LOGINIt started at two in the morning on a Tuesday.Not with drama. Not with the sudden moment I had half imagined despite knowing better. Just a tightening that pulled me up from a light sleep, low and wide across my whole middle, different from the practice contractions I had been feeling for two weeks in a way that was impossible to misread even at two in the morning even half asleep.Different in the way that mattered.I lay still and waited.It was released after forty seconds. Slow and gradual, the pressure unwinds like something being gently loosened from the outside in. I lay in the dark afterward and listened to my own breathing and felt my heart going faster than normal and looked at the ceiling and thought, this is it. This is actually it.I waited fifteen minutes. Timed the next one when it came with my hand on my stomach, feeling the tightening build and peak and release. Forty-five seconds. Longer than the first.I turned the lamp on.Lycian was awake before the light reached
The due date was eleven days away.I knew this the way I knew my own heartbeat, without checking, without counting, the number living in my body rather than my mind. Eleven days. Give or take. Aunt Clara had said give or take with the particular emphasis of someone who wanted me to hold the number loosely, who had seen enough births to know that babies arrived on their own timeline with complete indifference to what anyone had written on a calendar.I was trying to hold it loosely.I was not entirely succeeding.The mornings had taken on a specific quality. I woke early, earlier than I needed to, and lay in the pale light before the day started and listened to the house and felt the baby and ran through the internal inventory that had become my first act every morning. How she was positioned. Whether she had moved recently. The particular pressure of her against my ribs, my pelvis, the inside of me that was entirely hers now, every available inch of it.She was quiet in the mornings.
Thirty-six weeks felt like standing at the edge of something with no railing.Not fear exactly. Something closer to the feeling before a very long-held breath was finally released. The particular suspended quality of the last stretch, when everything was ready and the waiting was the only thing left to do, and waiting had never been something I was naturally good at.The baby had dropped.I felt it the morning it happened, a shift downward, a new heaviness settling low in my pelvis, my lungs suddenly less crowded. I stood in the kitchen and took three long slow breaths just because I could, just because the space was there again, and felt tears come without warning at something so small as being able to breathe fully.Lycian came downstairs and found me standing at the kitchen window with my hands on my stomach and my eyes wet and said nothing, just came to stand beside me and put his arm around me and looked out at the garden with me until I was ready to speak.“She’s dropped,” I sai
Thirty-two weeks and the estate was pulling me back.Not consciously. Not a decision I made and then acted on. More like a tide, the particular gravity of a place that held the people you needed when your body was doing something enormous and your mind needed somewhere to put itself that was not just the four walls of your own house.I have been coming three times a week. Sometimes more. Lycian drove me on the days my back made sitting behind the wheel uncomfortable and did not mention that this was what he was doing, just appeared with his keys at the moment I was thinking about leaving, which was its own kind of language.Thursday evening had become the fixed point. Pack dinner, unplanned and unannounced but somehow always happening, everyone arriving with food or without food and ending up around the long table regardless. It had started before the pregnancy and had continued through it and had taken on a different quality in recent weeks, the warmth of it more deliberate somehow,
The nursery was finished on a Sunday in late April.Not finished the way a room was finished when the last box was unpacked and the furniture was in place. Finished the way a room was finished when it finally felt like itself. When you stood in the doorway and the whole of it settled into something complete and you knew without being able to explain exactly why that nothing needed moving and nothing needed adding and it was exactly right.Pale grey walls. Damien’s crib against the far wall, solid and smooth, the wood he had chosen warm in the afternoon. Cream curtains are moving slightly in the draft from the vent. The moon watercolor print we had found together at the weekend market, not planned, just seen and both of us stopped at the same moment in front of the same stall, which felt like enough of a reason.The rocking chair in the corner. The lamp that would not be harsh at night. The small bookshelf with Tessa’s books arranged by size because Lycian had arranged them that way an
Tessa said, just a small gathering.Those exact words. Small gathering, just the people closest to you, nothing overwhelming. I had believed her because I wanted to believe her and because I was twenty-eight weeks pregnant and my feet hurt by noon and the idea of anything overwhelming felt like something to be avoided.I walked into the estate on a Saturday afternoon in late March and found the entire main room transformed.Cream and soft gold streamers hang from the ceiling in long gentle loops. Tables covered in white cloth loaded with food and flowers and small candles in glass jars throwing warm circles of light across everything. Every person I loved was standing in the middle of it wearing expressions that said they had been waiting for exactly this moment and were very pleased with how it had turned out.Tessa appeared at my elbow. “Small gathering,” I said.“These are all close people,” she said simply, and looped her arm through mine and walked me inside before I could respon
I looked up at Thaddeus. Mud crusted in my hair. Blood dripped from my palms onto Lycian’s shirt. Everything hurt.“What one more thing?” My voice came out hoarse. Raw from smoke and screaming.Thaddeus walked closer. His shoes were polished. Clean. Everything I wasn’t. He looked down at me with an
I didn’t sleep that night.Just lay in bed staring at the ceiling while Tessa snored softly across the room. My phone sat on my nightstand. Dark. Silent. Waiting for the decision I had to make by nine o’clock.Take Marcus Blackthorn’s money. Stay away from Lycian. Keep my scholarship and actually h
“Cancel the wedding,” Lycian said immediately. Voice hard. Final.“What? No.” I stared at him. “We’re not canceling because they’re watching.”“They just threatened us. Directly. At our wedding, we’ll be exposed. Vulnerable. Perfect targets.” He was already pulling out his phone. “We postpone. Move
I showed Lycian the message without a word.His jaw clenched. Gold bled into his eyes. Through the bond, I felt his wolf surge. Furious. Protective. Ready to hunt.“We’re leaving,” he said. Voice tight. “Tonight. The beach trip. We’re going now.”“We can’t run from this.”“It’s not running. It’s re







