Chapter Three — Two

"You're pregnant," Wren said.

The floor of her workroom tipped four degrees to the left and stayed there. The Mark at my neck came up hot all at once, one long pulse under my collar, like something turning over in its sleep.

"Say it again."

"Aria—"

"Please say it again."

"You're pregnant." She set the paper strip down on the tray. "And before you ask, no, I'm not guessing, and yes, you should sit further back on that table."

The room smelled the way her room always smells, antiseptic laid over dried yarrow. I sat on the end of the table with the paper crackling under me and did not move at all.

I had bought the test myself, at the human pharmacy off the highway, two towns over where nobody knows my Scent. There was a coupon on the box flap for a different brand — two dollars off, expires in March — and I stood in that aisle and read the coupon four times because it was easier than reading the box.

The strip's edge had bitten a white line into my fingertip on the walk over. I was still holding it. I looked down and made my hand let go.

"When?" Wren said.

"Does it matter?"

"I need a date, not a story."

"The night he Marked me."

"That was seven weeks ago Tuesday."

"Seven weeks ago Tuesday." My voice came out flat and reasonable, which was strange, because nothing else in me was. "He kept me six weeks. Then he stood on that stone and gave me back."

Wren didn't say anything to that, which I appreciated more than anything she could have said.

"Lie down."

"Why?"

"Because I want to listen, and because you're going to fall off my table."

I lay back. The paper was cold through my shirt. She put her palm flat below my navel and closed her eyes, and her face went to the blank, listening place Omegas go when they're using the sense the rest of us don't have.

The radiator ticked twice and gave up.

"There," Wren said softly. "There you are."

"What?"

"Shh."

Say it again, Nyx breathed, all the way down at the bottom of me. Say there you are again.

Wren's brows came together. She moved her hand two inches and went still.

"Huh."

"Don't huh at me."

"There's an echo."

"What does that mean?"

"It means give me a second." She moved her hand back, then moved it again. "It's not an echo."

"Wren."

She opened her eyes and looked at me, and I watched her decide to say it plainly instead of gently.

"Two," she said. "There are two."

The ceiling of that workroom has a long crack across it that somebody patched badly in the eighties. I looked at it for what felt like a while.

"Two."

"Two."

"You're certain."

"They're not in step. That's how you know." She sat back on her stool. "One of them runs a half-beat behind the other, and it's been that way the whole time I've had my hand there."

"You shouldn't be able to hear anything yet. It's seven weeks."

"No," Wren agreed. "In a human woman I'd hear nothing for another month, and in most of ours I'd hear one thing badly."

"Then say it."

"Alpha get quicken early and they quicken loud. It's the first thing anybody notices about them and it's why they're always born ahead of time." She was looking at her hands. "I've never put my palm on one before. I've only read about it."

"The dish," I said.

Her mouth went tight.

"On your table. Two beads out of one hole."

"Yes."

"You knew."

"I suspected on the walk home." She still didn't look up. "I've been wrong before, and I would much rather be a coward for six days than be wrong at you about this."

I sat up. The room did its four degrees again and then settled, and I put both hands flat on the paper and breathed until it stopped.

Twins.

Some part of my brain — the part that keeps working after the rest of you has walked out of the building — offered me the practical facts one at a time.

Two of everything. Two of every risk. Two of every reason.

And under that, coming up through the floor of me like heat off a stone at the end of a hot day, something I had absolutely no name for.

Ours, Nyx said. Both. Nobody touches them.

"I need to sit here a minute."

"Sit as long as you want."

"Don't write anything down."

"I wasn't going to."

"Wren." I turned to look at her. "Not inconclusive. Not anything. Nothing to the Council, nothing in your book, you didn't see me today."

"I know."

"Say you know."

"I know, Aria." She pushed the tray away with one finger. "Do you want the ugly law now, or do you want an hour first?"

"Say it now."

"Pups of an Alpha aren't the mother's." She said it evenly, the way you'd read a weather report. "They're the Pack's."

"That can't be the whole of it."

"They're raised in the Pack House and the Alpha names them. That isn't cruelty, it's four hundred years of law, and the Elders would enforce it with their own hands."

"He rejected me."

"He said the words at you. He didn't stop being the Alpha, and they didn't stop being his."

"Then the Rejection—"

"The Rejection is a separate fire, and it makes this one worse, not better." She leaned forward. "Right now half this Pack is arguing about whether a woman who won't release her Alpha is a Council matter or a Pack matter."

"And if they find out I'm carrying?"

"Then you stop being an argument," Wren said. "You become property with a due date."

My phone lit up on the chair where my coat was and buzzed twice against the wooden slats.

Dani — missed call. Dani from my old job at the bookstore, who is human, and who has been trying for three weeks to give me a couch because her sister is moving and it's "barely even a couch, it's more of a loveseat, you'd be doing me a favor."

I watched it go dark and thought about a woman on the other side of the mountains who wanted to give me a loveseat.

"You should call her back," Wren said. "I mean it. You're going to need one thing in your life that isn't this."

I went for my keys and found the flower instead — the little dried head of it, pressed flat and papery in the seam of my coat pocket, from the Blood Moon festival in September. Somebody's grandmother had been handing them out at the gate. I'd taken it to be polite and then forgotten it through everything that came after.

It came apart a bit between my fingers. I put it back in the pocket anyway, carefully, like it was worth something.

"What are you going to do?" Wren said.

"I don't know yet."

"That's not true. Your face is doing something."

"I'm counting."

"Counting what?"

"Everything." I stood up, and this time the floor stayed where it was. "How long before it shows. How many wolves know my Scent well enough to catch it changing. What Ames writes in that book at the culvert every day, and whether Hollis takes cash."

Wren's eyes closed briefly. "There it is."

"One more thing," she said at the door, with her hand on my sleeve. "And then I'll leave it."

"Say it."

"He'd move mountains if he knew."

"I know."

"I'm not telling you to tell him. I'm telling you I watched his hands shake on that stone, and I've been an Omega long enough to know what a wolf looks like when he's doing the second-worst thing to avoid the worst one."

I went out into the cold with my hand around a broken flower and walked the long way home, and I did not once put my hand on my stomach, because the light was still good and Ames was at the culvert.

Ours, Nyx had said. Both.

She was wrong, and I did not have the heart to tell her.

By four hundred years of Blood Moon law those two half-beat heartbeats already belonged to somebody else, and nobody in that valley would have to lift a finger to take them. They only have to find out.

So how many days does a woman get, between the morning she learns she is a mother and the morning the Pack informs her that she isn't?