3. The donor.

Effie's POV

I left before the sun came up, while the house was still dark and my parents were still asleep down the hall, my father's low snore keeping time with my mother's softer breathing. I didn't let myself think too long about the note.

If I thought about it too long, I would never write it, and if I never wrote it, I would never leave, and I had already decided I couldn't stay in Hollowmoon one more day with everyone's laughter still ringing in my ears.

Mama, Daddy, I'm sorry. I couldn't stay after last night, and I don't want you to watch me fall apart in that square for the rest of my life. I'm safe, and I have a plan, and I promise I'll write to you once I'm settled. Please don't come looking for me. Please don't worry. I love you both more than I've ever said out loud. — Effie

I left it on the kitchen table, weighed down with the sugar tin so it wouldn't blow away when she opened the door, and I walked out with one bag and the little money I'd saved from selling preserves at the market for the last six years.

The bus to the city took most of the day. I sat with my forehead against the window and watched Hollowmoon shrink and disappear behind the trees, and somewhere around the second hour I stopped crying, because there wasn't anything left in me to cry with.

By the time we pulled into the city, the sky had gone the color of a bruise, purple and orange bleeding into each other over buildings taller than anything I'd ever stood beneath.

The clinic was nothing like I'd imagined. I'd pictured something cold, all steel and silence, but the waiting room had soft green walls and a receptionist who smiled at me like I was any other woman walking through the door, which I suppose, to her, I was.

"Effie Hartwell?" she asked, and I nodded, gripping the strap of my bag. "We have your consultation file pulled up already. Right this way."

The assessment took most of the morning. A nurse drew my blood and asked about my health history, my cycle, whether I smoked or drank, whether anyone in my family had trouble carrying to term.

Dr. Jones, a doctor with kind eyes and gray at his temples, examined me and told me, in a calm, unremarkable voice, that I was a good candidate, that my body was healthy and more than capable, words I had never once heard said about myself in thirty-three years. I almost laughed at how simple it was, how nobody in that room had looked at me the way Hollowmoon always did.

"If you're ready," he said, "we can go ahead with the procedure today. There's no reason to wait."

I hadn't expected it to happen so fast. I thought there would be more time to sit with the decision, more nights to lie awake second-guessing myself, but he said it so plainly, like it was nothing more than any other appointment, that I found myself nodding before I'd fully caught up to what I was agreeing to.

An hour later I was lying back on an exam table in a different room entirely, sterile and quiet, a paper gown swapped for my dress.

"You're sure about this?" Dr. Jones asked gently, one hand resting on the tray beside him, where a single sealed vial sat waiting under the bright overhead light. "You can still change your mind, Effie. Even now."

"I'm sure," I whispered, and was a little surprised to find that I meant it.

He nodded and got to work with the calm, efficiency of a man who had done this hundreds of times before, explaining each step as he went in a low, steady voice, the vial, the catheter, the brief pressure I should expect and nothing more.

Nothing at all like what I'd imagined lying awake at night back in Hollowmoon, dreaming up a version of motherhood that never once involved fluorescent lights or a nurse squeezing my hand for comfort.

"All done," Dr. Jones said, before I'd even fully braced myself for it. "Lie still for a few minutes, if you can. Just let your body rest."

I stared up at the ceiling, my hands pressed flat against my stomach, willing myself to feel something enormous and certain, some sign that everything had changed.

I didn't feel anything at all, not yet, just the cold of the room and the strange, quiet disbelief that after thirty-three years of being overlooked, I might be carrying someone's child inside me, and I didn't even know his face.

"We'll draw blood again in ten days," the nurse told me kindly, helping me sit up. "Until then, just rest, and try not to worry."

Try not to worry. I almost laughed. I dressed slowly, my legs a little unsteady, and a nurse led me back to Dr. Jones's office, where he was waiting behind his desk, a thin folder open in front of him.

"Now," the doctor said, once I'd settled into the chair across from him, "there's something I should have mentioned before we went ahead. It's a bit unusual."

My stomach dropped. "What do you mean?"

"Your intake form mentioned you were open to a donor of high lineage, and given your circumstances, one of our most exclusive clients has expressed interest in being matched with a candidate like yourself." He folded his hands. "It isn't typical, but he's asked to meet the woman carrying his line after the fact. Some of our higher-profile donors prefer it that way, once the procedure is already done. You're under no obligation to agree."

I should have asked more questions. I should have wondered why an anonymous donor would want to break the very anonymity the whole clinic was built on, and why he'd waited until it was already too late to change my mind about whose child I was carrying.

But I was tired, and heartbroken, and desperate to feel like I was choosing something instead of being chosen against, so I only asked, "Is that normal?"

"Not usually. But it happens." Dr. Jones smiled. "Would you like to meet him?"

I nodded before I could talk myself out of it.

They led me down a quiet hallway to a private room with a table and two chairs and a window that looked out over the city instead of a parking lot, the kind of room I imagined they saved for the clients whose money mattered more than their patience.

I sat with my hands folded in my lap and waited, my heart thudding for reasons I couldn't explain, and when the door opened, I looked up expecting a stranger.

I did not get one. I got two.

They filled the doorway together, shoulder to shoulder, the way Jasper had filled the square two nights before. These men were tall and broad through the shoulders, but where Jasper's face was all sharp, restless youth, theirs were carved from something older and steadier.

They were more refined.

Two faces, identical down to the chiseled jaw and the dark hair threaded through at the temples with silver they wore like crowns, and let's not forget, wolves were weak to silver. They wore it like jewelry, even though it was like kryptonite for us.

I would not have been able to tell them apart at all, if not for the eyes.

One man's gold eyes were quiet and searching, fixed on me with a stillness that made the room feel smaller. The other's were sharper, more guarded, sweeping over me and the doctor and the room itself like he was cataloguing every exit before he'd even sat down.

The doctor cleared his throat somewhere behind me. "Effie, these are our clients. King Tobias and King Knox Thornwick. The two Alpha Kings who rule the crown together."

The room went absolutely silent.

I knew those faces. I had seen them in portraits hung in the pack hall, in the crest stitched onto Alpha Reed's ceremonial coat, twin kings ruling side by side since their own father's death.

I had never once imagined I would sit across from either of them, let alone both. The quieter one, the one whose gaze hadn't left my face since he walked in, was Jasper's father. It was said he was the youngest.

The Alpha Kings themselves, Knox Thornwick and his brother Tobias, were standing in front of me, one of them the reason I might already be carrying a child, while the other watched in silence, and I sat there frozen, unable to say a single word, while every certainty I'd built my escape on crumbled quietly to the floor.

Oh my God, I might be carrying a baby with my mate's father?!