TEMPORARY MATES PERMANENT CRAVINGS novel Chapter 223

Two hundred and twenty three

Cassidy POV

A month later, formal invitations to the wedding arrived. I never responded.

On the day of the wedding, I stayed home. My mother attended because the invitation had come directly from the. future Luna. Refusing would have created gossip neither of us needed.

When she returned that evening, she set a small gift box on the kitchen table and removed her shoes.

“How was it?” I asked, scooping ice cubes into my mouth.

My mother looked at me and sighed.

“Beautiful.”

I nodded.

She unpacked a small container and placed it in the refrigerator.

“Vanessa asked about you.”

I grabbed another ice cube.

“Did she?”

“She misses you.”

I nearly laughed.

My mother closed the refrigerator door.

“Cassidy…”

There was a warning in her voice.

I looked away.

“You can’t stay angry forever.”

That did it.

“Why does everybody keep saying that?”

Her head drew back at the force in my voice. I pushed away from the counter.

“Stay angry at what? At who? Kieran married his mate. Good for them. They’re happy! Everybody acts as though I’m standing outside their house throwing rocks through their windows.”

“Cassidy.”

“No. Tell me,” I said in clipped bursts. “What exactly am I supposed to let go of? The relationship? The friendship? The future I thought I had?”

My mother stayed silent. I wiped away the tears that arrived without warning. They came anyway.

“People keep saying move on as though it’s a decision. I see them everywhere, Mom. I go to doctor’s appointments and there they are. I go into town and there they are. People talk about them. People love them.

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was hundred and twenty three

+15 Bcnus

What am I supposed to do? Forget them? Forget her? Forget him?”

My mother crossed the room and pulled me into a hug. Everything I’d spent months holding together broke apart.

Later, when the tears stopped and exhaustion replaced them, I wiped my face and headed to my room without another word.

That evening, the smell of chicken soup drifted through the house. My mother had a bowl waiting on the table by the time I came into the kitchen. Neither of us mentioned the earlier argument.

I sat, picked up a spoon, and ate in silence while she moved around the kitchen.

The world hadn’t changed. But the tightness in my chest wasn’t quite as sharp as it had been earlier.

I tried to move on, not because I had suddenly found peace with what happened. I simply got tired of carrying the same pain every day.

I focused on the pregnancy and whatever problem was directly in front of me. Some days it worked. Most days it didn’t.

The hardest part was realizing I had lost two people at the same time. Kieran had been more than the father of my child, and Vanessa had been more than a friend.

There were days when I missed one and wanted to call the other, only to remember that both roads were closed. Whatever existed between Vanessa and me now was polite distance wrapped in good intentions.

The labor lasted long enough for me to stop caring about dignity. By the end, I was exhausted, angry, and convinced I would never forgive another human being for telling me childbirth was beautiful.

Then they placed him in my arms.

A boy.

Red-faced and alive.

I cried harder than I had during labor.

The next morning, Kieran returned before visiting hours officially began. Vanessa came later, carrying flowers and enough caution to make it obvious she wasn’t sure whether she was welcome. She arrived with Luna Diana.

For the first time in a long time, I didn’t care.

My son was alive. I was alive. Everything else could wait.

For months, it did.

Kieran visited constantly. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Vanessa. Eventually, I stopped bracing myself whenever I saw them together. Life kept moving whether I wanted it to or not.

My son laughed. Learned to crawl and stand.

Lawrence appeared somewhere in the middle of all that. He was completely unimpressed by Alpha politics. Perhaps that’s why I liked him.

When he asked me to dinner, I said yes. When he asked again, I said yes.

I didn’t love him the way I had loved Kieran. The truth was that nobody was ever going to be Kieran.

But Kieran was married, and life didn’t care about what might have been.

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Two hundred and twenty tiven

+15 Benus

The first conversation about moving my son into the Alpha House happened when he was still young enough to fall asleep against my shoulder.

I said no.

The second conversation came months later.

I said no again.

Then the meetings started.

Council members, tradition keepers, and advisors. People explained what was best for the child and that the Alpha’s firstborn needed to be raised in the Alpha House.

Kieran tried to make it sound reasonable.

“He wouldn’t be taken away from you, Cass.”

“You want weekends.” My voice shook. “You want holidays. Take that. But he can never live with you permanently.

They tried to give it fancy names like shared custody. I called it losing.

The battle dragged on for so long that I married Lawrence before it ended.

The Alpha House had power. When my son was a little over two years old, the final documents landed on the table in front of me.

I remember staring at them while everyone explained how often I could visit and how involved I could remain.

As though motherhood could be measured in scheduled visitation.

My signature looked unfamiliar when I finally put pen to paper. The room blurred.

I heard Vanessa say something. I heard Kieran thank me and discuss arrangements.

None of it mattered.

All I could think about was the little boy waiting for me at home. The little boy who still ran to me whenever he scraped a knee. The little boy everyone kept insisting belonged somewhere else.

The first time I heard him call Vanessa Mom was during one of the scheduled visits I looked forward to. He was sitting on the floor of the Alpha House nursery, building a tower out of wooden blocks.

“Mom, look.”

The word came out so naturally that Vanessa and I looked at him at the same time. Vanessa smiled and looked over.

“That’s very impressive, Nolan,” Vanessa said.

He grinned and added another block, and the conversation continued.

I sat there staring at the three-year-old who had no idea he had just split something open inside me.

Lawrence tried to make me see reason.

“He has two homes, Cass. That doesn’t mean he loves you less.”

Maybe that was true, but it didn’t stop the feeling.

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TAG Punked and twenty three

+15 8cnus

Every time my son visited, there was something new. Better toys, better clothes, private tutors, birthday parties large enough to fill an entire garden.

Vanessa attended every school event. She knew the names of his teachers. She sat beside him during performances and cheered louder than anyone else.

The worst part was that she wasn’t pretending. She genuinely loved him.

I hated myself for how much that bothered me. A child should be loved and cared for. Yet every time I watched him run into her arms or excitedly tell her about his day, a voice inside me whispered that pieces of motherhood were being handed away one by one and replaced by people who had more money and more access than I did.

I wondered whether there would come a time when he needed Vanessa more than he needed me. Those were the thoughts I never admitted out loud. They sat quietly in the corners of my mind, growing heavier every month.

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