Lost by the Alpha, page 20
“So you want to make the announcement—when? Right now? This weekend?” Seth seems exasperated. He’s always been overly cautious, a trait I do appreciate most of the time, but right now, I just wish he’d agree with me that I’ve found the best course of action.
“I was thinking we could wait a couple of weeks until the autumn solstice celebration,” I explain. I would go ahead and let myself be seen with Isla even more than I already have so that people can begin to understand that she is more than just a breeder to me, and then, when I announce that she is not only carrying my child, but that she is the only woman I want by my side, then we can send the other girls home, and this farce will all be over with.”
“And then, what? You’ll announce that Isla will be the next Luna Queen?” Seth challenges me.
I narrow my eyes. “I didn’t say that, now did I?” I remind him.
He shakes his head slowly. “The point of this contest was to find the next Luna Queen. How can Isla win the contest but not win the position?”
“Because I’m the Alpha King, and I get to decide!” I bellow at him. “Just because Isla is having my baby, that doesn’t mean I think she’s fit to be the Luna Queen. I haven’t decided suddenly that I need a new Luna Queen. When did I ever tell you I intended to change that?”
Seth stares at me unblinking for several seconds. “You may not have said it to me, exactly, but you did to the Alphas. When you decided to enter into this contest. You do realize that if you don’t make Isla—or someone—the Luna Queen at this point, they are going to be angry, right?”
“You just told me that they were going to be angry anyway, so what the hell difference does it make?” I shout at him. “I guess we just need to increase the number of warriors we have in the direct service of the crown.”
“And to do that, we will have to pay significantly more, so where in the world would we get the money for that? We’re not broke, but we don’t exactly have money sitting around not already designated for other purposes.” Seth is always the voice of reason, and sometimes it is very irritating.
“I have no idea where we will get the money for it,” I admit. “But I think it’s worth looking into. Maybe we can sell some of these ghastly works of art.”
“And then the other Alphas and other kingdoms will say we are poor or weak. We can’t do that. You can’t just go selling off the national treasure.” Seth rolls his eyes at me and folds his arms across his chest.
I will have to study the accounting ledgers to see what I can do, but I’m not just going to declare Isla is my queen because the other Alphas think I should.
“You know… we could… find the resources elsewhere,” Seth says as he scratches the back of his head, not even looking at me as he speaks. “That’s an option now, don’t you think?”
“What in the world are you talking about, Seth?” I ask him.
He lets out a loud sigh. “Come on. I think you know, don’t you?”
Shaking my head, I wonder if I’m just too distracted to be capable of comprehending or if he is talking in riddles. “No, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Seth.”
He leans forward in his chair, his voice just a whisper. “You know… the… treasure?”
“Treasure?” At first, I have no idea what he’s talking about, but then, I realize what he’s referring to. “Absolutely not!”
“I know it’s an unorthodox idea, but with Isla—” Seth begins.
“No!” I shout at him. “We’re not even thinking about doing that, Seth. No good could possibly come of it. I don’t want to hear about this again, do you understand me?”
I can tell he’s angry and wants to keep discussing it because he thinks I’m wrong, but I don’t care. The suggestion he’s just made is the worst one I’ve ever heard in my life, and I don’t want to even think about it, let alone consider following through with it.
“Yes, Alpha,” he says, dryly. “Is there anything else?”
“Just get me the reports we discussed earlier,” I tell him.
“Of course, Alpha.” Seth stands, gives me a forced sign of respect, and then heads out the door.
Once he’s gone, I let out a deep breath. Sometimes, he has great ideas and suggestions, ones I would have never thought of on my own. Other times, I have to wonder what in the world has gotten into him. He doesn’t sound anything at all like the man I have known for all of these years, and all of his ideas make me wish I didn’t even know him, let alone make him my Beta.
I look down at the notes I wrote down earlier regarding the pregnancy. I wanted to make sure I had everything on paper in case I have questions later from Mystica.
I disagree with Seth’s advice to hold this information back. Finding out I’m having a healthy son seems like the solution to a huge problem to me, and I’m glad to know that I have done exactly what the law requires me to do—provide an heir. The fact that it’s a male is a bonus.
And then there’s just the fact that I am going to be a father. Rebecca and I had discussed having children for years. She hadn’t been ready to start trying yet because it would mean giving up the drugs. I had plenty of time back then before I had to start thinking about the fact that I needed an heir.
Then, with her death, everything had gotten muddied. I’d still felt the pressure of having an heir, which increased every year, but I wasn’t as interested in the idea. I’d wanted to have a child with the woman I loved, and I figured that was out of the question because the woman I loved was gone.
Now, I loved another woman, and she was going to be the mother of my child. I couldn’t be happier about that. We would make a happy little family. Together. Forever.
I couldn’t do anything to mess that up and anger the Alphas, so maybe Seth was right and I should give it some time. But this should satisfy the majority of them.
