Chapter ten

“No,” I said. “No. It’s not possible.”

Hilda hadn’t moved from her chair. She had that terrible patience on her face, the kind healers wear when they’re waiting for the truth to finish arriving.

“Merliya—”

“I was a virgin, Hilda. Two days ago. You cannot— people don’t— it doesn’t happen like that.” I was pacing her kitchen, three steps, turn, three steps, my arms wrapped around myself. “It takes weeks to scent a pregnancy. Everyone knows that. Weeks.”

“For most bloodlines, yes.”

“Then you’re smelling something else. Soap. His cologne. Something.”

“I know what I’m smelling.” Her voice was soft and immovable, a hand on a struggling patient. “But you’re right that it shouldn’t be there. Not this soon. Not this strong.” She stood. “Which is why we’re going to my clinic, and we’re going to find out what’s actually going on inside you. Right now, before you wear a trench in my floor.”

The clinic was three rooms behind her house, whitewashed and smelling of dried herbs and antiseptic. I’d woken up in one of these beds a week ago, broken and bleeding. Now I sat on the edge of the exam table with my heart trying to climb out of my throat while Hilda drew blood from my arm with hands that didn’t shake even slightly. One of us had to be steady, and it wasn’t going to be me.

“How long?” I asked.

“For the standard test, minutes. For the deep panel, an hour.” She labeled the vial without looking at me. “Talk to me while we wait. This Jake. What do you actually know about him?”

“He’s… he was at the club. He’s from the capital, I think. He said work brings him out this way.” I closed my eyes and tried to gather the pieces of a man out of one night. “He’s older than me. He has money — the hotel was… it was the kind of place I’ve only cleaned, never slept in. He asked if I was sure. Every time, he asked if I was sure.”

“That’s who he was to you. I’m asking what he is.” Hilda set the vial in her little centrifuge and turned to face me, arms crossed. “Because here’s the thing you’re not going to want to hear. A pregnancy that scents inside a day isn’t about the mother, Merliya. It never is. It’s about the sire. It means potency. Old blood. The kind of dominant line that shows up in medical texts, not in nightclubs.”

The machine hummed between us.

“You’re saying he lied to me.”

“I’m saying nobody named ‘just Jake’ throws a scent like the one coming off you.” She pulled the first strip, dipped it, and we both watched the little window like it was a door something might come through.

One line surfaced. Then, dark and certain and impossible, a second.

The room tilted. I heard myself make a sound that wasn’t quite a word.

Hilda didn’t say I told you. She crossed to me and held my shoulders while the world rearranged itself, while everything I’d survived stacked itself up behind this one new fact and the whole tower swayed.

Pregnant. Nineteen days after my family burned. Eight days after my mate rejected me in front of five hundred wolves. Two days after I was sold at auction for ten thousand and climbed out a window with my wrists bleeding.

Pregnant, by a stranger, in a world that had already decided I deserved nothing.

“I can’t,” I whispered. “Hilda, I can’t. I can’t even keep myself alive. Corvain is out there. Silverpine is out there. If they find me—” My voice cracked down the middle. “If they find me now, it’s not just me anymore.”

“Then they don’t find you.” Her grip tightened. “Breathe. We’ll think. We’ll plan. You have me, and nobody knows you’re here, and we have time.”

The centrifuge chimed. The deep panel.

Hilda gave my shoulders a last squeeze and went to read it, and I watched her face because her face had always told me the truth faster than her mouth. I watched her scan the results once. Then again, slower. Then I watched every drop of color leave her.

“Hilda?”

She looked up at me, and my fearless friend — the one who’d lied to my face about danger every day for a week to keep me calm, the one who patched up warriors and never flinched — looked afraid.

“The hormone signature.” Her voice came out careful, each word set down like it might break. “There are markers here I’ve only ever seen referenced in the old texts. Dominant-line markers. Merliya, this reads like—” She stopped. Tried again. “This is what royal blood looks like.”

The word landed in the small white room and used up all the air.

“Merliya.” Hilda set the paper down. “Who exactly did you sleep with?”