Chapter 4: The Positive Test He Will Never See

Miami didn't care if you were a rejected human mate. Miami only cared if you could work.

I learned that in the first week.

I got a job washing dishes at a Cuban diner on Calle Ocho for $9 an hour. No questions asked. No ID needed if you worked off the books. The owner, Mama Rosa, took one look at my thin coat and my bruised eyes and said, "You pregnant?"

I froze, my hand instinctively covering my stomach.

"Don't worry, mija. I have three myself. You work until you can't stand, then you go home."

She didn't fire me. She fed me.

For five months, I washed dishes with my belly growing between me and the sink. The baby kicked every time the hot water splashed. I talked to him while the other girls laughed at me.

"It's okay, little wolf. Mama's got you."

The Lycan doctors say a royal Lycan pregnancy should last seven months, not nine. The baby grows faster. Stronger.

I was five months and already the size of a full-term human mother.

The envelope from Liam — I had burned the cash. I didn't want his money. I wanted to do this alone.

But on a Tuesday in July, when Miami was so hot the air melted, I bled again.

Not like before. Worse.

Mama Rosa found me on the bathroom floor of the diner, curled around my stomach, crying for a child I hadn't even met.

"HOSPITAL! NOW!"

The free clinic on Flagler was not like the Manhattan ER. The doctor was young, Dominican, tired.

"You're dehydrated, malnourished, and your blood pressure is 90 over 60. You are going to lose this baby if you don't rest," she snapped, not unkindly.

"I can't rest. I need to work," I whispered.

She looked at my chart. "Seraphina Cole. No family. No father listed. Twenty-three. Human?"

I nodded. I couldn't tell her the father was a Lycan King who could hear a heartbeat from three blocks away.

She sighed and wrote a prescription she knew I couldn't afford. "Vitamins. Bed rest for one week. At least."

I couldn't afford bed rest. I had $112 in my pocket.

I went back to the one-room apartment I shared with two other waitresses and laid on the mattress on the floor. I took out the ultrasound picture from Manhattan. It was creased now, faded from sweat.

And I took out the other thing I kept.

Three positive pregnancy tests. The ones I took in the diner bathroom the morning before the rejection. I had taped them together like a little cross.

The positive tests he would never see.

I held them to my chest.

That night, the fever came.

Lycan pregnancies kill human mothers. That's what the old pack stories say. The baby's wolf is too strong. It eats the mother from the inside.

I felt it. Claws scratching inside my belly. My body burning up. My own weak wolf whimpering, trying to protect me.

"Please," I begged the ceiling, to the Moon Goddess, to anyone. "Don't take him. Take me instead."

And then — in the middle of that tiny, stinking hot apartment with no AC — I felt it for the first time.

A howl. Not outside. Inside.

My baby howled inside my womb.

A tiny, furious, Alpha howl.

My fever broke instantly.

I sat up, gasping, drenched in sweat. My hand on my stomach.

He was protecting me. My unborn son, not even six months, was already protecting his weak mother from his own father's bloodline.

I laughed through tears.

"You are your father's son," I whispered. "Arrogant and possessive already."

In that moment, I stopped being Seraphina Cole, the rejected waitress.

I became a mother.

I got up. I threw the three pregnancy tests into a shoebox. I put the ultrasound on top. I wrote on the box in black marker: FOR HIM — WHEN HE IS OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW HIS FATHER IS A KING WHO THREW US AWAY.

One day, my son would ask who his father was.

I would show him the tests.

Not to make him love Alexander Thorne.

To make him stronger than Alexander Thorne.

The next morning, I walked back into Mama Rosa's diner and said, "I can work the register now. I speak English and I can count fast."

Mama Rosa looked at my belly, then at my eyes, which were no longer empty.

"Good," she said. "Because you need to save for that baby. He will be expensive. He has his father's appetite."

She didn't know how right she was.

Five months later, on a night when a hurricane was supposed to hit Miami and everyone evacuated, I gave birth alone in that same free clinic, during a blackout, to a 9-pound baby boy with black hair and eyes that opened amber for one second before turning dark brown.

I named him Leo.

Leo Cole. Little lion. Little wolf.

And 3,000 miles away, in the snow-covered Pack House in Alaska, Alexander Thorne woke up from a dead sleep, clutching his chest, howling his son's name without knowing why.