Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 243

Ch. 15

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Cassandra

I come back around to the sound of Liam. It’s the first thing I register. Followed quickly by the pain that seems to engulf me from head to toe and how difficult it is to suck in a breath. No, please No! I don’t want him to see me like this!

He’s not crying. Not the loud, urgent crying of a child who needs something, but the quiet kind. The soft crying of a child who knows there is no one to hear him but can’t keep the sound from escaping anyway.

He’s beside me where I’m lying on the road. He’s not supposed to be here. I told him to stay by the car. He must have heard something—or came looking for me when I didn’t come back-or heard the sounds and—

His small hand is pressed flat against the cut above my cheekbone. The way he’s seen adults press wounds.

“Mama,” he says, when I open my eyes. Just: Mama. The word doing the work of every feeling he has-relief and fear and the steadiness of a four-year-old who is trying to comfort his adult parent the only way he knows how.

I squint at him through swollen lids but my vision swims. I hold still until it stops.

“Hi, baby,” I try to pat him but my hand flails. My voice comes out thin-even the simple act of speaking is too painful. “I’m here.”

“You were sleeping,” the statement more like a question but I don’t disagree.

“I know.” I say instead.

“There were wolves,” Fuck. How much did he see?

“There were but they’re gone now.” I reassure him.

He looks at me with his father’s eyes-direct, waiting. “Are you hurt?”

I take inventory. The rib situation is going to need to be dealt with. The cut on my face has stopped bleeding but the area around it is already swelling. My shoulder moves when I tell it to, which means nothing is broken there, but the movement hurts like a bitch.

My head-I covered it, I remember covering it, but there’s a quality to my thinking that feels like wading through sludge. And who knows what they did to me after I passed out.

“I’m a little hurt,” I admit. Because a lie would be obvious, even to a four-year-old. “But I’m going to be okay.”

He keeps his hand on my face. I look at my son and the tears that sting my eyes have nothing to do with the pain. He’s sitting in the road in the dark with his small hand pressed to my cheek, crying softly, having walked from the car by himself to find me because he was scared.

He came to find me. And he found me like this. The implications of that hit me like a bag of bricks.

I can’t protect him.

Not like this, not in a car on a road with no pack and no resources and ribs that are going to make the next several days difficult and a head that isn’t working at full capacity. I couldn’t protect him before I was injured. I certainly can’t protect him now.

The thought won’t leave. I cannot protect my son.

I sit up slowly, gingerly, stifling the groan that wants to escape. Liam moves with me and stays pressed against

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my side, his crying stopped now. I hold him close, despite the pain the pressure causes, and thank the Goddess it wasn’t worse.

The road is blissfully quiet. The settlement lights are visible in the distance, which tells me I didn’t go far. The wolves are gone, probably bored enough to move on after finding I have nothing left to take. And I just sit on the road with my son, thinking about my broken ribs and how I’m going to manage to stand, let alone get him safe for the ngiht.

“Mama’s okay,” I say, for his benefit or mine, I’m not sure.

He doesn’t say anything. Because he may only be four but he has eyes and I have apparently raised a child who doesn’t accept obvious lies, which under other circumstances would be something I was proud of.

“We’re going to go somewhere,” I promise him. “First thing tomorrow.”

“Somewhere safe?” he asks a little too cynically for his young age.

I don’t answer right away like I normally would. Instead, I think about the bond with Noah-faint, but still there, despite the rejection. I think about what I’d say. What I’d ask. Whether he’d throw me out before I finished a

sentence.

He’d have the right. But I’m going to go anyway.

“I’m not sure,” I answer honestly. “But I hope so.”

I’m not sure how I get back to the car but somehow I manage it. I drive through the night, my ribs objecting the whole way. Liam falls asleep in the back and I sit in the quiet, running through what I’m going to say and then stop because I’m too tired to rehearse and I’m probably going to fuck it up anyway.

The gate comes up in the gray before dawn. I pull up and the guard looks at me then the car then back at me. He doesn’t quite manage to hide his cringe when he takes in what I look like-the cut, the swelling, the way I’m holding myself. Who can blame him?

“Name,” he pulls out a clipboard, ready to check if I’m on the list.

“Cassandra Winters.”

His eyes trail down the list of names I’m clearly not on, then he reaches for his radio. I hear him say Alpha Stephens. There’s a woman at the gate. She says her name is Cassandra Winters. She has a child with her. He pauses. She, uh, doesn’t look well.

Liam is awake in the back seat now. He’s looking out the window at Ironwood territory in the early light. The guard listens to his radio while I wait for him to turn me away. He mutters something else I don’t catch, probably discussing the rejection I’m about to receive.

“Alpha Stephens will see you,” he says when he turns back to the car.

I didn’t expect that. I stare at him stupidly for a minute, sure I must not have heard him right.

Then I pull through the gate before he can change his mind.

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