Lycan's Prey by Jessica Hall

Chapter 37 – part 1

Everly POV

My hands tremble as we pull up out front of the hotel. Officer Richards had driven and escorted me to Alpha Valen’s penthouse apartment. The whole ride, I wracked my brain trying to figure out how he had Valarian here. Did he spot him at the school and take him? Did Valarian look him, or did someone notice the uncanny resemblance between them? I had many questions, but nothing terrified me more than what happened now that Valen knew he fathered a son.

He would have to kill me before I ever let him take my son. My nerves were shot, my eyes burned from spending all afternoon and night balling like a baby. My mind instantly went to the thought that he was kidnapped, or one of the forsaken had killed him. The relief I felt when I found out he was alive and ok was as crushing as the thought of losing him. There was nothing worse than thinking you lost a child; the what ifs, the sheer panic, and frantic places your mind takes you were a pure nightmare. My mind had been zooming in and out of the worst–case scenario. Plus, because he was considered a rogue child, it’s not like anyone else really cared that he went missing.

The thing you fear most in the world, losing them for good. Your child suffering, and you could do nothing to help them. No sort of fear could compare to thinking you lost the most important person to you. Fear, once you’re a parent changes.

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Chapter 37 – part 1

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You no longer fear the boogie man. You no longer fear the dark, at least not for those same reasons you once did.

Being a parent, you become the boogieman hunter. You don’t fear him anymore. You fear ordinary people taking your child, your neighbor, the person hanging around the children’s parks; you fear people in general. You suddenly become the person checking under the bed, the person entering the shadows first, not because you don’t fear them still but because you fear them for a different reason. You fear them because you know the child behind you relies them safe.

you to keep

No, you don’t fear the dark; you fear what’s lurking in it that could hurt your child. Just the same as you no longer fear death, what you truly fear is leaving them behind, knowing nobody would love them more than you. You fear what would become of them without you.

As a parent, you fear the news headlines when a child goes missing in your area, your mind instantly going to what if that was my child.. Losing a child, no matter how briefly, nothing can compare to that sort of fear. The little person that has you getting out of bed each morning because the morning wouldn’t be worth waking up to without them.

Before children, you couldn’t picture a life with them in it. Yet, once they are born, you can’t remember a time when they weren’t all–consuming, you can’t remember not having them because your life becomes somebody else’s, it isn’t yours anymore, it becomes theirs, and you live each day for them, so to think you lost one? You just lose your reason for

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37 -part 1

breathing.

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can compare to how I felt for those grueling hours of frantic searching and thinking the worst. Sometimes your own mind becomes your worst tormentor. So, moving into the elevator, I feel myself breathe, knowing he was safe,

and I am shocked to find that Alpha Valen’s floor is heavily guarded. Exactly who was he expecting to attack him? We had to use a key in the elevator to get to this floor. Officer Richards

to see a rogue girl visiting the Alpha, oh the scandal that

at him, and

are you

was told to drop you off, not hold your hand,” he says with a

custody disagreement

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is suddenly

says, and I scrunch up my

call me that.

to come in, and I step past him. The place was all open–plan, and I realized the entire floor is just his apartment. Large windows ran the whole length from floor to ceiling, looking over the. I bet the view

walking around, I notice another security guard sitting on the couch when I spot Valarian on the sofa beside him. The huge security guard had a game controller in his hand, and Valarian glanced at me

up with one arm before depositing him back on the couch. Valen kisses

my boy. I try to move toward him. My heart frantically thumps in my chest as I reach the back of the

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