Chapter 5

"Say it again."

His voice was very quiet. The locker room was empty. Somewhere above them the stadium crowd was still screaming, vibrating the ceiling, but in here everything was stripped to just the two of them and the thing Nova had just said.

"You heard me," she said.

"I want to hear you say it "again."

"Jax—"

"*Nova.*"

She held his gaze. "You're going to be a father. Twins. I have two tests and I'll get the pack doctor to confirm it this week if you need proof." She paused. "I don't need anything from you. I came because you had a right to know. Whatever you—"

"Twins." He said it like a word from another language. Like he was trying to figure out if it was real.

"Yes."

"That's—" He stopped. Ran a hand over his face. His jaw was tight, his eyes doing the complicated thing they did when he was feeling more than he knew how to carry. "Nova, that's not— we were careful, I—"

"Full moon," she said simply. "Werewolf biology. I looked it up."

The silence stretched long enough to hurt.

Then: "You're lying."

The words landed like cold water.

She blinked. "What?"

"You're lying." His voice had changed. Gone flat and sharp the way it did when he was retreating into performance-Jax, public-Jax, the version of himself that had stood in that hallway and called her *nothing.* "I don't know what this is — a trap, a publicity stunt, some omega fantasy — but it's not happening. I have a future. I have—"

"I'm not asking you for your future," she said. Her voice was very steady. She was proud of that. "I'm telling you the truth. That's all. I'm going to leave and I'm going to handle this and you will probably never hear from me—"

"Handle it." His eyes cut to her. "What does that mean?"

"It means I'm going to raise my children." She met his gaze. "Our children. And I'm going to do it well, with or without—"

"Get out."

The words hit her like a fist.

She didn't move.

"I said *get out.*" He turned away from her. His hands were braced on the row of lockers, head down, shoulders rigid. "These aren't my pups. I don't know what you think happened that night but you've got the wrong alpha. Get a DNA test. Get two. I don't care. Just get out of my face."

Nova stood very still for a very long time.

She felt her wolf go completely silent. Not wounded this time — just finished. Like something had been answered once and for all, and the answer was terrible, but at least it was clear.

"Okay," she said.

She turned and walked toward the door.

"Nova."

She stopped. Didn't turn around.

"Don't come back here." His voice was rough. Almost broken. Like the words were costing him more than she could see. "Don't— just go. Please."

She pushed through the locker room door.

---

The hallway was chaos.

Team staff, press, family members flooding in from every direction. Nova kept her head down and pushed through the crowd, moving fast, not running — she would not run, she refused to run — cutting toward the side exit where the noise was thinner.

She was almost there.

Then the lights went out.

Not dimmed. *Out.* Every light in the stadium corridor killed at once, plunging everything into sudden, screaming dark.

The crowd noise shifted from celebration to confusion to fear in about four seconds flat.

Then came the howling.

*Outside the stadium. Close. Too many voices to count.*

Nova's wolf snapped awake. Every hair on her body stood up. She knew that sound — she'd read about it in pack history, had written a whole essay on it. She'd just never heard it live.

Rogue wolves.

Not a small group. Not a raid. The kind of coordinated attack that happened when someone powerful sent an army.

The emergency lights kicked on — red and dim — and in the bloody half-light Nova could see the crowd beginning to panic, bodies pushing in every direction, someone's elbow catching her shoulder hard enough to spin her sideways.

"*Everyone to the inner rooms NOW!*" A pack enforcer's voice cut through the noise. "This is a rogue breach! Move!"

Nova tried to move.

A hand grabbed her arm.

Not gentle. Not a teammate grabbing a teammate. Rough, deliberate, a grip that knew exactly what it was doing.

She turned and the man holding her was not someone she recognized. Big. Cold-eyed. A rogue brand burned into the skin at his throat.

"You're the omega," he said. Not a question.

"Let go of me—"

He didn't.

She screamed — sharp and loud and the way her mother had taught her, not pretty, not polite — and she felt her wolf surge forward with everything she had. For a second she almost shifted, almost felt the change begin—

From somewhere behind her she heard Jax.

"*NOVA!*"

His voice cracked open in a way she had never heard from him before. Raw. Devastated. Like someone had reached into his chest and pulled.

She was already being dragged.

She got one last look at him over her shoulder — Jax half-shifted, fighting through three rogues at once, his eyes locked on her with an expression that had nothing to do with performance or armor or the face he wore for the world.

Pure terror.

"JAX—"

A bag came down over her head.

And then there was nothing.