Chapter two

NORA

I woke up to the sound of machines beeping softly somewhere close to me and a stillness in the room that felt wrong before I could even fully open my eyes. My head was heavy and my body ached in ways I did not have words for yet and for just a few seconds between sleeping and waking I did not remember anything.

I turned my head slowly and looked at the empty space beside me on the hospital bed. No baby. No blanket wrapped around a small warm body. No sound of breathing that was not my own. Just an empty space where my child should have been and a silence in the room that pressed down on me like something physical.

I pushed myself up onto my elbows even though every part of me screamed in protest. My lower abdomen felt like it had been torn open and put back together badly and my arms were shaking just from the effort of lifting myself.

I looked around the room with eyes that were still swollen, nearly shut from all the crying I had done before I lost consciousness.

The doctor was standing near the window with his back partially turned to me, writing something down on his clipboard and deliberately keeping his gaze away from mine.

"Doctor." My voice came out thin and rough, barely loudable for anyone to hear. "Where is my baby?"

He did not turn around immediately. He kept writing for a moment longer than was natural, his pen moving across the paper with a deliberateness that told me he had been expecting this question and had already decided how he was going to handle it.

"Doctor please." I pushed myself further upright, ignoring the pain that fired through my abdomen when I moved. "I cannot see my child anywhere. Where have they taken my baby?"

He finally turned and looked at me and in his eyes there was something that was not quite guilt and not quite pity but lived somewhere uncomfortable between the two. He opened his mouth and then closed it again and looked back down at his clipboard.

"Your baby." A voice came from the doorway and every hair on my body stood up at the sound of it.

Kael was standing there with one hand resting against the doorframe, watching me with an expression that was completely unreadable. He looked rested. He looked calm. He looked like a man who had slept well and woken up without a single thing weighing on him.

He gave the doctor a look and the doctor gathered his clipboard and walked out of the room without another word to me.

"You took him." I said quietly, my voice was not capable of much more than that right now. "You actually took my baby from me while I was unconscious."

Kael pushed off the doorframe and walked into the room with both hands in his pockets,like he had all the time in the world and nothing I could say was going to change the direction of this conversation.

"You need to calm down." He said, like the way people say things when they have already won and they know it.

"Where is my child Kael?" My voice cracked on his name. "I want to see my baby right now. I just gave birth. You cannot keep my child away from me."

He stopped near the foot of the bed and looked at me and for just a moment something moved across his face. Something that might have been human if it had stayed long enough for me to identify it. But it passed as quickly as it came and what replaced it was that familiar blankness that I had spent so many months trying to reach through and never once succeeding.

Then the door opened again and Lena walked in.

She was carrying my baby.

Everything in me surged forward at once. Some deep and desperate and unstoppable part of me that had nothing to do with thought or reason. I pushed myself off the bed before I had even made a conscious decision to move, grabbing the side rail to keep me from going straight to the floor, my legs shaking violently beneath me, as my abdomen screamed with every movement, and I reached out toward her.

"My baby." The words came out of me like something that had been locked up and was finally breaking free. "Give him to me. Please give him to me."

Lena looked at me the way someone looks at an inconvenience they have already planned around. She took one deliberate step backward and pulled my child closer against her chest and smiled.

"I am sorry," she said, and the words carried no apology in them at all. "This child is in my care now."

I stared at her. Then I turned to Kael because some part of me was still holding onto the idea that there was a line somewhere that even he would not cross. That watching me reach for my own child with shaking arms and tears already streaming down my face would be enough to make him stop this.

He nodded.

One slow single nod.

My legs gave out from under me and I went down. Not all the way to the floor but down onto the edge of the bed with my hands gripping the sheets and my whole body folding under the weight of what that nod had just confirmed.

My mind was spinning and the pain in my abdomen was mixing with a completely different kind of pain that was spreading outward from somewhere in the center of my chest and filling everything.

"Kael." I looked up at him with whatever was left of me. "You cannot do this. Please. I am his mother. I carried him. I went through everything I went through to bring him here and you cannot just take him from me like this."

A pack elder walked in through the door.

I had not even heard him approach. He was an older man, carrying a folder of papers under one arm, and he did not look at me with cruelty the way Kael and Lena did. He looked at me with something worse.Like I was simply a matter that needed to be formally concluded.

"We are ready," the elder said to Kael.

"What is this?" I looked between them. "What is happening right now?"

Kael pulled a chair close to the bed and sat down and crossed one leg over the other and looked at me like he was about to explain something simple to someone slowly.

"You signed the custodial rights over to Lena the week after we were married," he said. "You signed the divorce papers three months into the pregnancy. You signed everything that needed to be signed a long time ago Nora and you did not understand what any of it meant at the time and that is not my problem."

"I did not know what I was signing." My voice was shaking so hard the words were barely holding together. "You know I did not know. You put those papers in front of me and you told me they were pack formalities and I trusted you."

"The elder is here to make it official," Kael said simply. "It is already done. It has been done for months. Today is just the formality."

The elder opened his folder and began reading from the papers inside in a low official voice and the words washed over me like something from a nightmare.

Custodial rights.

Legal guardian.

Transfer of parental claim.

Each word landed on me like it was all a dream.

Lena stood there holding my baby through all of it with a small satisfied smile sitting on her face.

I begged. I am not ashamed of it. I held onto the edge of that bed and I begged Kael with everything I had left in me, tears pouring freely down my face, my voice breaking apart on every word. I told him I would leave and never come back. I told him I would disappear so completely he would never have to think about me again. I told him I would sign anything, do anything, agree to anything, if he would just let me have my child.

He sat there and he listened to all of it and when I was done he stood up and straightened his jacket.

"You have until tomorrow morning to remove yourself from this pack," he said. "Everything that belongs to you has already been packed. The guards will escort you out at first light."

"Kael please." I reached for his arm as he turned to leave. "He is my son. Please."

He looked down at my hand on his arm and then he looked at me and removed my hand from him carefully and without any feeling at all, the way you move an object that has been left somewhere it does not belong.

He walked to Lena and placed his hand on her back and they walked toward the door together and Lena turned once to look at me over her shoulder, my baby pressed against her chest, and she smiled at me one last time before they walked out.

The elder gathered his papers and followed without a word.

The room was empty.

I sat on the edge of that hospital bed alone and the silence came crashing in around me and I pressed both hands over my mouth to hold in the sound that was trying to come out of me because once I let it out I was not sure it would ever stop.

My baby was gone.

And every door I might have walked through to get him back had just been closed and locked from the inside and I had not even seen it happening until it was already done.