ANMELDENLyra's pov Vera cleared me on the third morning with the manner of someone issuing terms rather than granting permission — light work only, nothing that required sustained physical effort, meals at proper intervals without negotiation, and if she found me on my feet for more than four hours consecutively she would put me back in the cot herself and she wanted that clearly understood.I understood it clearly and went to the healing house and stood at the center table and felt the familiar smell of the place settle around me like something I had not known I was missing until it was back — herbs and clean linen and the particular warmth of a room that was always in use, always purposeful, always asking something useful of the people inside it.I had missed it more than I expected, which told me something about how thoroughly it had become mine.Mira and Cael arrived for the morning session and they were careful with me in the way people were careful with someone they had decided was tem
Matthias's pov I called Aldric to the office before dawn.He arrived with the quiet efficiency of a man accustomed to being summoned at unusual hours for unusual reasons — no visible surprise, no questions before I had finished speaking, just the focused attention of someone who understood that the value of a good tracker was not only in what he found but in how cleanly he moved while finding it.I told him what I needed."Silverpine Pack," I said. "I want everything about Lyra's history there — her position, her relationship with the healer named Oswin, the circumstances under which she lost her voice, and anything the Elders excluded from the official union documentation." I held his gaze. "You observe and gather. You do not confront anyone, you do not identify yourself as coming from this pack, and you do not move in a way that draws attention. Understood?""Understood," he said."You report directly to me. Not Ryder, not anyone else. Only me."He nodded once and I dismissed him a
Lyra's pov Vera told me to stay and I stayed, which surprised me more than it surprised her.The old version of myself — the one who had arrived here forty-something days ago with the practiced efficiency of someone who had learned that stillness was dangerous and usefulness was the only reliable form of safety — would have been back at the center table the next morning, hands moving through the work, the motion of it keeping everything else at a manageable distance. But I stayed in the cot and looked at the ceiling and let the thoughts come, and found that they did not destroy me the way I had always assumed they would if I stopped running ahead of them.The pregnancy was real. Nine weeks, possibly ten, and growing with the patient indifference of something that had decided to exist regardless of the circumstances around it, and I was a healer who understood exactly what that meant — the timeline of it, the physical reality of it, what it would look like in another four weeks and an
Matthias's pov I told Ryder in the office with the door closed and no preamble, the way I delivered information that needed to be received clearly before anything else was done with it, and Ryder sat across from me and listened and when I finished he was quiet for a moment in the way he was quiet when something had landed somewhere significant and he was deciding what it meant before he spoke."Before she arrived," he said."Yes."Another silence, shorter this time. "Does she know that you know?""Vera told her I was waiting outside. She knows I was told."Ryder nodded slowly, his forearms on his knees, looking at the middle distance with the careful expression of a man building a picture from pieces he hadn't finished arranging yet. He did not ask the question I could see sitting behind his eyes — the one about who and how and what it meant for the arrangement and what I intended to do — and I was grateful for that, because I did not have answers to any of those questions yet and I
Matthias's pov I had carried her from the dining room to the healing house myself.Not because there was no one else available — Alexei had been on his feet before I was, and two pack members had appeared in the corridor within seconds, drawn by the sound of the chair — but because my hands had already found her and my body had already made the decision and by the time my mind caught up with what was happening I was already moving and handing her off to someone else was not something I was willing to do.She had weighed less than I expected, which was its own kind of information, and she had been completely still in the way people were still when they had gone somewhere their body needed to go without them, and I had walked the length of the garden path to the healing house with her against my chest and Knox utterly silent in a way that was nothing like his usual silences.Vera had met me at the door with the expression of a woman who had already assessed the situation from twenty fe
Lyra's pov I had not been sleeping well, which was nothing new, but the particular quality of the not-sleeping had changed in the past week — less the alert watchful wakefulness of someone listening for threats and more a heavy, waterlogged kind of restlessness that left me feeling worse in the morning than when I had closed my eyes, as though sleep was happening to my body without actually reaching me.I had been explaining it to myself as the aftermath of the fever, which was reasonable, and as the accumulated weight of everything the past weeks had contained, which was also reasonable, and I had been a healer long enough to know that the body kept its own accounts and sometimes presented the bill all at once without warning, so I had accepted the tiredness and the low persistent nausea that had been accompanying my mornings and the particular sensitivity that had arrived in my body like an uninvited guest and had not yet shown any intention of leaving.I had been explaining all of







