Positive

I took the test at six in the morning, alone in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub with the tile cold through my socks.

Three minutes. That was all it took.

I had done this once before, two years ago when my cycle was late and I was still with Nate and terrified in a completely different way. That test had been negative and I had felt relief first and then, quietly, something I never admitted to anyone, a small grief I buried under the relief and never went back to examine.

This time I sat with the test face down in my hands and counted my own breaths and thought about my mother, who used to say that the things worth having always cost you something first.

I turned it over.

Two lines. Dark, immediate, no squinting required.

I sat there for a long moment. The bathroom was quiet. The house around me was quiet. Outside the window the sky was the flat pale color of very early morning, and somewhere below on the grounds one of Lena's people was walking the perimeter in slow steady loops, and none of it felt real and all of it felt exactly real at the same time.

I was pregnant.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and breathed.

It wasn't sadness. It wasn't fear, not exactly. It was the specific feeling of stepping off a ledge you chose to step off and still being surprised by the drop.

I had wanted this. I still wanted this.

I just hadn't expected to be sitting in a near-stranger's bathroom when I found out.

I cleaned up, washed my face, looked at myself in the mirror long enough to confirm that I looked like a person who had slept four hours and just had her life change again, and then I went downstairs.

Cael was already up.

He was in the kitchen, which surprised me. I had expected staff, a formal breakfast setup, something that matched the scale of the house. Instead it was just him, standing at the counter with a coffee in his hand and his shirt untucked, reading something on his phone.

He looked up when I walked in.

I held up the test.

He went very still.

Not the controlled stillness I'd already learned to read as his default. Something different. Something that moved through him from the inside out and didn't quite reach his face but lived in the space just around it.

"Okay," he said. His voice was low and careful, like he was handling something that required both hands.

"Okay," I agreed.

We looked at each other across the kitchen for a moment.

"How are you?" he asked.

It was such a plain question. I appreciated it more than I could have explained.

"Overwhelmed," I said. "But functional."

He nodded. He set his phone down on the counter and picked up a second mug that was already sitting there, already filled, and slid it toward me.

I walked over and took it. Tea, not coffee. The right temperature. I hadn't told him I didn't drink coffee in the morning.

I didn't ask how he knew. I just drank it.

"I need to tell Theo today," I said.

I'll have someone drive you.

I'd rather drive myself.

A pause. "With someone following."

I thought about Aldric's text from last night. Four words. Think about it. Tonight. I had forwarded it to Lena without responding and then lain in the dark for two hours not sleeping.

Fine, I said. "With someone following.

We stood in the kitchen in the early quiet and drank our respective hot drinks and I thought about how strange it was that this felt less awkward than it should have. I had known this man for four days. I was carrying his child. Someone in his house had fed my location to his enemy. And yet standing here in the kitchen at six in the morning felt, in some small and inexplicable way, like the most normal thing that had happened to me all week.

That probably said something concerning my week.

"There's something else," I said.

He looked at me over his mug.

Last night, after I went upstairs. Aldric texted again. I watched his face. Just four words. Think about it. Tonight.

The temperature of the room didn't change but something in Cael's posture did, a tightening along his shoulders that he controlled immediately but not quite fast enough.

"You should have come back down," he said.

"It was midnight and it wasn't an emergency. I forwarded it to Lena." I set my mug down. "I'm telling you now."

He held my gaze for a long moment. "He's escalating. Two contacts in one night means he's not confident his first approach worked."

"It didn't."

He doesn't know that yet.

I picked my mug back up. "What if we let him keep not knowing? What if I don't respond at all and we use the time to find what we need on Dr. Cross?"

Something shifted in his expression. That almost-look again, the one I couldn't fully name.

You want to run a counter-operation, he said.

I want to stop being the person things happen to and start being useful. I met his eyes. I have medical training, I know how clinics are run, and I have a legitimate reason to contact Dr. Cross directly as her patient. That's access you don't have.

The kitchen was quiet.

"No," he said.

"Cael."

"Not yet." He held up one hand, not dismissively, just firmly. "Let Lena finish the financial records first. If there's a direct connection, we do this carefully and with a full plan. Not today."

I wanted to argue. I also recognized the logic.

Fine, I said. But we revisit it.

"We will."

I finished my tea and rinsed the mug and set it in the sink, and when I turned around he was watching me with that same unreadable expression he'd had when I'd walked in holding the test.

Cael, I said. "Whatever this is, whatever we're doing. I need you to promise me one thing."

"Tell me."

"This baby is mine. Whatever happens between you and your pack and your campaign, that doesn't change. I am her mother and I make decisions about her life."

He didn't hesitate.

"I know," he said.

It wasn't a promise exactly. But the way he said it, like the alternative had never occurred to him, settled something in my chest that had been pulled tight since the moment I'd turned that test over.

I picked up my keys from the counter.

"I'll be back by noon," I said.

I was almost at the door when Lena appeared in the hallway, and the look on her face stopped me before she said a single word.

"We found the leak," she said. "And you're not going to like it.”