But today was full of bittersweet disappointment. I’d known, deep in my heart, that another male child was going to be the outcome, and yet, I couldn’t stop the rush of anger that coursed through me.
“Fuck.” I groaned, scrubbing my face with my hands. “Why am I so disappointed it was a boy? After a hundred straight births, what were the odds?”
Kyle shrugged his wide, muscled shoulders, his blond hair shining in a rare patch of early morning sunlight. All the males of the pack, like Kyle and myself, were built and supremely healthy. Mikaela’s new son likely would be, too. It was only daughters we couldn’t seem to produce.
“Practically a million to one,” Kyle answered, after a pause.
I lifted an eyebrow at him. “Really? Then maybe she did have a chance.”
Kyle rolled his eyes. “I think we’re going to have to face the facts, Xander. There is no way out of this. Unless you wanna go mate with someone from another pack...?”
I shuddered. “No thanks. You’ve seen how those matings work out.”
Kyle frowned. “It could just be bad luck.”
I stared at him. Seriously? The men who’d married women of neighboring packs hadn’t found their fated mates. They just chose someone to fill the dark hole of loneliness we all shared.
But that pain wasn’t a good enough reason for me.
“Bad luck?” I repeated a little too loudly. “You call it bad luck that every man who has mated outside of this pack hasn’t had a single child? What are we up to now? Twenty failed matings? Or more?”
It wasn’t the fact that I wouldn’t have children that turned me off finding a mate outside of our pack. It was knowing that some of the women had died, birthing babies who never made it. I wasn’t putting another innocent woman in harm’s way over my own selfish need for a wife and child.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d think we were cursed. Not that I believed in magic, but a lot of the guys my age did.
Kyle frowned. “It isn’t that many. But anyhow, you’d need to go out of the state, because all the local packs have... um...”
“Yeah, they’ve stopped allowing us to mate with their females. I know. We missed the boat there.” Even if I’d been able to get my head around the idea of mating to a woman who wasn’t my fated mate, we couldn’t marry outside the pack now anyway. “Let’s go home. I’m starving.”
It was six in the morning, and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast yesterday. I’d been too worried about Mikaela and had stayed close just in case she needed me.
Kyle and I walked back through the tiny village to the small log cabin we’d built when we were paired up ten years ago. We’d created our home with the same look as most of the other pack dwellings scattered around us, but Kyle always pointed out that the extra bit of vacant land behind ours would come in useful if either of us found our fated mate. He said we’d have the room to extend the cabin, if we ever needed it.
Like most of the Betas in our pack, Kyle was a little too hopeful that this situation with the children would eventually even itself out.
Me on the other hand, was more skeptical. And I was seriously sick of this shit.
Inside the house, I went straight for the fridge and pulled open the door hard enough to rock the unit. I grabbed some cold roast meat on a plate.
“Starving,” I repeated, as I sat at the table and began tearing at the flesh with my teeth.
Damn, I needed a run through the woods. Every part of me was screaming to shift, or to fuck, or to punch the goddamn wall.
I slammed my fist down on the solidly handcrafted table. “Why the hell do I feel like this, Kyle? Surely you feel this way, too?”
Kyle grabbed some beers from the fridge, bumped the door closed, then brought them to the dining table for us. He sat in the chair with a sigh. “Of course, I do. I want a mate. A child. A girl, a boy. I don’t care. I want a life.”
And that was it. The crux of the problem. For a wolf shifter, family was life. And without females to marry and breed with, everyone born after me, would never know what it was like to have a child.
I tore apart a bread roll sitting on the table and chewed into it. “You want a fated mate? Or any old sort?”
Not that we had much of a choice, but while we were baring our souls, I wanted to know what sort of Beta I had.
Kyle sighed and tipped his beer back, swallowing the rest of it in a few gulps. “A fated mate would be the dream. But... you know those don’t exist anymore.”
He pushed his empty beer bottle across the wooden table.
I stared at him. “Don’t exist? Of course, they do.”