In the back of my mind, a soft voice I rarely heard said, “You should talk to Isla about this.” How long had it been since my conscience had weighed in on a situation? How long had it been since I considered asking someone other than Seth their opinion about what I should or shouldn’t do?
Probably since Rebecca died.
It seemed like a good idea, to ask Isla. Perhaps I would do that later.
I was looking forward to seeing her later, and celebrating the health of our baby boy.
For now, I had matters to attend to. Even on a celebratory day like this, an Alpha’s work was never done.
LETTER FROM THE PAST
*Isla*
“Well, who was it from?”
Poppy’s voice is too chipper for me. I’ve only just woken up from a long nap, and blinking a few times, I try to get my bearings, wondering what the hell she is talking about. Where is Maddox? I glance at the clock and see it’s almost 6:00. He’s usually done working by now.
“Isla?” Poppy is fluffing the pillows on the bed next to my head. Why is she in here? Did she wake me up? “You can’t sleep all day! I know you’re growing a human, but that requires food, too. You didn’t eat any lunch before you went to sleep. So why don’t you eat the snack I had the cook prepare while you tell me about the letter? I heard that King Maddox has had Seth in his office for a few hours, so who knows when he’ll be done.”
I sit up, feeling groggy. Whenever I don’t wake up naturally from a nap, I am always a grump. My stomach is rumbling, though, and when I glance over at the table, I see that Poppy has brought some of my favorites, including toast with cheese and sliced green apples.
Still rubbing my eyes, I wander to the bathroom, yawning, and then come back to the table. She’s straightened the bed; it looks like I never even laid down.
The toast is delicious, still warm. I eat a piece and a half while Poppy putters around. “Well?” she asks when I pause to take a drink of water. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“What question?” I honestly have no idea what she’s talking about.
“The letter,” she says again. I vaguely remember a similar question from earlier, now that she mentions it again. “Who was it from?”
“What letter? I don’t know what she’s talking about.”
Poppy sighs and looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “The letter I brought you when you got back from the doctor. The one that looked like it was a hundred years old.”
“Oh. Right.” Now, I am with her. She’d handed me that strange letter right before I went to sleep, and now it’s completely slipped my mind. It really didn’t seem important, only like a hassle of some sort, and I am not in the mood to open another can of worms. I can’t imagine anyone in the world who would need to contact me that I’d want to talk to anyway.
I shrug. “I didn’t open it.”
My maid’s eyes bulge slightly as her mouth drops open. “You didn’t even open it? Why not? Don’t you want to know what it is? Who it’s from?”
A wave of anxiety washes over me. Something about that letter seems ominous to me, and I can’t say exactly why that is. I don’t want to open it. I don’t even want to acknowledge its existence, though I can’t say exactly why.
“I don’t know, Poppy.” I take another bite of my food, but she’s making me lose my appetite, something that has been difficult this far into my pregnancy. “I just don’t want to think about it right now.”
Like most things, once Poppy has latched onto it, she won’t let it go. “Where is it?” she asks me, looking around the room. I wonder if part of her straightening up involved her actually looking for the letter.
I should probably just go ahead and open the damn thing in order to get her to let it go, but I’m almost as determined in my avoidance as she is in her insistence that it be opened. “In my nightstand drawer.” I glare at her for a second, daring her to walk over there and take it out of the drawer.
She holds my gaze for a long moment. When she turns, it’s to go dust my dresser. I almost laugh at her. She’s really trying to push my buttons now.
Without another word, I finish my snack and then go into the bathroom to freshen up a bit. I know it is killing Poppy not to get that letter out and read it, but I don’t think that she’ll do it.
When I return to the bedroom, she is reorganizing the books on the bookshelf, moving them around angrily.
“You are impossible,” I mutter to her as I cross the room to my bed.
“What?” she demands. “What did I do?”
I don’t even answer her because there’s no point in it. I’m going to have to read this letter, or she’s going to drive me insane. I’m not sure which is worse; reading a letter that might have a message in it that I don’t want to know about or having her hound me to death.
I take a seat on the edge of my bed and pull the letter out.
Studying it, a few things stand out to me again that I hadn’t noticed earlier. The postage stamp is strange. The text is in a different language. Also, there’s an odd ink stamp on it. I can’t read it. “Does that say Rudak?”
Why am I surprised that Poppy is right by my shoulder?
I turn the envelope a few times, trying to read it, but it’s faded. “I don’t know. What’s Rudak?”
“You really should look at a map sometime, girl. It’s an island near Maatua.”
My stomach twists up into a knot. “How do you know that? And don’t tell me you’ve been looking at a map.”
She snarls at me but then goes back to her normal expression. “No, that’s not how II know that, but I heard one of the delivery men talking about how he’d gotten some fruit from Rudak, and someone asked where that was. He says it’s one of the islands in the Sea of Moritzka, which is where Maatua is, right? So I looked it up, and it is.”
