LOGINAmelia had just discovered that she's carrying Alpha Jace's child but she didn't expect her world to shatter in one night. Finding her mate and her friend entangled together in bed, he didn't deny it and didn't apologize. Betrayed, replaced and humilated, Amelia decides to escape the cage she had lived in for two years by leaving the pack. Pregnant and alone, how would she survive? Her freedom led her to a second chance mate while she still struggled to get over the trauma caused by her first. Zayden Briggs. The cold alpha with a dark past everyone fears to talk about. What happens when she meets Zayden? What happens when her first mate, Alpha Jace, comes back trying to reclaim her?
View More"There," Mara said. Something in her voice that was not typical of her clinical assessments. Warmer. The amber eyes, if I had been looking at them, would have been doing the thing they did when something she had been working toward was arriving.I was not looking at them.I was turned inward, holding the warmth steady, listening to the second child moving toward the world with the purposeful, final quality of something that has found its direction and is following it."Amelia." The nurse's voice now. Coordinated with Mara, the two streams of guidance converging. "With the next contraction I need you to push."I opened my eyes.Zayden.Right there. Hand in mine, face at the edge of everything he was feeling, voice ready to be whatever I needed it to be."I need—" I started."I know," he said. Before I finished. "I'm here. I've got your hand. Breathe first."I breathed.The contraction built."Now," the nurse said."You're doing it," Zayden said. Simultaneously, the two voices layering
Amelia POV The first cry was still in the room.Not literally — the sound itself had ended, had been replaced by the organized, purposeful sounds of the medical staff attending to the first child with the efficient care of people who have a job to do and are doing it. But the first cry had changed the room in a way that persisted after the sound itself stopped, the way a stone dropped in water changes the surface long after the dropping. Everything in the room was different for having contained that sound.I was different for having heard it.There is no preparation for it. I want to say that clearly because I had done considerable preparation — months of it, the most thorough preparation that a person who takes preparation seriously can do. I had read everything. I had talked to Mara. I had listened to the internal frequencies of both children for so long that their presence was as familiar as my own heartbeat. I had thought about the moment of their arrival with the full, careful
"I read," he said. Of course he had. Zayden, who brought thoroughness to everything that warranted thoroughness, who had apparently spent some portion of the quiet months reading about what his mate was going to experience and what would be useful in the experiencing of it. "Everything?" I asked. "Everything available," he confirmed. The cracking continued. I want to be honest about that because honesty is what I have committed to in the telling of this, and honesty requires acknowledging that the next several hours were the most physically demanding thing I had ever done, which is a statement that has significant competition given the year I had just lived through. The blood was working. I could feel it — the deep, ancient current running at an intensity that the training had pointed toward but never fully reached, the lineage doing what it was built to do in the conditions it was built for. The children were active in the way Mara had described, participating rather than passi
The calm did not leave all at once.That was the thing about it — I had expected, in the abstract planning of the months of preparation, that if the calm broke it would break clearly. A defined moment. A line crossed. Before the breaking and after the breaking, distinguishable from each other.It did not work that way.It left in layers.The first layer went sometime in the third hour, which was when the contractions had established themselves with the kind of authority that makes the word contraction feel insufficient — too small, too clinical, too much a word designed for a training room description of a process rather than the actual experience of the process from the inside. The breathing was still working. The blood's warmth was still running, still being directed with whatever intentionality I could maintain. But the effort of both simultaneously was beginning to show at the edges.I was still calm.But the calm was working harder than it had been.The second layer went when the
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