The estate

The gate was the first thing that made it real.

Not the drive out of the city, not the way the buildings thinned and the road curved up into tree-lined silence. The gate. Black iron, tall enough that tilting my head back still didn't show the top, and it swung open before my car reached it, which meant someone had been watching the road.

I drove through and told myself this was fine.

The estate came into view around a bend, and I gripped the steering wheel a little tighter without meaning to. It wasn't a house. It was the kind of building that had opinions about itself. Stone and glass, three stories, wide enough that I couldn't take it all in from one angle. The grounds around it were clean and open, which I understood immediately was not just landscaping. Open ground meant nothing could get close without being seen.

I parked where a man standing near the entrance gestured me to stop. He was built like a door and had the face of someone who had professionally not smiled in years.

"Ms. Crane." He reached for my bag before I'd fully stepped out of the car.

"I've got it," I said.

A flicker of surprise. He stepped back. "Mr. Sinclair is expecting you."

Of course he was.

The inside of the house was warmer than I'd expected. Not decorated to impress, just solid, expensive in a way that didn't shout about it. Dark wood floors, high ceilings, the smell of something that might have been cedar. I followed the door man down a hallway and tried not to look like I was cataloguing everything, even though I absolutely was.

Cael was in a room off the main hall, standing at a long table covered in documents and open laptops. Two other people were with him, a woman with close-cropped hair and a sharp face, and a man in a suit who was talking fast and stopped the moment I walked in.

Cael looked up.

"You made it," he said.

"You gave me an address. It wasn't complicated."

The woman with the sharp face looked me over in one second flat. Not rudely. Efficiently. Like she was filing information.

"This is Lena," Cael said. "She runs security."

Lena gave me a single nod. "Ms. Crane."

"Ella," I said, because Ms. Crane was what people called me at the hospital when something had gone wrong. "Just Ella."

Lena's expression said she'd call me whatever she decided to call me, and we'd get there when we got there.

The man in the suit was already gathering papers from the table like I hadn't arrived, which I respected.

"I'll show you your room," Cael said, and came around the table.

We walked up a wide staircase to the second floor. He stopped at a door at the end of a corridor and opened it, then stood back.

The room was large and had its own bathroom and a window that looked out over the back grounds. There was a reading chair near the window and a desk and a bed that was bigger than the entire sleeping area of my old apartment.

I walked in and set my bag down on the floor.

"There's a medical team available on-site," he said from the doorway. "OB-GYN, general. You have final say on all your care decisions. No one comes into this room without your invitation."

"Including you."

"Including me."

I turned and faced him. He was leaning against the doorframe with his arms loosely crossed, and the afternoon light came through the corridor window behind him and caught the angle of his jaw, and I noted that and immediately moved on.

"What's the shape of my days here?" I asked. "Am I expected at meals? Meetings? Do I need to clear my schedule with someone?"

"No. This isn't a schedule. You live here. Move as you need to."

"And when your political situation gets louder? When people start asking questions about why there's a human woman in your house?"

He was quiet for a beat. "We'll manage that when it arrives."

"I'd rather have a plan before it arrives."

He looked at me for a moment with an expression I couldn't fully read. Not irritation. Something closer to reassessment.

"Then we'll talk about it tonight," he said. "If you're up for it after settling in."

I nodded.

He pushed off the doorframe. "Lena will be on this floor. If you need anything and I'm not available, she's your first call."

"I thought you said she runs security, not hospitality."

"She does both, for people she decides matter."

He walked back down the corridor before I could figure out what to do with that.

I closed the door and stood in the middle of the room that was now, for reasons I still hadn't fully processed, mine.

I unpacked because unpacking was something to do. I lined up my toiletries in the bathroom. I put my books on the desk. I plugged in my phone charger and set my hospital badge on the nightstand out of habit, even though I wasn't working for the next four days.

Then I sat on the edge of the bed and let myself be still for one minute.

This morning I had woken up in my own apartment. Tonight I was sleeping in a billionaire werewolf's house because someone somewhere had decided I was useful as a threat against him, and I was carrying a child that might be his, and the world had a layer I had not known existed seventy-two hours ago.

My phone buzzed.

Rosie. Three texts in a row.

*Did you get there?*

*Ella. I swear.*

*I need a sign of life or I'm calling the police and also your brother.*

I typed back: *I'm here. It's fine. I'll call you tomorrow.*

Her response came in four seconds: *It better be more than fine. You better be calling me the second anything happens.*

I set the phone down.

The house was quiet around me. Not the too-quiet of my apartment, where silence felt like absence. This was a different kind of quiet, full and alert, like the house itself was awake.

I got up and went to the window.

The back grounds were lit now, soft security lighting along the tree line. A figure moved along the far edge of the property in a slow, deliberate loop. One of Lena's people, keeping the perimeter.

I pressed my fingers against the cold glass and thought about the clinic room two days ago. The paper gown. The laminated poster. The one small, fragile decision I had made entirely for myself.

Somewhere in this house, there was a man who had turned my entire plan inside out just by existing.

And somewhere in my own body, something the size of a possibility was either already becoming a person or wasn't yet.

I wouldn't know for another twelve days.

A knock came at my door. Quiet, not urgent.

I crossed the room and opened it.

It was Lena. She was holding a phone, and her expression had shifted in a way that made my stomach drop before she said a single word.

"There's been a development," she said. "Cael needs you downstairs. Now.”