“So why would someone send me a letter from Rudak?” I look closely at the date on the letter. It was mailed to me over a year ago. The postage must be slow from the distant islands. It kind of looks to me like this letter has gotten lost in the mail and only just found its way to the post office in Willow pack. It’s a wonder they forwarded it here, rather than delivering it to my parents who probably would’ve opened it themselves or thrown it away.
“I guess we can open it and see,” Poppy prompts.
Again, I make a face at her, but I know she’s right. If I want to know who it’s from, I’m going to have to open the letter.
Carefully, I pull the top of the letter open, trying not to ruin the envelope at all in case we need to examine it later.
A piece of yellowed paper comes out. It’s folded so that I can’t see any of the writing until I unfold it. Neat, formal, cursive handwriting fills the page. The paper itself is smudged and dirty, and the corner is ripped off. It’s as if whoever wrote it had trouble finding a piece of paper.
My eyes trace down the paragraphs to the bottom. I’m not shocked when I see the signature.
With a sigh, I go back to the top and begin to read.
Dear Isla,
I hope that this letter finds you, and when it does, I hope it finds you well. You and your family have been off the letter for a number of years now, and if I know your parents, which I do, they probably haven’t told you much about Maatua, the place of your birth.
If you’ve heard anything at all about this place, you will know that it is cursed. Some say that I am the one who placed the curse. Others will tell you it is a witch who lives in the forest, one my husband, your uncle, paid to do so.
The truth is that neither of those things happened. I didn’t curse this land. Despite hating Antonio and wishing I’d never been brought here, Maatua was my home for many years. It is a special place, full of magic and wonder. Like the pool that brought us both back to life.
Do you remember? I’m guessing you do not.
Isla, your powers are greater than anyone will ever tell you. I need your help. You must return to Maatua and help me break the curse that has been plaguing this country all of these years. Only then will the great treasure of Maatua be released for the people to use to start over and prosper.
The treasure is hidden behind the waterfall, an enchantment binding it there. Together, the two of us can break the spell.
If you should run into Antony, you must know that he has been against me for all of these years, blaming me for the curse. It is his father’s doing. Do not listen to him. He can guide you back here, but please know, I mean you no harm. You were always a sweet girl, my darling Princess Tropicana. I hope to see you again soon.
Love,
Aunt Mary
I read the letter over twice, dumbfounded.
So many variations of the truth dance around in my mind. Who cursed the island? Was it the witch like Maddox told me or Aunt Mary, like Antonio seems to believe? Or was it someone else?
What is this treasure she’s speaking of? Maddox mentioned treasure seekers going there, but I just assumed he meant those looking for the royal coffers, not an actual treasure.
Would it be possible for me to go to the island and help Aunt Mary unlock the treasure so that Maatua can become a flourishing island once again? I had wanted to return just to lift the curse, but now there’s a promise of a better life for all involved.
“Well?” Poppy’s voice interrupts my thoughts. Obviously, she has read the letter, too. “That cousin of yours sure is a lying jackass.”
Of all of the things for her to say….
“I’m not sure who to believe,” I tell her. I fold the letter up and put it back in the envelope and then place it in my drawer. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t go anywhere. Not right now. It wouldn’t be safe for the baby.”
“Right.” Poppy sounds disappointed.
“Do you think I should go?” I ask her.
“I don’t know. It’s just… you seemed to want to go before.”
“But I was worried about the baby then, and now Mystica says he’ll be safe. I’ve waited this long. Why wouldn’t I wait a bit longer?” I argue.
“You’re not going to want to go once the baby is born. Then, you won’t want to go when he’s older because you’ll miss him. He won’t be able to go because of school. There will always be a reason not to go, if you let there be.” She shrugs, and I know that she’s right.
But now is not a good time to go, so I can’t risk it. I’ve made up my mind. End of discussion.
It’s a good place to end it, too, because just then my door opens, and Maddox walks in.
He is not going to find out about this letter.
OUTNUMBERED
*Isla*
The content of the letter continues to play through my mind for the next several days as I try to concentrate on other matters.
More important matters.
Like… whether or not Maddox is going to go ahead and announce the baby’s existence to the world. I have only asked him once, though, and when he practically growled at me that he hadn’t made a decision yet, I knew I just needed to wait and let him tell me.
For the most part, the two of us have been getting together very well since the appointment with Mystica, so I don’t want to irritate him. He just doesn’t know how to speak to me sometimes.
I often wonder how Rebecca would’ve responded if he’d growled at her, but I probably don’t want to know. From what I know about his wife, she didn’t take shit from anyone, whereas, even my own mother will tell me I am often a doormat.
Wonder whose fault that is….
Other more important matters include trying to decide on a name for this little one. I would like to know what to call him. Maddox says it’s not important yet, and we should use our brain cells on something else. So I don’t bother him with it. But I do spend a great deal of time thinking about it. He probably needs a royal name, something from Maddox’s past, his long line of kings, or what-have-you.
