of them.