CHAPTER TWO: THE BORDER

They moved me out of the family wing three days later. Nobody said it directly, nobody in this pack ever said anything directly if they could help it, but I came back from a walk to find my things already boxed and sitting outside a smaller room near the servants' quarters, and I understood the message well enough without anyone spelling it out.

I didn't argue. There didn't seem to be a point.

The room was fine, actually. Smaller, colder, but fine. What wasn't fine was the way people looked at me now, or didn't look at me, which was worse. I'd walk into the kitchen for water and conversations would just stop, mid-sentence, like someone had reached over and turned down a dial. Once I would have found that humiliating. By day three I mostly just found it tiring, the way a headache that won't quit is tiring.

Kane, at least, had the decency to stay away from me entirely. I heard about him secondhand, a wedding date being set with Selene for the following month, a formal announcement pending, the pack already starting to refer to her as their future Luna in a way that made my back teeth hurt every time I overheard it. I didn't see him once in three days. I told myself I was grateful for that. I mostly believed it.

Dr. Whitlock confirmed it on the fourth morning, in a whisper, with the door locked. Not one heartbeat. Two.

"Twins run in some bloodlines," she said, studying my face for a reaction I wasn't ready to give her yet. "Do you know if it's in yours?"

I didn't, actually. My mother had been an only child. My father's side was a blank I'd never had reason to fill in before now.

"Does it matter?" I asked.

"It might," she said, and wouldn't elaborate further, which told me it probably did.

That night I lay awake doing math that had nothing to do with weeks or months. If I stayed, I would give birth in a pack that already treated me like something to be quietly managed until it went away. If I stayed, my children would grow up as the rejected Luna's mistakes, footnotes in Kane and Selene's story, pitied at best. I thought about the way Selene had said never going to be enough to stand beside him like she was doing me a kindness by explaining it, and something in my chest went hard and flat and very, very clear.

I wasn't staying.

I left before dawn on the sixth day, with a bag I'd packed in pieces over three nights so nobody would notice all at once, and no plan beyond away. Ashwood territory ran for miles in every direction I knew well, which was exactly the problem, anywhere I knew well, someone would eventually think to look. So I went the one direction I didn't know at all: north, toward the ridge line that marked the border with Cade territory, land Ashwood had been in a cold, simmering not-quite-war with for longer than I'd been alive.

Nobody in their right mind crossed into Cade land voluntarily. That was sort of the point.

The walk took most of the morning. I'd underestimated how much slower everything was now, not showing yet, but tired in a way that arrived without warning and sat on my chest like a stone. By the time the trees started thinning out into unfamiliar terrain, my legs were shaking and I'd stopped twice to be sick behind a tree, which either meant the twins or the terror, possibly both.

I heard them before I saw them.

Not wolves, not shifted, anyway. Voices, low, moving with the kind of coordinated quiet that told me these weren't hikers who'd wandered off a trail. I froze against the trunk of a dead pine and did the thing every pack kid is taught to do around unfamiliar scent lines: nothing. Don't run. Running is what gets you caught.

It didn't work.

"She's not one of ours." A man's voice, close enough that I felt it more than heard it.

"She's not local at all." A second voice. "Look at the crest on that bag."

I hadn't thought to hide the Ashwood emblem stitched into the strap. Of course I hadn't. Six days ago I'd been planning a honeymoon, not an escape.

I turned, because there wasn't any version of this where not turning helped me, and found three men in dark, unmarked clothes fanned out in a loose half circle, close enough to have closed it entirely if they'd wanted to. The one in front had pale eyes and an expression that wasn't unkind, exactly, just utterly unreadable, which somehow scared me more than open hostility would have.

"You're a long way from Ashwood land," he said. Not a question.

My hand went to my stomach before I could stop it, an instinct, not a decision, and his eyes tracked the motion and stayed there a half second too long.

"I'm not looking for trouble," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected, which felt like the only thing going right today. "I just need to pass through."

"Nobody passes through," he said. "Not from Ashwood. Not onto Alpha Cade's land."

Behind him, one of the other two men had gone very still, head tilted slightly, the way wolves do when they're catching a scent thread and following it somewhere their face hasn't caught up to yet.

"Marcus." His voice, low. "She's pregnant."

The pale-eyed one, Marcus, apparently, went quiet in a way that felt different from the quiet before. Calculating instead of just watching.

"Ashwood crest," he said slowly, like he was working something out in real time, "pregnant, alone, six days after their Alpha's wedding that half the territory's still gossiping about." His eyes came back up to my face, and something in them sharpened. "You're going to want to come with us."

"I told you, I don't want trouble—"

"I'm not asking because I want to make trouble for you." His voice didn't change, flat and even. "I'm asking because if I'm right about who you are, the Alpha is going to want to know you're standing on his land before anyone else does. And trust me. You'd much rather he hears it from me first."

I stood there, forty feet from the only home I'd ever known and further than I'd ever been from anywhere else in my life, three strange men between me and any direction I could run, and understood with a sick, sinking certainty that I'd just walked directly into the one place my rejection could become a weapon in someone else's hands.

"Fine," I heard myself say. "Take me to him."