LOGINIt wasn't a confirmation. It wasn't a denial either. It was worse than both, somehow, the way she said it—flat, exhausted, like she'd already run through every version of this conversation in her head a hundred times and none of them had ended well."Elena." He took a step forward, and she took a step back, one hand coming up—not quite pushing him away, but close enough that he stopped immediately, his whole body freezing in the doorway."Don't," she said. "You don't get to come here in the middle of the night still smelling like the training yard and act like you have some claim on this. On me. On anything.""I'm not trying to claim anything." His voice had gone rough, low, and he hated how much of what he actually felt was bleeding through despite every effort to keep it contained. "I just need to know.""Why?" She threw the word back at him, the same question she'd asked him in the Pack Hall three weeks ago, and he heard the echo of it land somewhere deep in his chest. "So you can
The rumor reached him sideways, the way most rumors did, through a conversation that wasn't meant for him at all.Kane was in the training yard, running drills with a handful of younger pack members, when he caught two of the older women talking near the fence, their voices pitched low but not low enough. He wasn't trying to listen. He'd stopped mid-drill to correct a boy's footing, and the wind had simply carried the words to him before he could help hearing them."—her aunt drove her somewhere outside territory, that's what I heard. Twice now.""For what, though?""What do you think, Marlene. A woman goes quiet, stops drinking her coffee, starts wearing looser clothes—"Kane's hands went still on the boy's shoulders."You don't think—""I'm not saying anything for certain. I'm saying what people are saying."The boy in front of him said something Kane didn't register at all. He straightened up, his whole body gone rigid, and it took a visible effort not to turn and demand the women
He still hadn't found another way out. That was the part that ate at him most, walking this fence line alone in the gray afternoon light. Three weeks, and he was no closer to understanding what Reyes and the council actually wanted, no closer to finding whatever loophole might let him undo the damage without triggering whatever "forced separation" would have meant if he'd refused to do it himself.He'd asked around, carefully, the way you ask questions when you don't want anyone to know you're asking them. He'd gone through what pack records he had access to, looking for precedent, for anything that might explain why the council had suddenly, four nights before the ceremony, decided his bond with Elena was untenable. He hadn't found anything solid. Only a strange, persistent silence around certain old records, an unwillingness among the older council members to discuss anything from more than thirty years back, a discomfort he couldn't quite name but recognized instinctively as signif
The house had never felt big until she stopped being in it.Kane stood in the kitchen at six in the morning, coffee going cold in his hand, staring at a counter that still had a chip in the tile where Elena had dropped a mug three months ago—laughing about it, telling him it added character, refusing to let him replace the tile even after he'd offered twice. He hadn't replaced it since. He told himself it was because he hadn't gotten around to it. He knew that wasn't true. He just hadn't been able to make himself erase the last piece of evidence that she'd ever stood in this room at all.He'd built this house four years ago, when he first took the Alpha mantle from his father—six bedrooms, a great room with vaulted ceilings, more space than one man could ever reasonably need, because some part of him, even then, had been building it for a life he hadn't met yet. A mate. Children, eventually. A house that could hold a family instead of just an Alpha living alone in it.For four months
Dr. Okafor wiped the gel from Elena's stomach with a soft cloth, helped her sit up, and pulled her chair a little closer, setting the wand aside entirely now, her full attention on Elena's face rather than the screen."I want to ask you something," she said, "and I want you to know there's no wrong answer. Sometimes these conversations are complicated, and I've learned not to assume anything about a patient's situation.""Okay," Elena said again, bracing without knowing exactly what she was bracing for."Does the father know you're pregnant?"The question landed softer than Elena expected, delivered with none of the weight it carried for her, and for a moment she just sat there on the edge of the exam table, the paper crinkling faintly beneath her, trying to find an answer that was both true and safe to say out loud in a room that, for all its careful anonymity, still felt somehow too exposed for the whole truth."No," Elena said finally. "He doesn't know."Dr. Okafor nodded slowly, n
The clinic sat forty minutes outside Ashford territory, in a strip mall between a laundromat and a shuttered video store, and Elena had chosen it specifically because nothing about it looked like it belonged to anyone's world but the human one."Fill out the intake form," the receptionist said, sliding a clipboard across the counter without looking up. "New patient?""Yes." Elena took the clipboard and the pen chained to it and found a seat in the corner of the waiting room, as far from the other three patients as the space allowed.Rosalind sat beside her, quiet, her hands folded in her lap, watching the door the way she'd watched every door for the last two days—like something might come through it that they weren't ready for.Elena looked down at the form. Name. Date of birth. Insurance, which she didn't have and would be paying out of pocket to avoid. Reason for visit.Her pen hovered over the first line."Use Ellis," Rosalind murmured, barely a whisper, close enough that only Ele







