Chapter four

NORA

I turned to walked out of the pack as I said,

“My baby, I'll come back to get you!"

That was the only thought I had when those gates closed behind me and the sound of them shutting echoed through the cold morning air and faded into nothing. I did not have a plan. Neither did I have a direction.

I did not have anything except the clothes on my back and a body that had given birth less than two days ago and had no business being out in this kind of cold.

The snow started coming down not long after I left the border. Slow at first, light flakes that melted the moment they touched my skin, and then heavier, thicker.

My feet were already numb inside my thin shoes and the cold was climbing up my legs and settling into my joints and making every step harder than the one before it.

My abdomen was still throbbing. That deep interior ache that came from being cut open and stitched back together was still very much present and the walking was not helping it.

Every time my foot hit the ground a jolt of pain moved through my lower body and I breathed through it and kept going because stopping meant sitting down in the snow and sitting down in the snow meant not getting back up.

I thought about my baby with every step.

I don't even know his name. I don’t know if Kael had named him already or if Lena had or if they had done it together over his small head while I was lying unconscious in that hospital room.

I don't know what he looked like beyond the brief and blurry impression I had gotten in the chaos of the delivery room. I don't know if he was sleeping well or eating well or if anyone was holding him the way a baby needs to be held.

That not knowing was its own kind of pain that had nothing to do with the cold or the wound in my abdomen or the exhaustion pulling at every part of me.

I wiped the snow from my face and kept walking.

The trees grew denser the further I moved from the pack border. The path I had been following gradually disappeared under the snow and I was moving through open forest now, bare branches above me and thick white ground below and silence everywhere except for the sound of my own breathing and my own footsteps and the occasional crack of a branch somewhere in the dark of the trees.

I don't know whose territory I was moving into.

That thought occurred to me somewhere in the back of my mind but I pushed it aside because the alternative was turning back and turning back was not something I was capable of.

There was nothing behind me anymore. Whatever was ahead of me, no matter how uncertain or how dangerous, was the only direction that existed now.

One moment I was moving through the trees alone and the next something slammed into me from the left with enough force to knock me sideways into the snow. I hit the ground hard on my side and the impact tore through my abdomen like fire and I cried out before I could stop myself.

I rolled and pushed myself up and they were already circling me.

Three of them. Large wolves, grey and brown, their eyes fixed on me with the focused intensity of animals defending something they considered theirs.

Border wolves.

I understood immediately what had happened. I had crossed into their alpha's territory without permission and they had been sent to handle exactly this kind of intrusion.

"I am not a threat," I said, which was almost laughable given the state I was in. "I am just passing through. I have nowhere to go."

They did not respond to words. Neither,did they slow their circling.

The first one came at me and I dropped to one side and felt its teeth graze my arm as it passed.

The second came right behind it and I threw myself backward.I landed in the snow again and the pain in my abdomen exploded so violently that my vision went white at the edges.

I got back up.

I do not know how. My body had nothing left to give and the rational part of my mind was fully aware of that fact.

The thought of dying and not seeing my child pushed me back onto my feet and kept me there.

The same thing that had kept me walking through the snow for hours. The same thing that had made me hold my head up while walking through that crowd at the pack gates.

The same thoughts,that refused to go down quietly even when going down quietly would have been so much easier.

The third wolf circled wide and came from behind and I turned just in time and caught it with enough force to make it stumble and it fell back snarling.

They regrouped and came at me together this time.

I went down.

This time,I could not get back up.

My arms gave out when I tried and my abdomen was screaming and the snow beneath me was warm in the places where the wound had opened back up and I lay there with my cheek pressed against the cold ground and my breathing coming in short ragged pulls and I looked up at the three of them standing over me and I thought about my baby one more time.

I thought about holding him. Just once. Just long enough to let him know that I had wanted him. That none of what happened was because I had not wanted him.

My eyes were closing on their own.

The wolves went still.

Then they stepped back.

All three of them at once, and silence fell over the forest that was completely different from the silence that had been there before. It was Heavier. I could feel it,even through the fog of pain and exhaustion that was pulling me under.

Then a scent reached me before anything else did.It was Warm and deep and layered with something that cut straight through the cold and the pain and the fear and reached into the most hidden part of me and pulled.

I forced my eyes open one last time.

He was standing at the edge of the trees looking down at me with dark eyes that caught what little light existed in that grey morning and held it.

And then the word came. Rising up from somewhere so deep inside me I had not known it was there until this moment.

"Mate."

His lips parted.

"Mate."

And then the darkness took me completely.