I grimaced as a theory formed in my mind. There had been a wolf among those Shade people. It was very possible that they had used this starry portal to travel to The Woodlands in the first place. And their wolf had managed to scent him…

Gazing down into the crater, my chest heaved imagining where Bastien could be now. Sharing the bed of that wench back in The Shade! My blood boiled. Oh, he had better not be. He had better not…

It appeared that fate had transpired against me. Which meant that now, I had no choice but to transpire against fate.

I shuddered even as I thought about what I was about to propose to my husband. But I gritted my teeth. I could not have that boy make a mockery of my daughter or my family. After he’d been betrothed to Rona for so long, no other werewolf worthy of my daughter would ever accept her. Even though Bastien and Rona had hardly touched since childhood, she would already be considered tainted, spoiled. Rejected by someone else.

Besides that, the progeny Bastien’s seed produced would be the envy of every family in The Woodlands. His bloodline was fine… finer than he even knew.

He just had to be my daughter’s. And he already was my daughter’s. It was simply a matter of him giving up his delusions and accepting the fact.

Thus, I turned to my husband and said in a low, grim voice, “We must call upon the Mortclaws.”

As I expected, my husband’s eyes bulged with shock, then sheer terror. “What? The Mortclaws? You can’t be serious, Brucella!”

“I am quite serious,” I replied, even as my lower lip trembled slightly at the thought of facing such creatures.

Whether I liked it or not, the time had finally come for Bastien to meet his real birth parents…