Chapter 1

Blenda POV

The day I found out I was pregnant was the best day of my life, and it lasted about three hours.

I was sitting on a metal stool in the treatment room of Jeff’s lab, holding the test result in both hands, and I read the one word on it three times before my thumb left a dent in the corner.

 ---Positive.

“Congratulations, Luna.” Nora, the healer, wrapped both of her hands around my free one, and her eyes had gone wet. “After five years of effort, you’re finally going to have a baby. I’d say you’re about two weeks along.”

“Yeah, finally.” I was so excited I could not help but read the word again.

Five years.

I had spent them on needles every new moon, on pack gatherings where somebody always dropped their voice when I walked by, and on nights beside Jeff while he slept with his back to me. I pressed my fist against my mouth so that he wouldn’t hear me cry.

They called me the Luna with no wolf, and I had smiled and refilled their glasses, anyway.

I tipped my head back and whispered with my fingers crossed, “Thank you, Moon Goddess.”

“Nora, please don’t tell Jeff yet.” I turned.

 “He’s done so much for me, and I want to tell him myself and see his face.”

Nora patted my hand and let go of it.

“Of course, Luna. It’s too early for anyone to catch the scent anyway, but don’t wait too long.”

I folded the paper into my purse, zipped it shut, and walked out with my free hand resting on my stomach.

Molly was the first person I wanted to tell.

She’s my adoptive sister, the real Ashford daughter, while I’m the stray her parents took in when I was six, and she has never once treated me like one.

 When we were kids, the pack children loved to chant “wolfless,” “useless,” and “the girl with no wolf,” and I believed every word, walking around with my head down for years.

Molly would plant herself between me and whoever was talking and say, “Go on, say it again,” and nobody ever did.

At night, she sat on the edge of my bed and told me that having no wolf didn’t mean having no future, and she said it so often that I started saying it to myself.

She was also the one who pushed me to tell Jeff how I felt since I never would have found the nerve alone, and without her, there would be no Jeff and me.

She had even been right about him, because he never minded I was wolfless; after we got married, we had no mind link; he didn’t blame it. He even built an entire lab so I could become a mother, and every needle in those five years was worth it now.

I drove to her house, grinning, with both hands strangling the wheel, and somewhere along the way, I started wondering exactly when this baby had happened.

I counted back against the steering wheel with my fingertips until I landed on the night Jeff came home from his last border run.

He walked in smelling of rain and pine, skipped his study for once, and pulled me against him with his chin on top of my head.

I stood stiff in his arms, terrified that if I moved, he would let go, and then he tipped my face up and kissed me.

That night, I remembered we did it twice.

He completely wore me out, and I slept straight through until the next afternoon.

Yeah, that had to be the night. Just thinking about it made me smile.

Molly’s street was blocked by orange cones, a backhoe, and a man in a yellow vest waving cars away, so I took the service lane behind her house and parked by the back gate.

 A black truck sat in the driveway with a scratch down the left bumper and the pack crest on the windshield.

I knew that truck because Jeff had backed it into a fence post three months ago and never fixed it.

He was supposed to be at the northern border, six hundred miles away, for another week, and last night on the phone, he had asked me not to wait up.

I walked around the truck and checked the plate, then checked it again, and it was his.

Maybe he had come home early to surprise me, I told myself, or perhaps he had stopped by because—and I let the thought die there.

The gate stood open a few inches, and I did the one thing I would spend the next month wishing I could take back, which was to look.

A little girl was racing across the lawn, four or five years old, with dark brown curls and bare feet, shrieking, “Daddy! Catch me!”

A man scooped her up and flung her into the air.

I knew this jacket; I bought it with Molly.

I knew those broad shoulders and that jaw before he turned his face.

I had known them since I was a kid.

When she screamed, “Higher, Daddy, higher!” Jeff laughed, a sound I had never once heard in five years of marriage, with his entire face open and his shoulders loose.

He tossed her again, caught her against his chest, and she planted a loud kiss on his cheek.

“Careful, Jess,” Molly called from the porch, coming down the steps with a plate of grapes.

“Don’t wear your daddy out.”

She crossed the grass and rested her free hand on the small of his back, in a spot she clearly knew well.

 The girl laid her head on Jeff’s shoulder and said, “I love you, Daddy,” and my fingers tightened on the gate until the hinge squealed.

Molly turned her head and looked straight at me through the gap.

 She wasn’t surprised at all.

She smiled.