“Because a mate-bond pregnancy in a wolf as strong as you, with a bond as powerful as what I’m reading in your scent — that child will be extraordinary. And because ending it won’t end the bond. It will break something in you I don’t know how to mend.”
“You don’t get to decide—”
“I’m not deciding. I’m telling you what I know.” She stands, goes back to the stove, and picks up her spoon. “Besides, I’m not messing with that beast of yours. She’d take my throat out if I harmed her baby.”
She’s right, dammit. I know she is.
I’m standing in Greta’s kitchen with my hands on my belly and my wolf singing — actually singing, a warmth so deep it fills me from head to toe.
“Don’t tell anyone,” I say from the door.
“I’ve kept harder secrets than yours, child.”
I walk out. Across the yard. Past the training ground where Sienna is running drills. Past the children’s room, where Sable is singing something soft and sweet. Past the cabin where Conner and Willow are talking in low voices about the meeting. About Martin. About hearings and justice and all the things that matter to people whose lives haven’t just been turned inside out by a single sentence from an old woman with a spoon.
I get to my room and lock the door, then sink onto my mattress. I lie on my back. Hands on my stomach. My wolf settled around the place where his seed has taken, guarding it, warming it, pouring a tenderness into it she has never shown to me.
I carried the rabbit six hundred miles to make a man pay for what his corridor did to children.
Now, I’m carrying his child.
The two truths sit side by side in me. They don’t fit together. They don’t cancel each other out. My wolf doesn’t care about the contradiction because my wolf has moved past vengeance into something older and fiercer.
I press my hands against my belly.
I’m having a baby.
Chapter 20
Garrett
The letter arrives on a Tuesday. Dawes brings it to the study the way he brings bad news — no lead-up, no expression. Thick envelope. The seal of the Southern Regional Council. Inside: a summons to a preliminary hearing, two weeks out, Lost Creek ranch, with a list of charges that runs three pages.
Trafficking. Conspiracy. Enabling the trade of minors across pack boundaries. Receipt of funds from a proscribed source.
I read it twice. Dawes waits.
“Two weeks,” I say.
“Brenna Corvus filed the evidence packet yesterday. The council chair put the hearing on an expedited track. Bern’s people got the notice this morning. They’re already in motion.”
“Already how?”
“They want us to coordinate the defense. Bern’s senior representative called the compound an hour ago. I told him you’d call back.”
“I won’t call back.”
Dawes doesn’t move. His thumb runs once along the seam of his jeans. “Garrett.”
“I heard you.”
“Bern’s people are going to frame this as a broader network. They want the Forresters to be one operator in a system. If you’re part of the defense, they bury it in procedure. If you’re alone on that floor—”
“I know what alone on that floor means.”
He stops. Waits.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.