Chapter 282 Uncompromising Opinions on Dairy – Amelia’s POV

Chapter 282 Uncompromising Opinions on Dairy – Amelia’s POV
The tomato and cheese panini had seemed like a brilliant idea seventeen minutes ago. Now it sat beside my chair, half-eaten, the cheese congealing into a study in culinary regret. The pups had wanted it desperately, then abandoned the craving after three bites. Apparently my unborn children already had the attention span of goldfish and uncompromising opinions about dairy.
I sipped my tea instead. The chair by the window caught thin afternoon light, warming the white plaster walls into something almost comfortable. Kaela dozed in our shared mind, curled on her side with one eye open and vigilance temporarily downgraded to mild interest.
Mindlink Mira, she murmured, the words fuzzy with sleep. Chocolate muffin. Grapes. Green, not red. Red grapes taste like disappointment wrapped in skin.
“I literally just ate.” I set the tea down. The panini continued its transformation into inedible art on the plate beside me.
You ate three bites of something the pups decided they hated halfway through. That doesn’t count. Chocolate. Now. Before I take control of your hands and start rifling through the cupboards myself.
I mindlinked Mira. The connection opened with a warm buzz that still reminded me of dial-up internet, if dial-up had been designed for werewolf royalty and came with fewer complaints.
Mira? Sorry to bother you. Any chance of a chocolate chip muffin and some grapes? The green ones. The panini turned out to be a catastrophic error in judgment.
Her answer arrived within seconds, cheerful and efficient. On it. Five minutes. Maybe six if the kitchen argues about the muffin, which they will, because Chef thinks chocolate before three is ‘indulgent’, but I think Chef can stuff his opinions where the sun doesn’t shine.
The knock came before I’d finished smiling. Three sharp raps against the door, and I called “Come in, Mira, it’s open,” without looking up from my tea.
Then cedar reached me from the doorway, followed by leather and whiskey.
Aleksandr. Alpha King, executioner of all the people that hurt his wife and the man who had kept me in the dark because he thought truth might break me. The whiskey lay heavily over his usual scent, not one glass but several, consumed across hours by someone who had stopped counting.
I froze with the teacup halfway to my mouth. Kaela woke at once, attention snapping towards the door so sharply that my vision blurred.
Holy shit, she said. He came. Do I look presentable? I haven’t groomed in two days.
“You’re a wolf. You don’t have clothes.” I set the cup down. My hand didn’t shake. I was proud of that. “Come in.”
The door opened slowly. Aleksandr stepped through, closed it with more restraint than he had shown in his office, and turned. Whatever I had prepared for, it was not this.
He looked like hell. Not the polished menace of the Alpha King on a bad day, but a man who had abandoned basic maintenance along with sleep. Stubble darkened his pale face. His black shirt was wrinkled, and his trousers bore the creases of someone who had spent most of forty-eight hours sitting. Whiskey, exhaustion and neglect clung to him more clearly than any royal authority.
His bloodshot gaze found mine. The hurt there was real, stripped of performance, the look of a man who had spent two days failing to construct a defence for his behaviour.
He approached the chair opposite and stopped with one hand on its back. His fingers curled around the wood. When he spoke, the words sounded scraped raw by forty-eight hours of waiting.
“Can I sit?”
I nodded once. The gesture held more caution than welcome. He lowered himself into the chair as if stubbornness had kept him upright and permission had finally released him.
“I’m sorry.” His voice was quiet, without protocol or polish. “I was an arse. I should not have kept any of it from you: the livestream, the security concerns, any threat that affected you or the pups. You had every right to know, and I took that right away because I decided protection meant control. It doesn’t. I was wrong.”
The apology rested between us, honest and undefended. No qualifiers. No demand that I understand his motives. Only the brutal truth: he had fucked up and expected nothing in return for admitting it.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation, Aleksandr.” My voice stayed steadier than I felt. I had rehearsed the words in the bath and in the lonely geography of a bed built for one. “I know you and Skoll want to protect us. But protection means giving me information and deciding with me what we do about it. Not deciding for me. With me. There’s a difference.”
He nodded. “I know. Skoll does too. It took him longer. Wolves are not built for the complexities of human partnership. He’s learning. We both are.”
