TEMPORARY MATES PERMANENT CRAVINGS novel Chapter 226

Two hundred and twenty six

Lisa POV

The atmosphere inside Alpha Kieran’s house had changed.

It wasn’t dramatic, yet I felt it. Conversations between him and my mom ended too quickly, and silences lingered.. My mother stayed polite, but the ease she usually shared with Kieran was gone.

The distance between them reminded me of the months after my father left, when my mother carried her hurt like

armor.

I couldn’t blame her. I couldn’t blame Kieran either.

Cassidy’s story had come out in pieces. Nothing fit into heroes and villains. The more I learned, the harder it became to decide who was right. Cassidy had reason to be angry. Kieran still carried the weight of his mistakes. Everyone had lost something, and nobody got it back.

The part that stayed with me most was their son. Until now, I’d only known that Kieran and Vanessa had lost a son. I hadn’t known another mother stood behind that story. A woman who had carried him, raised him, fought for him, and buried him.

The grief in Cassidy’s eyes made sense. So did the look that crossed Kieran’s face whenever Vanessa’s name came up. My mother had pointed out that people often mistook guilt for devotion. The thought lingered.

It explained something else. For years, Kieran had lived alone with no new wife, no children, and no attempt to start over. I’d assumed he loved Vanessa too much. Now I wasn’t so sure. The realization didn’t make me trust him less. If anything, it made me pity him.

The problem was that none of it brought us closer to a solution. Cameron and I were still in danger. The Daughters had made it clear that desperation wouldn’t earn their help. Cassidy’s story explained how she became the woman she was, but it didn’t tell me whether she would help us.

The eggs hissed in the pan as I poked at them with a spatula. One side looked cooked, while the other looked questionable. I was trying to decide whether that counted as breakfast when footsteps entered the kitchen. Alpha Kieran paused beside the stove and studied the pan.

“I didn’t realize they had declared war on you. They look a little aggressive.”

“I think they’re winning.”

“Clearly.”

The corner of my mouth lifted despite myself.

He poured himself some orange juice and stood by the island. The glass remained in his hand. I slid the eggs onto

a plate, and by the time I reached for a fork, he was still staring into the orange juice as though he’d forgotten why he’d poured it.

“How are things with my mom?”

His face answered before his mouth did.

I winced.

“That bad?”

I slid part of the eggs onto a plate and pushed it toward him. The eggs spent more time being moved around than

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eaten.

“You’re wasting perfectly good food.”

“I’ll write the eggs an apology letter later.”

I chuckled.

He stared down into his orange juice and said, “We need to find a way to confirm your bond with Cameron.”

Silence filled the room. My pressed lips trembled despite my effort to hold them still.

“The Daughters aren’t wrong. We need proof beyond assumptions. If there’s a mate bond there, we need to know.”

I looked down at my plate.

Part of me couldn’t stop thinking about Cassidy. The conversation seemed to circle around Cameron and me while Cassidy remained standing in the wreckage of everything that had happened to her.

“Do you think she’ll ever forgive you?”

The question lingered between us. Kieran took a slow drink of his orange juice and set the glass down. When he looked at me again, his eyes carried the kind of exhaustion that came from revisiting the same regret too many

times.

“I don’t know.”

He rubbed a hand across his face.

“I’ve apologized. I’ve begged. I’ve offered money she never touched. At some point, you run out of ways to say you’re sorry.”

“Does she still love you?”

Kieran huffed a laugh and shook his head. The reaction carried far more history than amusement.

“That’s a dangerous question.”

“Why?”

“Because if she didn’t care, she’d probably hate me less.”

His gaze drifted toward the window.

“I think love and resentment became tangled together a long time ago. I stopped pretending I knew where one ended and the other began.”

I sat quietly with that, then asked the question that had been sitting in the back of my mind since Cassidy’s story.

“Do you think your wife killed the baby?”

Kieran stared at the countertop. For a while, I thought he wasn’t going to answer.

“I don’t know.”

The admission came out rough.

“I’ve spent years wishing I had a better answer than that. My son wasn’t sick. No poison was found. No healer could explain it, and neither did any investigation produce anything useful.”

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He sagged into a chair as his voice trailed off.

“Part of me wants to believe Vanessa was innocent. The other part knows I was wrong about a lot of things.”

I thought about Cassidy’s son, husband, and the baby she had lost.

Nobody could explain what happened. Meridian had spent years hiding behind coincidences, bad luck, unexplained illnesses, and things that left no evidence behind. If the child had truly been targeted, there might never have been anything for a doctor to find.

A long breath left me.

“I understand why she’s angry.”

Kieran remained quiet. My fingers tightened around my fork.

“She lost her loved ones. Most people would have fallen apart after that. Some people would have lost their minds.

Kieran’s gaze drifted toward the window.

“Cassidy didn’t.”

There was respect in his voice.

“She’s stronger than most people I know.”

A faint smile touched his face.

