Chapter 225: Bonus (1)
"How is Mom?" Rose asked softly, peeking cautiously into her father’s study.
Magnus looked up from a stack of contracts and beckoned his daughter over with a brief gesture. The girl bounded forward eagerly, rushing to the massive desk and peering right at the screen of his phone, which displayed a fresh photograph of medical lab results. As he smoothly swiped to the next image, a bright, joyful smile instantly broke across her face.
𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦
Gazing at the subsequent photo, the Alpha felt a familiar, searing warmth bloom deep within his chest. Little Kaya was grinning wide for the camera, her small arms wrapped tightly around her mother’s neck.
Their youngest—their fifth child. Right after those harrowing, grueling birth complications a year ago, the doctors had declared with unanimous certainty that his wife’s body possessed not a single viable egg left.
Jane had been utterly devastated at the time. Magnus had supported her every way he could, while privately plotting how to snap the necks of the idiots who had dared deliver such a verdict straight to a fragile mother.
Yet Jane was neither foolish nor weak. Once the shock faded, she reasoned logically that her breeder body had simply given every ounce of vitality nature had asked of it, and she bore no guilt for its natural limits.
Even so, Magnus knew the true root of her sorrow had never been the physical inability to bear more children. The real ache lay in the fact that his fiercely independent mate lived for the absolute freedom of choice—and now, that choice had been taken from her.
She herself had honestly admitted that carrying Kaya had been the most grueling pregnancy of her life. The easiest, by far, had been the twins—conceived on vacation when their wild, unbridled passion and a momentary lapse in caution got the better of them.
Out on a deserted beach beneath a canopy of stars, barely eight months after Rose was born. Magnus had always blamed the madness entirely on his wife’s sheer chiffon pareo and her breathtaking physique.
His nymphet of a mate had simply seduced him with the sway of her hips against the backdrop of the warm ocean. While their children slept soundly inside a bungalow just a few dozen meters away under heavy guard, the two of them had forged two more brothers right there on the sand.
Five children in total. Every last one of them carrying the alpha blood. Nature’s reasoning was obvious: this fragile world simply wouldn’t have survived any more of their devastatingly potent offspring. Magnus felt a deep, fierce pride in every single one of his kids—even though his eldest had just turned twenty-three, and the youngest was barely a year old.
Damian. He was their adopted, sixth child. He was no longer the volatile, feral little creature who had first stumbled into their lives. A month ago, he had celebrated his twenty-third birthday. His true birth date, naturally, remained lost to history.
"It’s a shame Mom won’t be back today," Rose murmured, lightly perching on the leather armrest of her father’s desk chair and wrapping her arms around his neck in a familiar gesture. "Matthias’s taking it hard, what with turning nineteen and all."
Rolling his eyes with fond exasperation, the Alpha affectionately ruffled his daughter’s bright hair. Beneath those words, the girl was awkwardly masking the fact that the entire noisy household was profoundly missing its anchor.
Oddly enough, all of their children tended to be a bit reserved when it came to open affection and touch. Only Jane knew the exact key to each of them. She always found the right words, effortlessly navigated any topic, and gently coaxed out the deepest secrets of every child’s soul. She saw right through them. Without her, this sprawling house functioned like a disjointed machine—it ran, but it groaned at every joint.
"They’re being discharged in a couple of days, and little Kaya is doing great," Magnus said quietly.
Hearing this, an energized Rose instantly slipped away from beneath her father’s heavy hand.
"Dad, can we swap some of the wine on the table for grape juice?" With a distinctly devilish gleam in her eyes, she pulled a set of counterfeit bottle labels out of her hoodie pocket.
"Think those two idiots are going to try swiping the drinks again?" the Alpha chuckled, already guessing what the twins were up to.
"I even know the exact bottle they’ve got their eyes on," she replied with a smug smirk.
Behold, the fiercest champion of a healthy lifestyle in their insane family. Magnus smiled, remembering how she had sprinted across the courtyard a week ago, fleeing for her life from a furious Matthias.
Rose had generously spritzed his cigarettes with an anti-nicotine spray. Before that, she had masterfully swapped Damian’s smokes with colored theatrical smoke bombs. As she later admitted, she’d swiped them from a circus prop box. The eldest had ended up walking around with neon-green lips and a stained tongue, while Rose spent three agonizing days dodging him by hiding all over the mansion.
An athlete, class president, and irrepressible troublemaker—that was the woman his eldest daughter had grown into. Just like her mother, as Askold loved to grumble with mock despair. Yet Askold’s own bloodline wasn’t spared either; his youngest daughter had inherited her mother’s rebellious streak and, just the other day, had completely disassembled Askold’s favorite motorcycle down to the last bolt.
Fortunately, the boy managed to piece it back together before his father returned. All of Jane’s eldest brother’s kids were gearheads to their core, capable of stripping down and rebuilding machinery with their eyes closed.
Askold had ultimately tracked down his runaway wife, though she had put up a fierce resistance, dodging him for nearly a full year in retaliation for how deeply he had wronged her. Askold had even come to see Magnus back then, and the two of them had gotten completely, blindingly hammered right in this very study.
For five years he had searched for her relentlessly, and only thanks to Magnus’s vast network of resources had he finally found her. But she hadn’t made it easy—she had modified an advanced medical bracelet to completely block her scent and pheromones. Askold had suffered through hell trying to win her back, but as he dryly put it: "I had it coming."