Chapter 219: Little demon
“He spent the entire night in Alan’s office again…” Jane said softly, her eyes fixed on Magnus.
Setting his documents aside, the Alpha gently drew his mate into his arms, settling her onto his lap so she could rest. The final month of pregnancy was taking a heavy toll on his woman.
The intense hormonal spikes driven by their unborn daughter’s emerging aura were wreaking havoc on Jane’s body. Everyone had anticipated that the child would be born a dominant, but no one had expected such a wild, overwhelming wave of influence.
The pack estate’s security detail had been tripled, with every guard taking high-strength scent suppressants—though it offered little relief.
Jane’s altered aura now triggered a fierce, protective instinct in every male on the property. Magnus gritted his teeth in quiet frustration, watching massive, hardened guards practically trailing after her like eager pups, ready to jump at her smallest whim.
Old Derek had lost his mind entirely, meticulously checking the temperature of her food down to the exact degree and asking a dozen times if everything was to her liking. Even Alan hadn’t escaped the mother-hen virus; Magnus was ready to shove the doctor’s stethoscope where the sun didn’t shine for his overbearing fussing.
For his part, Magnus felt it with uncanny accuracy whenever his daughter staged an internal revolt against her mother. During those moments, he made a point to stay as close to his wife as possible. The instant the little pup sensed her father’s aura, she would grow quiet. Just like now: as soon as his warm palms settled over Jane’s taut belly, a long, quiet sigh of relief escaped her lips.
“She is definitely going to be a daddy’s girl. The way she plays soccer with my internal organs is beyond belief. I love our daughter, but sometimes she acts like a little demon—and she isn’t even born yet,” Jane chuckled softly, leaning her head back against the Alpha’s shoulder and pressing her lips gently to the skin behind his ear.
“What does Adam say about Damian?” the Alpha asked thoughtfully, a dark furrow appearing between his brows.
“He says his aggression levels drop sharply whenever he is near the capsule, but his emotional state plunges into a deep depression.”
Magnus let out a heavy breath. Pressing a kiss to his wife’s temple, he shifted a somber gaze toward the window. They had been searching for Amelie continuously, never pausing for a single day. They had combed every inch of the surrounding coastlines, abandoned outposts, and remote hamlets far beyond the city limits, questioning anyone who would speak.
The finest detectives in the region had been dispatched, but the investigation was crippled by a critical complication: the facility where the children had been held was located across foreign borders. Magnus had personally slaughtered Dean, and with his death, every last thread leading to actionable intelligence had gone cold.
To make matters worse, the two private investigators hired abroad had vanished without a trace. The monsters involved in the child experiments were backed by power at the highest levels of government. Magnus understood their motives, but no matter how noble a lie they told themselves, there was always another path—one that didn’t demand the blood of innocent children.
Madmen in power, wielders of vast state resources, stood at the helm of these barbaric trials. Men who had lost the physical ability to father offspring or find their fated mates had built an underground network of secret laboratories. They seduced elite surgeons, geneticists, reproductive specialists, and immunologists to their cause—all to artificially engineer a new gene resistant to fated bonds.
They were desperately trying to cheat nature itself, to shatter the immutable laws of creation. But judging by the broken state of young Damian, the only thing they had succeeded in breaking was a child’s life.
Magnus clenched his jaw, remembering how calmly the boy had explained that ink could never hold on his skin. Of course, they hadn’t believed him at first. Alan—that idiot—had brought over a tattoo machine to test it, pricking a tiny dot into the boy’s forearm.
Magnus recalled with dark satisfaction the massive black eye he had dealt the doctor afterward; he had struck Alan himself out of sheer fury. The boy’s finger had inflamed shortly after, and the top layer of skin simply peeled away. No pigment remained. No mark, no scar. Absolute, unblemished skin. The boy would never carry a tattoo, nor would a mark ever appear on his fated mate. He would never be able to trace her…
For atrocities like these, skinning the perpetrators alive was a mild mercy—merely the bare minimum Magnus planned to inflict once they tracked down the bastards.
Finding the girl, however, was proving nearly impossible. No photographs, no verified age, no records. Not even a precise date of her disappearance. Nothing at all. Only a name—one that the child, if she were even still alive, might never utter out of sheer terror of being hunted down and silenced.
Amelie.
It was a beautiful name. Magnus knew that in one of the ancient tongues, it signified love. What a cruel, twisted irony—to bestow such a name upon a test subject, only to treat her with such cold-blooded brutality.
“Have you spoken with him?” the Alpha asked, drawing his wife tighter against his chest.
𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚
A chilling realization washed over him: soon he would have a daughter—a child over whom a bloody, brutal war could break out, given that her gene profile would be far more potent than even her mother’s. A tiny, miraculous pinnacle of evolutionary creation.
“Yes, but he senses and sees that I’m pregnant. He promises he won’t do it anymore, but it only lasts for a couple of days before he goes right back to sitting by that capsule like he’s tethered to it. He already has dark circles under his eyes like a raccoon,” Jane murmured plaintively, nestling helplessly against her mate, seeking comfort and safety.
Her maternal instinct refused to rest as long as even one child suffered beneath their roof. Matthias had tried to distract his newly revealed stepbrother, but while Matthias slept soundly at night, Damian tormented himself with nightmares in the dark.
“I’ll speak with him.”