Chapter 4

Nicole's POV

The banquet hall was full by the time I took my seat beside Tate, candlelight running the length of the table and every chair occupied by someone who mattered politically. I had worn the dark green dress Tracy had approved two seasons ago conservative, appropriate, nothing that invited comment and I had arrived exactly on time, which was the most I could do.

Tate leaned toward me a few minutes in, his voice pitched low enough that only I could hear it beneath the noise of the room. "Sophia tells me you smelled strange today."

I lifted my water glass and kept my eyes forward. "Allergic reaction, the soap in the east bathroom, I think. It's been happening with strong fragrances lately."

He looked at me, I could feel the weight of his stare on the side of my face and I kept my expression neutral and faintly inconvenienced.

"Your arms," he said.

I turned them slightly so the rash was visible in the candlelight, already fading to a dull pink at the edges but present enough to be convincing. "It has settled down by this evening, I'm fine."

He held his gaze on me for another moment and then he looked back at the table. "Be careful tonight," he said quietly. "Don't cause trouble. The Alpha of North Maple is here. However you conduct yourself at other times, do not embarrass this pack in front of him."

He turned to the guest on his left and that was the end of it.

I set my water glass down, kept my posture straight, and allowed myself one slow, controlled exhale. It worked.

When Sophia had stopped me in the corridor and said you smell, I had understood immediately what was happening and what was coming.

I hadn't known how much she might say to Tate, or how much Tate might already know. A she-wolf's scent changed for two reasons and he was intelligent enough to know both of them were either due to pregnancy or lactation.

So before I dressed I had gone to the kitchen, boiled three bay leaves, strained the liquid badly and drunk it faster than was sensible, and then stood over the sink waiting for my immune system to do what bay leaf extract reliably did to mine.

The rash had come up in under ten minutes red and visible and completely genuine, crawling up my forearms and throat in the specific pattern of histamine response. A real reaction with a real explanation. One Tate could see with his own eyes and verify with a doctor if he chose to.

He had chosen not to, that was the relief I had been carrying all evening, quiet and close against my chest.

I reached for my water glass again and turned my attention to the room.

Later on I slipped out onto the balcony during the third course because I needed a few seconds to catch my breath.

"You're looking better than the last time I saw you."

I turned. The auburn-haired man from the corridor was standing at the railing with a glass of water, his jacket off, looking out at the grounds below with the ease of someone who had also come here to escape the noise.

Something in my chest loosened fractionally. "I would have brought your scarf if I'd known you were coming."

I told you not to worry about it." He smiled. "Keep it."

Someone called his name from inside and he straightened, setting his glass on the railing. "Enjoy the air," he said, and went back in.

I turned back to the garden below.

The balcony doors opened behind me and I didn't need to turn around to know from the footsteps that there was more than one person.

"You shameless thing."

I didn't have to turn around to know Lily's voice. Lily Hayes — Tate's cousin, Jonathan's mate, and one of the three girls who used to corner me in the school corridor with my notebook. She had followed me here. "Seducing our guests now? In the middle of my cousin's dinner? Do you have no limit? Have you no shame at all?"

"There she is." Sophia's voice, smooth and satisfied. "I told you."

I turned around Sophia stood in the doorway with Lily just beside her, and Tate behind them both, his expression already closing into the careful blankness he used in public when something had annoyed him.

Lily stepped forward. "We saw her out here with Alpha Ashford. Alone, in the dark. The way she was looking at him, Tate — I was embarrassed on your behalf."

"That is not what happened," I said.

"We both saw it." Sophia tilted her head, her voice gentle and deeply certain. "She's been watching him all evening. Every time he moved, she was there. I didn't want to say anything but when Lily came to find me."

"We spoke for less than a minute." I turned to Tate, hating the sound of myself explaining, doing it anyway. "He came out for air, I came out for air. He spoke to me briefly and went back inside. That was everything."

Tate looked at me for a long moment, then looked at Lily, then looked at Sophia, and something moved across his face that I couldn't read.

Lily's hands hit my shoulders before I saw it coming, and she shoved me into the pool.

The cold hit me. I came up gasping, my dress wrapping around my legs and pulling. I turned in the water looking for the edge.

A ring of people had formed at the pool's edge staff and guests, faces pale in the outdoor lighting but no one moved.

I looked up at the balcony. Tate stood at the broken railing, hands loose, face entirely neutral. He looked at me the way you look at a stranger you have decided not to involve yourself with. For three years I had made excuses for every version of his cruelty. I had called it grief, I had called it pain.

I kicked toward the edge. The cramp hit before I got there — sudden and vicious, low in my abdomen as I stopped moving. No, not my baby. I am not losing this child. Not here, not tonight, not for this.

A hand closed around my wrist and pulled, and then I was on the tiles, coughing, the cold air hitting my soaked skin. I tried to find the face of whoever had pulled me out but my vision had gone dark.

I woke up in my bedroom. The lamp on the dresser was on. I was dry, which meant someone had moved me and changed my clothes, which meant I had been unconscious longer than it felt.

Dr. Hale already on his feet, moving toward the bed with his stethoscope in hand.

My hand went to my stomach before my eyes had fully adjusted, I made myself pull it back.

How long had I been unconscious? How long had he been in this room?

Tate was by the window, arms crossed. He came. He called the doctor. Something loosened in my chest despite everything and then Dr. Hale reached for my wrist and I pulled it back before he could take it. "I'm fine. I don't need to be examined."

"Stop being dramatic," Tate said. "Let him look at you."

"I just swallowed some water." Dr. Hale was already reaching again, and I shifted back against the headboard. "I'm fine. Really."

"You've said that three times." Tate's voice had taken on the edge that meant his patience had a visible end approaching. "Stop refusing his help and let him."

"I don't want to be examined." My voice came out louder than I meant it to, and Tate's expression hardened into something I recognised immediately, and I rushed to fill the silence. "I'm sorry. I just — I don't want a fuss. I'm all right, I really am."

He looked at me for a long moment with the specific contempt he reserved for things that inconvenienced him in ways he hadn't planned for.

"Ungrateful," he said quietly. "I arranged for a doctor and you sit there refusing his help like a child." He pushed off the doorframe and straightened his jacket. "You should have stayed in the water if you were going to make this much trouble about being pulled out of it."

He turned to Dr. Hale. "Pack up. Go upstairs and check on Luna Tracy, her condition has been getting worse." He didn't look at me again.

The door closed, and in the silence of my room, I understood completely, and finally, what I should have understood a long time ago.

The doctor had never been for me. I pressed both hands flat against my stomach, gently, and held them there until my breathing steadied.

Are you all right? I asked the question silently. I need you to be all right.

Outside, Tracy's bell began to ring. I didn't move to answer it. For the first time in years, I simply let it ring, and lay back on the bed, and stared at the ceiling, and thought.

In two months, maybe less, my body would start to show signs of pregnancy. I could not protect myself here, let alone someone smaller and more vulnerable and entirely dependent on me to make the right decision before it was too late.

Where could I even go?. I had no money of my own, no contacts outside the pack, no identity that wasn't tangled up in Tate's name and my father's crime. I was an omega without a wolf, the daughter of a man every pack in the alliance had been told was a murderer. No one here would help me. No one in any allied pack would risk sheltering me against a sitting alpha.

I closed my eyes and thought harder, and found nothing.

Where? Where can I go where I become invisible? Where the scent disappears and the bond goes silent and Tate can't reach me?