Chapter 4

The gas station bathroom smelled like Pine-Sol and old cigarettes.

Nova stood at the sink for a long time after she was done, not moving, not breathing. The test sat on the back of the toilet like a small, world-ending fact. She didn't need to look at it again. She already knew. She'd known before she bought the test, before she walked in here, before she'd knocked on Jax's dorm room door three nights ago.

Her wolf had known from the morning she woke up in his bed.

Two pink lines.

Twins, the second test confirmed — the one the campus pharmacy sold with the early detection add-on. Two heartbeats, faint and rapid and impossibly synchronized, already visible in the small readout window. She'd bought the fancy one because she needed to be completely certain before she did anything that couldn't be undone.

She was completely certain.

She sat down on the bathroom floor — because her legs stopped working, and the floor was there, and no one was watching — and she let herself have exactly four minutes of falling apart. She set a timer on her phone. Four minutes to be terrified, to cry if she needed to, to let the enormity of it press down on her.

The timer went off.

She stood up.

Washed her face. Dried her hands. Looked at herself in the spotted mirror above the sink: nineteen years old, alone, carrying the children of a boy who had looked at her like she was nothing in front of everyone who mattered to him.

The girl in the mirror looked scared.

But she also looked like she had already made a decision.

---

She called her mom from the parking lot.

Two rings. Three. Voicemail.

Right. Time zones. Her mom was three thousand miles away and three hours behind and had a double shift at the hospital tonight.

Nova left a message. "Hey. Call me when you can. Nothing's wrong." A pause. "I just need to hear your voice."

She hung up and sat in her car and watched a couple walk out of the gas station with a bag of chips and a Slurpee, arguing cheerfully about which road to take. They were maybe thirty. The woman was pregnant — obviously, beautifully so — and the man kept touching her lower back like he couldn't help it, like it was automatic.

Nova watched them until they drove away.

Then she took out her notebook — the paper kind, because some things needed to be handwritten — and she started a list. She did this when things got overwhelming: made them small. Made them manageable.

*Options.* She wrote it at the top and underlined it twice.

She stared at the blank lines below.

She wrote one word.

*Jax.*

She stared at it for a long time.

He deserved to know. That wasn't even a question — it was just true, the way gravity was true. Whatever he had done to her in that hallway, whatever ugly thing he was capable of in front of an audience, she was not going to be the kind of person who kept this from him out of spite.

She would tell him.

She would go to him one more time — the last time, genuinely the last — and she would say the words out loud.

What he did next was on him.

She crossed out *Jax* and wrote: *Tell him. Once. His choice after that.*

She turned to the next page and started writing something else.

*Plan B* — and she meant her life plan, not the pharmacy kind. Money. Her scholarship. The apartment her mom had offered to help with next year. Whether the university had any provision for students who—

She stopped writing.

Her hand was on her stomach again. She hadn't even noticed.

She thought about those two tiny heartbeats. Rapid and synchronized and stubbornly, insistently *there.*

Her wolf pressed forward, warm and fierce and certain in a way Nova didn't feel yet.

*Protect them,* her wolf said. Not frantically. Just factually, the way wolves dealt with things. *Protect them. That's the whole job now.*

Nova closed her notebook.

"Okay," she said out loud, to the empty car, to no one. "Okay."

She wasn't fine. She wouldn't be fine for a while. But she was upright, she was thinking, and she had a plan — or the beginning of one. That was enough to start with.

She was going to tell Jax Wilder he was going to be a father.

And then, whatever he said — she was going to be the best mother these pups had ever seen.

---

She found him the next afternoon.

Championship day. The stadium was packed, roaring, electric with the kind of full-pack energy that made the air taste like lightning. She waited outside the locker room with her hood up and her arms crossed and her heart doing something slow and preparatory in her chest, like it was getting ready for impact.

The final buzzer rang.

The crowd erupted.

Jax Wilder emerged from the tunnel with his helmet in his hand and victory on his face — grinning, wild, more alive than she'd ever seen him. His teammates mobbed him. Cameras flashed.

He saw her across the hallway.

His grin faded.

Not into cruelty. Not into the performance-version of himself. Into something quieter, more complicated.

He crossed toward her slowly, like he was giving himself time to build whatever wall he needed.

"Nova."

"I need five minutes," she said. "Locker room. Just us."

He looked at her face. She'd worked hard to keep it neutral — she wasn't giving him fear, wasn't giving him desperation. Just steady. Just the facts.

Whatever he saw there, it was enough.

He jerked his head toward the locker room door.

"Five minutes," he said.

She followed him inside.