Page 7 of The CEO Alpha’s Substitute Mate

“...then she doesn’t know the child is a shifter,” I finish tightly, my fingers clenching around the pen. “But she had the number to the clinic. Humans don’t know that number.”

“We’ll have to figure that part out,” my friend responds. “But this is as good a lead as any. We should go investigate. Remember what happened the last time we wasted time?”

My lips press into a thin line, the memory still burning me.

It had been a small human clinic, a happenstance that one of the healers had been doing an internship there to get some bonus points. She saw the shifter child, but by the time she reported it and I got there, the mother and child had long gone, and the paper carrying their information had been ripped out. I had smelled the child there, my son. But in a human city, it’s hard to follow a trail with so many of people around.

“Very well,” I murmur. “Tell Petrov to pull the car around.”

It can’t be my son. I look out the window, my brows furrowed. It’s been six years, and there’s been no trace of him aside from that one moment. Wherever the woman who carried him went, she made certain I’d never find either of them. At least I know she gave birth. But that’s all. My jaw clenches in anger and humiliation that has never quite settled.

Any shifter can find his own child by scent. I couldn’t, and the boy is my heir. An alpha losing their heir is a very different kind of humiliation. I’ve run the Lunar Pack for twelve years, since my father died and left the seat to a twenty-year-old. Half the council has been waiting ever since for a reason to say I wasn’t ready. And this one mistake of mine has cost me a lot of pride. I should have imprisoned that women in my home till the child was born.

I was too lax, too comfortable in her being weaker, human.

“I’ll stay here and send you information. I’ll try to narrow down the kids in that area. If she’s living there or if she’s in a motel somewhere, we can get her information,” Damien tells me, already whipping out his phone and tablet.

I head downstairs, and as the car takes me toward the opposite side of the city, I try not to get my hopes up.

My tablet goes off against my thigh within ten minutes. Damien has sent through every six-year-old boy in Ashgrove living with a mother and no father on record, and there are more of them than I want to look at. The boys have no photographs attached. The mothers do.

I go through the women.

One of them stops me. It’s a municipal ID pull, badly lit, taken by somebody who didn’t care whether it came out. This matches the description of my runaway surrogate.

I’m looking at Maya Calder.

My brows furrow. Except that I’m not, and it takes me a few seconds to work out why, because she’s much too young. Maya would be thirty-two by now, and this woman is nowhere near thirty. I read the rest of it properly. Ariela Reyes, twenty-four, four years at an address on Garrick Street. She was a professional dancer, but now she teaches dance classes. Her son, Luca Reyes, has just turned six and is enrolled in the first grade at Halloran Street Elementary.

I call Damien.

“I want photographs of the boy, Luca Reyes,” I tell him. “Get me the school portrait and anything medical or municipal that exists.”

“Give me four minutes.” Something scrapes on his end of the line. The photographs come through within minutes. First is a school portrait against a blue backdrop, and the boy in it has black hair nobody has managed to comb into submission, a gap in the bottom row of his teeth, my mother’s chin. His eyes are gray.

Half this city has gray eyes. The particular gray in that photograph is the one I’ve looked at in a mirror for thirty-two years, and my father looked at it before me.

“Take me to number eleven Garrick Street,” I instruct Petrov.

I put the tablet face down on the seat beside me. Petrov looks in the mirror once, then keeps his eyes forward the whole way over the bridge.

I keep staring at the image of the boy throughout the ride. A part of me knows, while the other part of me, which has faced disappointment so many times, is wary. The car pulls up to the curb, and I get out.

Almost instantly, the scent reaches me. Threaded through the millions of shifters and humans passing by here, there’s a child’s scent, months of it laid down over the same route to school and back. There’s no mistaking it. My wolf can recognize the smell of its own kin.

Number eleven is five stories of brick with a street door that doesn’t latch, and the trail goes straight through it.

Inside, the boy is on everything. He’s on the handrail, on the wall at the height of a six-year-old’s shoulder, worked into the tread of every stair. There’s no elevator in this building, so he’s climbed these three flights a thousand times. I close my hand on the rail, and the wood creaks under it. It gets stronger at every landing. There’s no need for an apartment number. I follow it up to a door on the third floor with a strip of light under it.

I knock on the door.

“Ariela Reyes?”

I hear movement, and my sharp hearing catches the heartbeat of a human just on the other side.

“Miss Reyes, open the door. Please do not make me break it down.”

She shifts her weight on the boards. I stand back far enough to let her see all of me through the peephole.