My throat tightened. The question had waited since he entered, and I asked before I could retreat from it.
“And what does Skoll think about this? Really?”
Aleksandr’s focus shifted as he made room for something larger. When Skoll spoke through him, the voice carried none of Aleksandr’s control, only grief too raw for a wolf to disguise.
“I miss my mate.” A whimper lived beneath the words. “I hate that she’s upset. I hate that Kaela’s upset. I want to fix it, and I don’t know how. I want to protect you, both of you and the pups. That is what I am. I don’t know how not to want that.”
The honesty nearly undid me. Skoll, ancient and terrifying, sounded suddenly young and lost, and the ache beneath his words matched my own.
“You can protect us without hiding information, Skoll.” I leaned forward but did not reach for him. Touching would have ended a conversation that still needed finishing. “We talk things through. We do not lie or hide. That is partnership. That is what we are supposed to build.”
Let me, Kaela said quietly. I stepped aside, and the shift came smoothly, my body making room.
“Listen to me, you massive, stubborn, beautiful idiot.” Kaela’s voice came through my mouth, rougher than mine, threaded with a growl that made the teacup rattle. “You can’t keep doing this. Every time you decide something for us instead of with us, it damages what we are building. I understand the urge to protect. I spent twenty years trapped behind these ribs, watching her get hurt and unable to stop it. But protection without respect is control wearing a mask, and I can smell the difference, Skoll. So can she.”
Skoll answered through Aleksandr, low and wounded. “I’m trying. It is not simple. The wanting is simple. The how is complicated.”
“Then learn.” Kaela held firm, her presence filling the bond without blurring my vision. Love, not rage, powered the demand. “We are learning too, every day. So can you.”
The silence that followed felt less like peace than the first sound of rebuilding. Two predators had offered truths that hurt and chosen not to retreat from them.
Aleksandr’s focus returned. He rested one hand on the chair arm, giving himself something steady to do, then spoke with careful restraint.
“Will you come back? To our suite. Tonight.”
I nodded slowly. The decision had been forming for forty-eight hours and now settled into place. “Yes. I’ll come back.”
Relief loosened his posture. “I’ll keep trying. I cannot promise perfection, but I can promise honesty and effort. Every day. However many times it takes.”
“You need to, Aleksandr.” My voice roughened around the boundary. “I cannot keep feeling managed instead of trusted. I will not live that way again.”
“I know.” He offered no defence. “It will not happen again. I promise.”
I stood with an unauthorised groan from my lower back. Apparently carrying two rapidly growing pups had already persuaded my spine that structural obligations were optional.
“Your children,” I said, pressing one hand against the small of my back, “are starting to make my back hurt, Aleksandr Brecc. Fourteen weeks and they’ve already decided that my spine is merely a suggestion rather than a structural requirement.”
He rose and came to me without rushing. His palm found the ache at my lower back through the fabric of my shirt. The comfort did not feel like surrender. It felt like the beginning of coming home.
He kissed my forehead once, hard enough to betray forty-eight hours of restraint and gentle enough not to make the gesture an apology by itself.
“I missed the scan.” The words came out quiet against my hair. Not an accusation. A statement of regret, delivered with the weight of something he wished he could take back.
“I had Sylvia record it.” I reached for my phone on the side table. Scrolled to the video, the timestamp reading 10:17 that morning, and handed it to him. “The footage. And the audio. You can hear their hearts.”
His hand trembled when he pressed play. Greyscale filled the screen, then the rapid overlap of two strong heartbeats belonging to our future, entirely unaware their parents had spent two days in different towers learning how to be better.
He watched every second. His thumb rested against the phone’s edge, careful but still, and when the video ended the quiet no longer felt empty. It held work still to be done.
“I love you,” he said. The words came out rough. Simple. Undefended. “All three of you. However many times it takes.”
I took his hand. Forgiveness did not erase the damage or the effort still required; it only meant I was willing to continue beside him.
“Let’s go home,” I said. “Your children are demanding chocolate, and I’ve already mindlinked Mira twice in one afternoon.”
He laughed, rough and genuine, as if he had finally remembered how to breathe. We left the room side by side, not repaired, not finished, but moving in the same direction.