Chapter 334: Forgive me
"Forgive me for how I treated you since last night. I will grow enough sense going forward to never let a creature of the sea convince me of anything about you again." He said, cupping her face and accepting the deeply unimpressed glare she aimed at him. "Have you forgiven me, my love?"
"I am hungry." She said flatly, deliberately moving her face out of his hands. "I will think about forgiving you after you take this offensive fish off this table and have them bring us something actually worth eating for breakfast. I have been starving since last night." She pouted, turning her chin away from him pointedly, because he had given her anxiety all through the night and a heartache all through the morning, and he could wait a little longer for his forgiveness.
Though deep down, the relief that had lifted off her shoulders at finally being known for what she might be, was so immense she could have wept from it all over again. But the fish really did have to go.
In no time Sebastian called through a tablet screen to the restaurant workers he had deliberately dismissed earlier, he had cleared the entire floor just so he could have this conversation with his wife without a single listening ear or wandering spy. He ordered a complete change of meal, instructed that everything currently on the table be removed and discarded, silverware included, and replaced entirely. He wasn’t willing to risk her tasting even a trace of fish on anything.
How he hadn’t connected the dots the very first time he heard she didn’t eat fish baffled him now, but then again, he had never associated her with anything other than a werewolf, and had simply assumed it was a personal preference. Now he understood. She stayed away from fish because fish were a natural kin to mermaids, and consuming certain kinds was something akin to consuming a part of themselves that ended up making them sick. It was knowledge that had once been taught in the werewolf world long before his time, buried now under generations of distance from those old conflicts.
Sebastian ordered every single one of her favorite meals he could think of, wanting to earn her forgiveness properly, though he already knew she had forgiven him for being an idiot. He needed to hear her say it before he made his own confession to her.
For a moment, Sebastian could have sworn he had been under a spell that made him believe he had been betrayed by his wife throughout last night, until he saw her tears a while ago. It had baffled him, and he wished he could punch himself for the way he had acted over the last few hours...
They ate in relative silence, a quiet broken only by the sound of her picking at her food and staring somewhere beyond the table, clearly lost in her own thoughts, until he glanced across at her and asked, "Are you still angry with me, amor?"
Viola startled slightly and looked up at him before shaking her head. "No."
"Then why aren’t you eating?"
"I don’t have much of an appetite suddenly. I was thinking..." She hesitated, turning her fork slowly against the plate while he gave her his full attention. "If I am a hybrid of a werewolf and a sea creature, how did my parents ever meet? And which one of them was the werewolf?" She voiced the thought out carefully, as though she had been holding it behind her teeth for a long time. "I can’t help wondering, because I cannot imagine a mermaid and our kind ever coming together willingly in this lifetime."
It felt strange, and also like relief, to finally be able to say it out loud to him. She hadn’t realized how much weight she had been carrying by keeping it pressed down inside herself all these weeks, and now that it was out, every curious thought she had buried came rushing back, including the question of why she and her twin had been left at that orphanage at all.
Sebastian had sat with that same question himself, though he had arrived at the conclusion that it didn’t matter as long as she remained on this side of the world.
"I can’t imagine it happening either, mermaids hate our kind just as deeply as we hate theirs. And quite frankly, this is the first case of a hybrid I have heard of in this generation. The last recorded case, the story I was told, involved a hybrid who was killed because she attempted to poison an entire werewolf settlement and cause a mass killing, an act of vengeance for her father’s death at the hands of our kind in the water. He was captured in a fish net. After that, no hybrid was ever found in Silver again. And that was a generation before ours."
Viola absorbed his words quietly and understood why hybrids would never be welcomed, it always seemed to come to a point where they had to choose one side, and they could never fully belong to both worlds. "Do hybrids..." She hesitated over the question, but his attentiveness gave her the courage to push through it. "Do they have wolves? Since they carry both sides, is it possible for a wolf to awaken in them?"
Sebastian sipped from his tea and gave a slow nod. "From some of the records I dug out yesterday after learning about you, yes, it is possible. But it depends greatly on whether one of the parents carries Alpha blood, because that strengthens everything. It is also possible for a hybrid to develop a tail if the other parent is of royal mermaid descent, since royal mermaids are the most powerful of their kind, long-lived and rarely ever seen on land, even in the old accounts."
Now that Sebastian turned it over in his mind, he couldn’t stop himself from quietly entertaining the possibility that Viola’s werewolf parent might have been an Alpha, because a regular werewolf breeding with another kind of creature simply would not produce a child with a wolf. But the fur he had seen rising along her skin during their most intimate moments suggested otherwise.
"How unfortunate then," Viola murmured, the sad disappointment sitting quietly but visibly in her expression. "I might never have a wolf, maybe being what I am was the reason I never awakened one when I turned nineteen." She pushed at her food with her fork, trying to bury the small, hollow grief of it beneath a mouthful of something she didn’t really taste.
That tiny thread of hope she had always carried about one day having a wolf had just been quietly confirmed as something she might have to let go of entirely, and she was trying not to let it show too much.
Sebastian felt her emotions shift almost immediately through their bond. He sat with the question of whether to tell her, about the wolf suppressant Gilbert had found in her blood, about the fur he had seen with his own eyes.
