Chapter 3: The Confession

The doctor stumbled back from Lillian's grip, clutching his papers to his chest like a shield.

"I checked four times, Miss Ashford." His voice was barely above a whisper. "Blood tests, hormone panels, everything. The results are consistent. Your sister is approximately three weeks pregnant."

"Then your equipment is broken!" Lillian lunged at him again, and I caught her arm just in time, pulling her back even as my own world crumbled around me.

"Lillian. Stop."

She turned to me with wild eyes, tears streaming down her face. "Serena, he is wrong. He has to be wrong. Tell him he is wrong!"

I could not look at her. I could not look at any of them.

"He is not wrong."

The words fell out of my mouth like stones dropping into a well. I heard them hit the bottom and echo, and I felt the impact in every face around me.

My mother's lips parted, but no sound came out. She stared at me with this look of shattered disbelief, like I had just told her the sky was falling and she could see the cracks forming overhead.

My father did not move. He stood at the foot of the bed, rigid as a statue, and for one terrible moment I thought he had not heard me.

"That is impossible," he finally spoke. "My daughter would never do something so reckless."

"Alpha Ashford," the doctor tried again, his voice quivering under my father's freezing gaze. "I assure you, I ran the tests multiple times. The results are conclusive."

"I said it is impossible!" My father's voice boomed through the room and the doctor flinched so hard his papers scattered across the floor.

"Dad." My voice broke on the word. "Please send Lillian and the doctor out. I need to talk to you and Mom alone."

My father looked at me. Really looked at me. And in that moment, I watched the denial drain from his face and something far worse take its place.

He waved his hand without turning around. "Everyone out."

Lillian clutched my arm. "I am not leaving her."

"Now, Lillian."

Marcus gently took Lillian's elbow and guided her toward the door. She looked back at me over her shoulder with a face full of terror, and then the door closed and it was just the three of us.

The silence pressed down on me like a physical weight.

My father walked slowly toward the bed, each step deliberate, and stopped beside my mother. He looked down at me with eyes so cold they burned.

"Explain."

I could feel myself shrinking under his gaze, becoming small and insignificant, a little girl again standing in front of a giant who held her entire world in his hands.

"It was the night of the Alpha Conference." My voice was barely a whisper. "Someone spiked the drinks, or I drank too much, I do not know. I woke up the next morning in a hotel room and I could not remember anything. I did not know what had happened until I saw..." I trailed off, unable to finish.

"Until you saw what?" My mother's voice was high and thin, balanced on a wire.

"Until I saw that I was not alone."

My father's hand gripped the bedpost so hard the wood groaned under his fingers.

This was a man who had built the Bright Moon Pack into one of the four great packs of Evermont. A man whose name carried more weight than law. He had spent eighteen years raising me to be his successor, pouring every ounce of his wisdom and strength and reputation into making me worthy of the title he was about to pass down.

And I had destroyed all of it in one drunken night.

A sound came out of him that I had never heard before. It was not a word. It was a roar that started deep in his chest and erupted through the room like an earthquake, rattling the windows and sending the lamp on the nightstand crashing to the floor. My mother grabbed his arm, and I could see her knuckles turning white as she held on.

"Richard. Richard, stop."

He was shaking. His whole body was trembling with the force of keeping himself contained, and when he looked at me again, I saw tears in his eyes. Actual tears, in the eyes of a man I had never seen cry.

I could not take it. I slid off the bed and dropped to my knees on the cold floor, my forehead touching the ground at his feet.

"I am sorry." The sobs ripped through me now, ugly and raw and unstoppable. "Dad, I am so sorry. I do not remember anything, I swear, I never meant for this to happen."

My mother knelt beside me and pulled me into her arms, stroking my hair with shaking hands. But even through her tenderness, I could hear the calculation in her voice, the desperate strategizing of a woman trying to save her family from ruin.

"Listen to me, Serena." She cupped my face and tilted it up to meet her eyes. "We can fix this. If we terminate the pregnancy now, before anyone finds out, we can tell the pack your transformation was blocked by exhaustion. You can try again next month. No one ever has to know."

The words hit me like a blade to the chest.

"What?" I pulled back from her hands. "Mom, no."

"Serena, think about what you are saying. This is the only way to protect the family. To protect you."

"You are asking me to kill my own child!"

The room went deathly still.

In our world, there were sins and there were sins. Conceiving outside of a mated bond was a disgrace. But ending a pregnancy, destroying a life blessed by the Moon Goddess, that was an abomination. It was the one crime that even the most forgiving packs punished with death. The Moon Goddess gave life, and to reject her gift was to spit in her face.

I looked at my mother and saw the desperation in her eyes, the way she was already rationalizing it, already building the lie that would cover the tracks. And I understood that she was doing it out of love, out of a mother's fierce, blind need to protect her child.

But I could not do it.

"No." I grabbed my father's trousers and held on, looking up at him through my tears. "Dad, I know what I did is unforgivable. I know I have brought shame on this family and on the pack. But I will not kill an innocent child to cover my mistake. I will not bring the wrath of the Moon Goddess down on our bloodline. I cannot do it."

My mother knelt again, slower this time, and placed her hands gently over mine.

"Serena." Her voice was soft now, coaxing, the way she used to talk me out of nightmares when I was small. "We will tell everyone it was exhaustion. That you pushed yourself too hard preparing for the ceremony. No one will question it. By next month, it will all be over, and you can still become Alpha. Everything your father built for you, everything you have worked for, it does not have to end."

I looked at her kind, desperate face, and I shook my head.

"I cannot do it, Mom."

I pulled my hands away from hers and pressed them against my stomach, where somewhere deep inside me, a tiny, fragile life had already begun.

"I will not do it."

My mother's face crumpled. She opened her mouth, but no more words came.

My father stood above us both, his shadow stretching long across the floor. His face was unreadable, but his fists were clenched at his sides, and the vein in his temple pulsed with a fury so enormous it filled the room like smoke.

He did not speak.

He did not need to.

The silence said everything.