The test-a

The supply closet at Moonridge Clinic was the only room in the building with a lock that worked, so that was where Lyra Voss went to find out whether her life was over.

It smelled like bleach and old cardboard. A single bulb hung from the ceiling on a cord, and it buzzed whenever she stood too close to the shelves. She stood too close to the shelves. She stood with her back pressed against a crate of gauze and her hands shaking so badly she had to set the test down on a box of gloves, just to stop it from rattling in her fingers.

Three minutes. That was all the box said. Three minutes, and then you would know.

She had stolen it. Not really stolen, since she was the one who ordered the clinic's supplies and she had simply added one extra item to the invoice and paid for it herself out of her own pocket, but it felt like stealing.

Everything about the last six weeks had felt like stealing. The late nights. The back stairs. The way she had learned to move through the pack house like a draft, never touching anything, never leaving anything behind.

Two minutes and forty seconds.

"Stop looking at it," she whispered. "A watched pot."

But she looked. She had always been a person who looked. Her mother used to say it was what made her a good healer and a poor liar, both at once.

You can't help but see what's in front of you, little moon. Be careful what you let your face say about it. 

Her mother had been dead for nine years. Lyra still heard her at the worst possible moments.

Outside the door, the clinic went on without her. She could hear Orla, the head healer, scolding some young wolf about a sprained wrist. She could hear the front desk phone ringing and ringing. Somebody laughed in the hallway, a big easy laugh, and she knew whose it was and her stomach folded in on itself.

Not him. Not today. Please, not today.

The laugh moved on down the corridor. She let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding.

It was possible she was being ridiculous. People were late all the time. She had been working double shifts since the flu went through the east ward. She had barely eaten. Stress did things to a body, everyone knew that. And the nausea in the mornings could have been the water, because the water in the north wing tasted like pennies. And the tiredness, the strange heavy tiredness that pulled at her in the afternoons like a hand on her sleeve, could have been anything at all.

She was twenty-four years old. She was an omega with no family, no rank, and two hundred and twelve coins in a tea tin under her bed. She had no business being anything but ridiculous.

Two minutes.

She thought about him, because there was nowhere else for her mind to go.

Dante Kane. Alpha of the Moonridge pack. He was thirty-one and he was built like a man who'd been carved out of something that wasn't meant to bend. He had a scar that ran from his left ear down under his collar, and she knew exactly where it ended, and she wished she didn't.

He had a way of standing in a doorway that made a room go quiet. When he said her name, nobody else in the world had ever said it like that, like it cost him something and he was glad to pay.

It had started in the spring. A deep cut on his forearm from a border skirmish, and Orla was out sick, and Lyra was the only one left in the clinic who could stitch.

He had sat on the exam table with his sleeve rolled up and watched her work, and she had been so afraid of her own hands that she'd bitten the inside of her cheek bloody.

"You're good at this," he'd said.

"It's just stitching."

"No." He'd been looking at her, not at his arm. "It isn't."

That was all. That was how it began. A man who could have ruined her with a word looked at her like she mattered, and she had never learned how to say no to being seen.

One minute.

She picked up the test.

She didn't want to. Her body did it for her, the way it would pull a hand back from a hot stove, only in reverse. Her fingers closed around the plastic. She turned it over.

Two lines.

Dark ones. Not faint, not hopeful, not the kind you could squint at and argue with. Two clean, certain lines, as if the universe had run out of patience with her.

Lyra sat down on the floor.

She didn't decide to. Her knees simply stopped holding her up, and she slid down the crate until she was sitting on the cold concrete with the test in her lap and her hand over her mouth. She stared at the shelf across from her. Rubbing alcohol. Cotton swabs. A box of tongue depressors with the corner crushed in.

Pregnant.

The word didn't feel real. It sounded like something that happened to other girls in other stories, girls with mothers who would cry and then hug them, girls with someone to call.

She pressed her palm flat against her stomach. There was nothing there yet. Nothing to feel. Just her own warm skin and her own quick breathing, and under both of them, if she held very still, something that might have been imagination and might have been a tiny, stubborn flicker.

"Oh," she said, to no one. Her voice cracked in half. "Oh, no. Oh, no, no."