“The worst part is that she kept paying for my mistakes long after she should have walked away. She nearly died helping me fight Meridian. Every time I thought she’d finally cut me out of her life, she’d show up again.”

The kitchen fell quiet.

I remembered the look Cassidy gave me when I asked whether I stood a chance. Most people would have offered false hope because it was easier. She hadn’t. And despite everything, she had still opened the door.

“Did she ever try to… reconnect after your wife’s death?”

His eyes dropped to the counter.

“I don’t know. I think there were moments when grief blurred a lot of things.”

He took a sip of orange juice.

“There were conversations and times when it felt as though we were both standing in the ruins of the same disaster. But I couldn’t do it.”

“Because you didn’t love her?”

His laugh was soft.

“No. Because I’d already hurt her enough. I couldn’t look at everything she’d lost and decide I deserved another chance.”

I picked at the eggs while Kieran stared into the kitchen window. For someone who claimed he had run out of ways to apologize, he still sounded as though he was looking for a new one. And for someone who wanted nothing to do with him, Cassidy’s name seemed to follow him into every room.

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I wasn’t sure either of them had escaped what happened all those years ago. 1

“This isn’t the time for any of that anyway. We have bigger problems.”

Kieran looked at me.

“I’ll talk to my momn.”

The relief on his face appeared so quickly it was almost painful to watch. His hand reached out to mine.

“Thank you.”

The guest room smelled faintly of the spicy incense my mother liked to burn when she couldn’t settle her thoughts. She lay beneath the blanket with a book resting unopened beside her.

At the sound of the door, she turned her head and offered me a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. I sat beside her and brushed a hand through her hair. She closed her eyes and leaned into the touch. The gesture alone told me more than her words would have.

My mother had always been the person who carried other people’s burdens. Seeing her look this tired unsettled me more than anything Cassidy’s story had revealed.

She loved him, yet love hadn’t protected Cassidy from discovering things years later that changed everything. My mother wasn’t angry. If anything, that would have been easier to understand. What I saw in her eyes looked more like uncertainty. And uncertainty frightened me because it meant neither of us knew what came next, or whether the man helping us save Cameron was someone we truly understood at all.

For a while, neither of us spoke.

“You know what bothers me?” she asked quietly.

I shook my head.

“He never told us.

There was no anger in her voice, and somehow that made it worse.

“A child doesn’t just happen, Lisa. A woman doesn’t spend years raising a son and fighting custody battles, and then it never comes up.”

I looked down at the blanket.

“I know.”

“He let me believe I understood his life.”

“You understood part of it.”

She let out a breath, and I held her hand.

“Mom, he made mistakes. Big ones. But he isn’t Meridian.”

The room grew quiet.

“He didn’t kill his son. He wasn’t the one who caused Cassidy’s accident or whatever happened to her family.”

My throat tightened.

“Maybe he should have protected them better, and maybe he failed Cassidy in ways he’ll never fix. But he’s

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carrying those consequences too.”

My mother’s thumb traced small circles across the blanket.

She didn’t argue, nor did she defend him. Nothing about Cassidy’s story felt simple anymore, and that was what made it hurt.

“We can’t afford to start breaking apart now,” I said. “We need him.”

Her gaze drifted toward the window.

“I know.”

A few moments passed before she spoke again.

“I think we should reach out to Cassidy.”

I stared at her.

“That sounds like a terrible idea.”

She chuckled. “It probably is.”

“Mom. Did you meet the same woman Imet? She looked one minor inconvenience away from telling me to go fuck myself.”

That actually earned a small laugh.

“Lisa, I’m not looking for friendship. All I want is help. We don’t have the luxury of pride anymore.”

I rubbed my forehead.

“She’ll insult us. She doesn’t even like me.”

“She doesn’t like anybody.”

She adjusted the blanket around herself.

“Kieran keeps trying to fix things. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Maybe every conversation reminds her of everything she lost. If his presence is the trigger, perhaps his absence gives us a chance.”

I thought about Cassidy sitting alone, and the years she’d spent carrying grief around like an extra organ.

The idea still sounded awful. The problem was that we were beginning to run out of better ones.

I hesitated before bringing up what Kieran had said downstairs.

“He thinks we need to confirm the mate bond. The Daughters won’t just take our word for it.”

My mother was quiet. I knew she was waiting for me to continue. The problem was that every time I thought about seeing Cameron again, my mind went straight back to the last time and the certainty that he would have killed me.

I wrapped my arms around myself.

“I don’t know if I can do it.”

Part of me wanted the answer. I wanted to know whether there was a reason I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and whether there was a reason my body seemed to miss him even when my mind was trying not to.

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Whether Evangeline had truly stolen something from us.

But the other part remembered what it felt like to be afraid of him.

Neither choice felt safe anymore. If I stayed away, Cameron kept slipping further away from himself. If I went near him, I might be putting myself and the baby directly in danger. Somewhere in the middle of all that was the answer everyone seemed desperate to find, and I wasn’t sure whether I was brave enough to go looking for it.

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