Chapter 236

Justin’s POV

Somehow, the months that passed over the course of Helen’s pregnancy seemed to fly by. I spent a good deal of that time getting myself accustomed to the idea that one of the twins was actually going to be the Huntsman’s child.

I’d always thought that issues of illegitimate birth were simple. Either the woman cheated, or she didn’t. That was simple. And as the man, you were either willing to raise someone else’s bastard, or you weren’t. It was simple. If you weren’t, you got it divorced. Simple.

Yet I found myself in a situation that was anything but simple.

Helen had cheated, but not by her own choice. She had been raped, which I suppose isn’t really the same thing as cheating. Especially when the cheating happens when the woman in question is under a spell, I can hardly hold her accountable for that manipulation.

Punishing Helen for the fact that a child was conceived while she was raped was anything but fair. Then taking that a step further, she had my child as well. And they were twins, so it wasn’t like I could just leave because the child she had wasn’t my own.

A nasty little part of me that said that it might be easy just to get rid of the one twin and put it up for adoption or some such. But then I thought about the Huntsman and how his circumstances of having been abandoned and being the son of a demon had turned him into something as bad as his demon father. Even though he was attempting to get rid of any creature that reminded him of his father, he went fully wicked.

Did I want to start that cycle again by abandoning this little pup?

Those were the questions that I had been rolling around for months. And after much thought and deliberation, I came to the conclusion that I could love the child. I would love the child. I wouldn’t let history repeat itself.

If this child became a monster like its father, it wasn’t going to be my fault. I wouldn’t be the one to blame. And then we would know that the slide into wickedness was simply the result of breeding and not upbringing.

The downside to having taken all of this time to figure things out for me was that it had put a strain on my relationship with Helen. Oh, after being scolded by Julianne, I made sure that I stayed active in Helen’s life. I treated her with kindness. I moved back in.

But it wasn’t the same, particularly in the bedroom. I found it harder and harder to desire her, knowing that the swelling in her belly was half due to someone else’s baby. And by the time I’d come to terms with accepting the half-demon baby, she was just too big for sex to be enjoyable for either one of us.

We fooled around here and there when one or the other of us got really desperate. But our sex life dried up significantly. And now, here we were in the fall, Helen was huge, ready to pop, and my dry spell was getting uncomfortable.

Forcing myself to focus on something besides my lack of sex, I pondered the passage of time. I had no idea where the last nine months had gone. They seemed a blur of unpleasant emotions mixed with high points like finding out that Helen was pregnant in the first place or Russo and Lisa’s wedding.

One of the necessities that we’d taken care of in the last few months, I’d finally talked Helen into buying a new house. She refused to move back into the mansion, which I understood. Though, with my father gone, we were going to have to think of something else to call it. The place couldn’t be Juden’s mansion anymore.

About a week ago, Helen suggested just referring to it as True Mate’s Headquarters since that’s where most of the pack administration was done anyway. I had to admit I kind of liked that name for the place. And the more I thought about it, the more I was leaning towards changing its name to that officially.

But Helen’s little place with its two bedrooms and cute little upstairs was definitely not big enough for a family of four, which we were going to be any day now. So we had sold that place and moved into a place where we would start what I hoped was the final chapter of our life together.

Not final meaning that I expected either of us to die anytime soon, but final as in with the Huntsman gone, and my father gone, and having come to terms with the news that one of the twins belonged to the Huntsman, then everything else in life under control, that this would be either the final chapter to our story in which we all live happily ever after. Or this would mark the start of a new one in which the main adventure was raising our children together.

Every so often, a thought would creep into my head, one which I hadn’t discussed with Helen yet, but I felt very favorable towards. And that was when she was recovered, and managing the twins was well in hand, I wanted another baby.

I don’t know whether the desire sprung from simply wanting to make sure that there would be lycans for future generations or if I felt in some way that my lycan children needed to outnumber the demon children. But whatever it was, as soon as she was ready to be pregnant again, I was ready to go again.

Our new house sat halfway between the old mansion and Helen’s previous house. With the thought of more children trickling around to the back of my head, I’d insisted on picking up a place with four bedrooms. Helen thought it was too big, but I insisted that there might be a point when both twins would want their own bedroom. And then we would use the last one as a home office so that if I had long hours to work, they didn’t necessarily have to be done at headquarters.

Besides, at some point, Helen might decide that she wanted to work as well. Or, as I pointed out, she might find that taking care of twins was too difficult to manage on her own. As king and the pack’s alpha, finding a nanny to come live with us would be an easy task.

Having that extra bedroom meant that if we found someone who was young and unmated, she could just become a part of our family and live with us to help care for the twins around the clock. When I looked online to see whether or not that was something people needed, the stories were vastly different.

Some parents were just exhausted but loved every minute with their twins. And some people only had one child and still had a full-time nanny. Since we didn’t have any other children, and I had no idea what our personal inclination would be, I figured having the extra bedroom would set us up no matter what we decided we needed to care for our family.

The other thing I loved about our new place that we had picked up was that it adjoined the greenbelt, which also ran behind the old mansion/new headquarters. As part of the park system that I created, it had trails developed through this greenbelt. The intention was to give the werewolves of the True Mates pack of place to easily run their wolf.

These trails wound through the forested acres in a system of interconnected paths. I had the trails made and paved because our growing community wasn’t just werewolves with a wolf to run. We had witches like the doctor and Lisa living with us, along with Russo and his baby, as the start of a fae community.

At the edge of the green belt, in the massive stump of an old-growth tree, we had carved out a neighborhood, essentially a self-sustaining apartment complex, for the remaining pixie colony. They had turned the stump into a city that they referred to as Hollow Oaks.

In the event that the pixies multiplied and needed to create another place to live, the paths would allow them easy access to some of the other locations in the forest where they could take advantage of the natural surroundings to expand their community as well.

Unlike my father, I wasn’t narrow-minded and centered on negativity. Instead, I focused my community on planning for the future for everyone the True Mates pack had come to be allied with.