The Lyon's Cub Caitlin (Lyon The Next Generation 1)

Some of them could’ve bedded down here, even with the boy and Mancini there were still two rooms empty, but they refuse to split up so to mom and dad’s they go. Kat keeps hinting at building some sort of guesthouse since the guards had taken over the other one and I’m starting to think she might be right.

I let my mind wander for a bit in order to bring myself down. It always kills me when she goes through this shit, and I don’t have to think too hard to figure out why the dreams were back.

“You wanna tell daddy about it?” She curled her little body into me, reminding me once again that for all her smarts, she’s just a little girl, my little girl. I kissed her hair and hugged her closer. Her late ass mother came barreling into the room “Did she wake everyone? I’m so sorry.” She apologized to the guys who assured her that no apology was necessary, before coming to join me and our daughter on the bed.

She ran her hand over our baby’s hair and Catalina turned and crawled into her lap for a hug. Then she tugged on my arm until I hugged them both, making a cocoon around her. I looked up at Mancini as if to say, ‘see, just a little girl’.

Lyon

We got her calmed down but there’s no way I was getting back to sleep. “Should I make some coffee?” Kat offered as we came out of our kid’s room to find the guys still in the hallway. “No, go back to sleep.” I kissed her hair and sent her off before heading to the kitchen with the guys behind me.

“She have those often?” Creed pulled up a chair and the others followed suit.

“Yeah!” And they gut me each and every time. I didn’t have the satisfaction of knowing that the asshole responsible was no more because these fucks had ended him while I was preoccupied at the hospital that day.

They’ve never told me what the hell it is that Mancini had done to him, probably fed his ass to sharks with his murdering ass. But each time she screams herself awake in the night I wish I had the memory of putting one in his ass to console me. “And this stuff she’s messing with is only making it worse I think.”

“Nope!” Mancini’s impatient ass couldn’t even wait for the coffee to finish, he was holding his cup under the drip to catch the sludge. “That’s not how her mind works. She’d get more out of hunting them down than if she just sits back and do nothing. The more she does the more she’ll heal.”

“You do realize that you’re talking about an eight year old little girl right?”

“Colt, I’m gonna need you to listen to me. You’ve got to stop fighting this. Your kid, is not just an average kid. She’s a lotta things, with her brain she can even be a fucking weapon, but what she is not, is ‘just a little girl’.

“You think I don’t know that? My kid was doing shit by the age of two that I never saw any of her siblings doing when they were that age. She was reading shit and forming complete sentences when the asshole pediatrician was telling us that that was some shit she would be doing in about another year or so.”

“I want her to be smart, but I want her to have her childhood. From the time she was five years old people have been trying to get me to send her somewhere or the other to test her smarts, like she’s a fucking rat in a lab.” Shit, why doesn’t anyone understand me? That’s my little girl!

“I get it, and all of that is good. But what I’m saying to you is, there’s no way to turn off what she is. She’s going to have days and times, like what happened just now, where she’s going to need you, but when her brain is going, you can’t stop her, you’d hurt her if you try.”

“I’m coming to understand that but I’m gonna need a minute. One is heading off to college a year early and the other isn’t too far behind.” I saw the boy react to my statement and only then realized what I’d said. Then I remembered what Mancini had said about talking to the kid.

“You told me earlier to talk to him, what was that about?”

We both looked at the kid who looked wide-awake. “Todd, you wanna tell him about your living arrangements once you head back to campus in the fall?”

“Yeah sure!” The kid cleared his throat and moved around on his seat as he played with the cup that Law had put in front of him once the coffee was ready. “You already know Jace Saunders and his group, well, they have a building, it’s an MDU but he bought the whole thing. Before I left he offered me a place there. A place where Caitie and I can live instead of staying in the dorms.”