CHAPTER FOUR: QUIET

Roman gave me a room on the east side of the pack house, away from the main hall, close to the healer's wing. I didn't ask if that was deliberate. I already suspected it was.

The first few days I mostly slept, the running and the fear finally catching up with me all at once. Ivy, Roman's healer, an older woman who didn't ask questions I didn't want to answer, told me that was normal enough for early pregnancy stacked on top of grief and shock.

"Your body's been running on adrenaline for a week," she said, pressing gentle fingers along my stomach. "It's allowed to stop now."

Roman checked on me himself every few days, always some practical reason attached, whether I needed anything, whether Ivy had cleared me for solid food yet. It would have been easy enough to send someone else. He never did.

"You don't have to keep checking on me yourself," I told him, maybe ten days in. "You have a pack to run."

"I'm aware." He leaned against the doorframe, not quite entering, the way he always seemed to hover at the edge of a room rather than commit fully to being in it. "I'm also aware that the last time you were left alone with people who were supposed to be looking out for you, it went badly enough that you walked two hours into enemy territory rather than stay."

That was fair, and uncomfortably direct.

"Consider it self interest," he added. "I'd rather not explain to my own pack why the Ashwood heir died of neglect under my roof."

"Heir," I repeated. "That's an interesting word."

Something flickered across his face, there and gone fast. "Figure of speech."

I didn't believe him, but I let it go. There had been something underneath the word when he said it, though, some flicker of recognition, like a man hearing an old name he hadn't expected to hear again outside of a history book.

Meanwhile, forty miles south, Kane Voss was not sleeping.

I only learned this later, in pieces, some from Ivy, some from Roman, none of it from Kane himself, since he had no way to reach me and, as far as I knew then, wasn't trying. What I would eventually piece together was this: three days after I disappeared, Kane called an emergency council session and demanded to know why nobody had noticed his rejected mate walking off pack land pregnant. When his own council reminded him, carefully, that he was the one who'd rejected her, he reportedly said nothing for a long moment and then left the room without dismissing anyone, which apparently had never happened before in the pack's recorded history.

He sent search parties past Ashwood's usual borders within the week. He did not send them toward Cade land, because no sane Alpha assumes his mate walked willingly into enemy territory, and because some part of him, I'd learn much later, still couldn't fully accept that I'd left at all rather than simply being taken somewhere to grieve in private.

None of that reached me yet. All I had at the time were secondhand fragments, a rumor from Ivy about search parties, a rumor about Kane snapping at his own council for the first time anyone could remember, and I filed all of it away without examining too closely why some small, stubborn part of me was glad to hear it.

I started showing properly around the second month. Ivy confirmed twins not long after, and adjusted her notes without much visible surprise, telling me to expect to feel it earlier and harder than a single pregnancy usually went.

It happened on an ordinary evening. I was on the terrace with tea Ivy had started insisting on, watching the light go orange over trees that still didn't feel like they belonged to me, when something pulled tight low in my chest, sudden and sharp enough that I gasped before I understood what it was.

The tea cup hit the stone floor before I'd registered dropping it.

Mate. My wolf came up hard and fast, straining toward the pull like a dog against a leash. I hadn't heard her sound like that in weeks, not since the rejection, when she'd gone quiet and wounded and stayed that way. Now she was awake all at once, every part of her leaning toward Ashwood like the border wasn't even there.

Stop, I told her: He rejected us,remember that part.

He's calling. She didn't care about the rejection right now. He's calling and he means it this time.

I knew that pull. I'd felt a version of it once before, faint and distant, on the day I first met Kane, before everything went wrong between us. The bond wasn't supposed to work like this anymore, not after a rejection. It was supposed to be severed, nothing left for him to reach through even if he wanted to.

Unless he was trying anyway.

Let me answer, my wolf pushed, and it took more effort than I expected to hold her back. Just once. Just to know.

No. I said it out loud without meaning to, low.

Roman was there faster than I expected, crossing the terrace at something just short of a run, Ivy right behind him.

"Mia." His voice had lost every trace of its usual careful evenness. "What happened."

I pressed a hand flat against my sternum, where the pull still sat, fading now but not gone, and looked up at him with what must have been obvious dread, because his expression changed the second our eyes met.

"He's looking for me," I said. "Kane. He's actually looking for me."

Roman went very still.

"How do you know that?"

"Because I can feel him trying." My voice cracked in the middle and I hated it. "The bond isn't supposed to do that. Not after a rejection, not unless he's actively—"

I didn't finish the sentence, because I didn't know how to finish it, and because somewhere behind Roman's carefully schooled face, I watched something shift that looked less like concern for me and a great deal more like a man recalculating every plan he'd made so far, in real time, all at once.

Under all of it, quieter now but not gone, my wolf kept pacing.