The doors close. The engine starts. The van moves, taking a turn hard enough that my shoulder hits the panel wall. The restraints catch my wrists and pull. A sharp line of pain, clean and specific, gone in two seconds.
I close my eyes, and I feel her. Focused, alert. I hold it. Let myself feel her as clearly as I ever have. The warmth. The strength. The presence I don’t deserve.
I’m sorry,I think at her.I’m sorry I didn’t say it in the storage room.
The word I didn’t say. The word I spent weeks not letting myself think. The word that fits what she is to me and what she’s always been to me since the first time her scent hit me in a cabin with a rabbit on the floor between us.
Mate.
I’m sorry.
The van turns onto the highway. The sound changes. Open road, the steady hum of tires on asphalt. We’re heading somewhere. I can’t tell from inside the box.
I feel her slipping as the distance grows.
I don’t fight it. Don’t reach. Just hold the sense of her in my chest as long as I can, not because I think I can keep it forever, but because the alternative is letting go too soon.
I keep holding.
Chapter 26
Briar
The drop comes at training. I’m running Warrick and two other juniors through close-quarters drills when something jolts me from the inside out. A sensation, low and rolling through my belly, intense enough that I miss a block. Warrick’s forearm catches me across the shoulder and knocks me two steps back.
“Briar?”
“I’m fine. Reset.”
We go again. I put him on the mat with a sweep, and the move feels wrong, my body executing a pattern while my stomach clenches around something I can’t identify. The sensation builds. Deepens.
By the time I’ve shifted to breathing drills with the juniors, I’m pressing a fist against my lower belly without realizing I’m doing it. The warm, protective curl that Greta said was my wolf guarding the pregnancy has gone tight, alarmed, alert.
“Break,” I tell them. “Five minutes.”
I don’t take five minutes. I leave the training yard at a walk that breaks into a run as soon as I’m out of sight.
Greta is in the kitchen because of course she is. She sees me come through the door, and the expression on her face changes before I’ve said anything. Her hands stop moving. She sets down the skillet she was drying.
“Something’s wrong,” I say. My hand is on my stomach. “The… I can feel— Something’s wrong.”
“Sit down.”
“Greta—”
“Sit, honey.”
I sit. She comes around the counter and kneels in front of me. Her hand goes to my belly, a firm, knowing pressure. Her eyes close. I watch her face while she reads what’s happening to my body, and for the longest ten seconds of my life, I hold myself still, and I don’t breathe.
“The baby is fine,” she says at last.
My relief hits so fast it takes my breath. I drop my head forward, and Greta’s other hand comes up to my shoulder and steadies me. The realization lands underneath the relief. I wanted it to be fine. Not just for my wolf’s sake, not just as a complication I’d been reluctantly accepting. Iwantedit to be fine.
The fear that I’d lost my baby had cut through me a second ago with a grief I wasn’t prepared for. Now, the absence of that grief is letting me feel what it would have been like.
I’m attached. I didn’t realize how much.
“Briar.” Greta’s voice pulls me back. “Listen to me. The baby is fine, but the baby is not what you’re feeling.”