CHAPTER 1

POV Kristen 

The wine glass slipped from my hands! 

It hit the marble floor and exploded .... red everywhere, like something had been murdered .... and I just stood there, barefoot in the kitchen doorway, staring at the mess I'd made. The wine spread across the white marble, filling them like it had somewhere to be.

The mess was not the glass. 

It was in our bedroom.

My brain was still catching up. My feet had already stopped working. I could hear them .... laughter, low and breathless .... and my wolf, Mira, had gone completely silent inside me. Not sleeping. Not calm. Gone. No warning. No growl. Just .... absence, where she'd been a warm and constant presence my entire adult life.

I forced myself to take one step forward. Then another. My bare feet were cold on the floor and I noticed that distantly, the way you notice small sensations when your mind is refusing to process the large ones.

The bedroom door was open. I hadn't even touched it. Derrik always left it open because he said he felt suffocated with it shut. Five years I had slept in that room, five years I had folded his shirts and learned which side of the bed he couldn't sleep without. Five years of being the perfect mate .... quiet, loyal, invisible when he needed me to be, present when he needed that instead.

And there he was.

Derrik Cole. My mate. My whole stupid heart.

Tangled in our white sheets with Priya.

Priya. My best friend since childhood. Priya, who had cried at our mating ceremony ruining her makeup. We had laughed about it for years afterward. Priya, whose number was still saved in my phone as "My Person.” 

They didn't hear me at first.

 I stood there long enough to understand, completely and without any remaining hope of misinterpretation, exactly what I was looking at. I watched his hand slide through her dark hair .... the same slow, deliberate way it used to slide through mine in the mornings he was in a good mood .... and something in my chest started moving.

It was Priya who saw me first.

Her eyes flew open and found mine across the dim room, and for one second .... just one .... I saw it. Guilt. Pure, white, naked guilt, the kind that doesn't have time to put on its armor. The kind that shows you exactly how long someone has been carrying a secret by how fast they try to hide it.

Then she looked away.

That was what broke me. Not what I saw. Not what I heard.

That she looked away.

"Kristen .... " Derrik was scrambling upright, sheets tangled around his waist, and his voice had that low, careful tone he used on nervous pack members. Already managing the situation, already assessing the damage. He was already managing me. "It's not.... "

"Don't." My voice came out so quiet that he stopped talking immediately, which told me something about how I must have looked.

Good. He should be quiet. He should be very, very quiet.

I watched myself cross the room. I opened the closet. I noted, from somewhere outside my body, that my hands were completely steady as I pulled down the overnight bag I used for pack trips .... I set it on the floor. I started folding things into it with the careful patience of a woman who has decided that falling apart is a luxury she cannot currently afford. A sweater. My mother's cream colored scarf still smelled like her perfume even three years after she died. The small wooden wolf my father had carved for me when I was six, back when the world still felt like it was made of manageable things.

"Kristen , please.... " Priya had already wrap herself with the sheet. Her voice soft as she called my name in a way that once would have had me moving toward her, hands out, asking what's wrong. 

"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, it just happened, it was.... "

"How long?"

Silence.

"How long, Priya?"

I heard her swallow. The sound was very loud in the quiet room. "...Eight months."

Eight months.

Eight months ago, I had organized Derrik's birthday party. I had called the caterer and arranged the guest list and coordinated with the pack elders and worried for a week about whether he would like the playlist. Eight months ago, Priya had come over early to help me set up. She had helped me bake his cake from scratch because he said he didn't like store bought. She had licked the icing off the spoon and laughed .... that big, unguarded laugh I had loved since we were children .... 

The bag was full. I zipped it shut.

"You're not leaving." Derrick had stood up, dressed fast, and now he was blocking the bedroom doorway with his broad shoulders. He wasn't even thinking about it, probably. 

Just his nature trying to find a way solve the problem. His jaw was set. "We need to talk, Kristen . You're my mate. You don't just walk out.... "

"Move."

"I said.... "

"Derrik." I looked up at him then. Actually looked, the way I'd stopped letting myself look because looking cost energy I was always saving for something else. 

I walked past him. Down the hall. Through the kitchen, past the exploded wine glass and the red spreading across the white floor, still moving, still patient, still finding its way into every crack.

I opened the front door.

The night air hit me like cold water .... sharp and clean and immediate .... and somewhere under all that silence, under all that careful stillness I had wrapped around myself like armor, I felt it.

Something tearing.

Not breaking. Breaking sounds like it's over fast. Like a clean line between before and after.

I stepped off the porch. I kept walking. The pack grounds moved around me in the dark .... familiar trees and familiar paths I had walked a thousand times .... and they felt suddenly like someone else's memory, like scenery from a life I had borrowed and was now returning without comment.

I didn't stop until I couldn't see the gates. 

And finally, alone in the dark, on a road… 

I let myself feel the pain. 

I pressed my hand flat against my stomach.

Because there was one thing Derrick didn't know yet. One thing I had been waiting three days to tell him, choosing the perfect moment, turning the words over in my head while he slept beside me .... warm and easy and completely unaware that everything between us was about to change. I had imagined how he would react when I told him. I had imagined it so many times.

I was six weeks pregnant.