Chapter 4

Elena

Barrett took a long breath.

Then: "Of course not. Of course I believe you."

The words came with the right speed, with the right warmth, and six months ago they would have worked on me.

Today they landed flat.

The five seconds of silence before he spoke had already answered for him.

He turned on the two orderlies by the bed. "This hospital's security is a disgrace. A controlled substance walked into a private room in the middle of the day. Park. Get me a name before lunch."

Dr. Park, my former trainee, stiffened. "Yes, Alpha."

Barrett's voice didn't lift toward me. It wasn't meant for me. But an Alpha doesn't raise his voice in a hospital without the whole floor going quiet, and every sentence still sat on my chest.

I folded my hands deeper into my coat.

"Elena." His palm settled at the small of my back. "You're exhausted. Let me walk you out."

The fluorescent hum I had stopped hearing a decade ago had come back into the corridor.

He waited until we were alone at the elevator bank. Then he bent his head closer, voice dropping.

"This baby is important to both of us. We cannot afford a mistake."

I looked up at him.

"We."

"Elena."

"You still don't believe me."

He didn't answer. He reached past me, pressed the call button, and walked back toward Sophia's room before the doors opened.

I rode the elevator down alone.

Dr. Marin was waiting in her office with her arms folded the way she folded them for bad news.

"Don't make me say it," she said. "Please."

"Say what."

"The Alpha called the chief of medicine. He is concerned about your workload. He wants you to rest. You're being moved to archives."

I stared at her.

"He thinks filing is good for me."

"Elena."

"He can build a career for his mistress. He can make her Chief Press Secretary. He cannot imagine his wife has a career."

Dr. Marin said nothing. She knew better than to comfort me while my voice was this level.

I had worked ten years to be the only human name on this floor. I had been the first human to run a genetic-disorder clinic in a wolf hospital, and the wolves on staff had spent two of those years pretending not to see me in the cafeteria. I had earned this coat.

He had lifted it off my shoulders with one phone call, because he was afraid I would poison his mistress's baby.

I picked up my badge, the chain of my wedding ring clinking against it under my collar, and went to the basement.

*

Barret

In the third-floor suite, Barrett sat on the edge of Sophia's bed.

She reached for his wrist with a careful, practiced hand.

"The baby is fine," she said. "The doctor says no damage. Please don't blame Elena."

She let a small silence hang, then added, "She is a doctor, though. I will have to see her again. For scans. For anything that goes wrong."

Barrett's jaw shifted.

"Just think about it," Sophia said, and her other hand returned to her belly.

He did think about it. He thought about it exactly the way she wanted him to. Sophia knew, because she had watched him work through a thousand press crises the same way, and she could read the tell at the corner of his eye.

She opened her mouth to press further.

"Sophia." His voice cooled. "You will take care of this pregnancy. If anything happens to this child, I don't care what drug was found in whose sample. You will be held responsible."

She closed her mouth.

He did not look at her again.

Elena

The archive was in the basement. Tiled floor. No windows. Bulbs no one had replaced in years.

It was, genuinely, an easy job. Too easy. All day to think.

I pulled Sophia's case file from intake. Her first fertility consultation had been booked under a coded internal referral, not from her own OBGYN, three months ago.

Three months.

I sat with the folder open on my knees. Turned the page. Turned it back.

Three months was Ironbound's last board gala, where Barrett had pressed his hand to the small of my back and told me soon. Three months ago I had canceled a ski trip because he said the council schedule wouldn't hold still. Three months ago he had come home at two in the morning and said, I am so tired, Elena, just give me a minute, and I had fetched him water and rubbed the knot out of his shoulder like a good wife.

Every alarm bell that could have gone off, I had muted myself.

I pulled out my phone.

V.C.: Call me anytime, Elena.

I was still staring at it when the archive door opened.

"Sorry. I didn't know anyone was —"

Reid.

Barrett's Beta. Large, quiet, careful with his words. I slid my phone face-down against my thigh.

"Reid."

"Dr. Halloran." His ears went pink. "I didn't know they had you down here."

"It's temporary." I made my voice easy. "What do you need?"

He named a set of physical records. I walked him to the cabinet, pulled the file, and as I flipped through for the sheet he wanted, another form brushed my finger.

A prescription record.

His.

Twelve months of a single standing order. A common contraceptive suppressant. Issued to Reid.

I held the page without turning it over.

Reid was twenty-nine. He had been single the entire three years I had known him. I had never met a partner, had never heard him mention one at any pack function.

"Reid." I kept my voice doctor-light. "A year on these is a long time. Long-term use can cause permanent infertility. You should rotate off. Whoever your partner is, she should know."

Something under the embarrassment moved on his face.

"I — I'll talk to her. Thank you, Dr. Halloran."

He took the file and left faster than he had come in.

The door clicked shut.

I stood in the middle of the archive holding his prescription record.

Contraceptive suppressants produced a very specific hormonal signature. Spike one marker. Drop another. An internal-medicine physician who wasn't looking for them would read the panel and say stress. Too many shifts.

The way every fertility specialist I had seen for three years had read mine.

My hands went cold at the wrists first, then at the fingertips. It is the first thing that happens in hypovolemic shock. I knew the order like a nursery rhyme.

I turned toward the door.

Sophia was leaning against the frame.

How long she had been there I did not know. She wore the same wool coat from the morning. She had the settled look of someone who'd enjoyed the show.

"You." My voice was rougher than I had heard it in three years. "You paid Reid."

She laughed.

One short, mean laugh. The bright, camera-ready mask was gone.

"Who else can order a Beta to do anything," she said, "except the Alpha he reports to?"

The file slipped a half-inch in my hand.

"Did you really think," Sophia said, almost kindly now, "that Barrett was ever going to let a human be the Luna and the mother of the Ironbound heir?"

I stopped breathing.