“Because of you.” I step closer. “The baby is… the baby is everything. But I’m not asking you to come because of the baby. I’m asking you because I don’t want to build something new without you. Because every morning I stack Greta’s firewood and make oats and muck stalls and wait for you to come through the kitchen door. And the moment you walk in is the moment the day starts making sense.”
She’s quiet. Her hand has gone to her stomach — that unconscious gesture, the one she still doesn’t know she’s making.
“I need to think about it,” she says.
“Take whatever time you need.”
“That’s very patient of you.”
“I’ve had practice.”
She gives me the straw-chewing almost-smile. The tiny crack in the mask that lets the light through.
“I’ll think about it,” she says again. And walks out of the barn.
I watch her go. Then I pick up the pitchfork and go back to work.
She’ll say yes. I don’t know when. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe after the baby comes and she’s had time to test what it means. But she’ll say yes, because Briar doesn’t throw straw at men she’s planning to refuse, and Briar doesn’t sit on hay bales watching men she doesn’t want. And Briar’s wolf has been carrying my scent since the clearing. The woman has been catching up ever since.
She’ll say yes. My wolf knows it. The rubber ball on my nightstand knows it. The child growing under her hand knows it.
I shovel straw, and I wait.
Chapter 35
Briar
I don’t sleep well. This is not new. I haven’t slept well since a man bit my neck and rewired my nervous system and made it impossible to exist in a bed without feeling his absence in it. But tonight is different. Tonight I’m not fighting the pull toward him. Tonight I’m lying in my room staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out if I’m ready to stop having a room like this to stare at.
Forrester packlands. Hill Country. The territory I spent weeks crawling across on my belly, watching his compound, planning how to take him down.
He wants me to live there.
My wolf thinks this is the best idea anyone’s ever had. She’s been radiating a warm, settled smugness since the barn conversation that makes me want to shift just so I can bite my own tail. The animal has no doubts. The animal hasn’t had doubts since she spotted him.
The woman has doubts. The woman has a list.
I get up at dawn and skip Greta’s kitchen. Garrett will be there, stacking wood, making oats, being helpful, present, and impossible to ignore. Once again, I go to the south ridge instead.
The run starts strong. Stretching out, four legs eating ground, the Ozark hills opening around me in the early light. The air is damp from overnight rain, and every scent is amplified — loam, resin, the creek running high. The territorial markers of Ravenclaw wolves layered through the undergrowth.
A mile in, my wolf does something strange.
She slows. Not tired; she could run for hours at this pace. She slows deliberately, dropping from a lope to a trot, and her attention turns inward. Toward my belly. The protective curl is there, the one she’s been doing since Greta told me what I already knew. But this is different. She’slistening. Ears up, nose down, her whole body oriented toward whatever she’s sensing inside me.
I stop on the ridge and stand in the morning air with my fur damp from the mist. She’s very still. Focused on something I can’t hear.
Then I feel it. A flutter. Low in my belly, quick and light, gone before I can be sure it happened. My wolf’s ears swivel. Her tail lifts.
Was that—?
Another flutter. Stronger. Like a finger tapping from the inside. Not painful. Not even uncomfortable. Just… present. A body inside my body, making itself known.
My wolf’s response is a full-body shudder of joy. She throws her head back, and the sound that comes from her throat is not a howl. Something quieter. A chuff, the low, warm sound a mother wolf makes when she greets her pups. I’ve heard it from other wolves. I’ve never made it myself.
I stand on the ridge making mother-sounds at a flutter in my belly, and for the first time, the pregnancy isn’t something I’m carrying. It’ssomeoneI’m carrying. The difference is everything.
I shift back to human form because I need to put my hand on my stomach. My palm flat over the place where the flutter happened. Nothing now. Just warmth. But the chuff is on repeat, the animal greeting the cub she’s been guarding.