The Car Accident

Brynn Hollis' POV

The road stretched ahead of me, dark and slippery.

I didn't know where I was going, but I knew I wanted to be far away. Far away from the pack house. Far away from the laughter. And most importantly, far away from my unloving and cheating husband, Alpha Dax.

My hands gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles ached. The October wind screamed through the cracked window, whipping my hair across my face. I didn't close it. The cold kept me awake. Kept me from feeling the hole opening in my chest.

To the womb with legs.

Sera's voice. Crystal clear. A dagger in my heart.

I pressed the gas harder. The Honda groaned beneath me, old and tired, like me.

Forty miles per hour. Fifty.

The mountain pass curved ahead, a serpent of asphalt cut into the rock. I'd driven this road a hundred times. I knew every turn, every guardrail, every drop-off where the trees gave way to nothing but air and darkness.

Tonight, I didn't care about any of it.

He married me for an heir. I was nothing more than a surrogate mother.

The thought hit me like a hammer. I'd known it. Somewhere deep, in the part of myself I never let listen, I'd always known. But hearing him say it. In front of everyone. With Sera's hand on his chest and her smile sharp like a blade.

I couldn't breathe.

The speedometer climbed. It was now at sixty.

You're going too fast, a small voice warned, but I shoved it down.

Sixty-five.

The trees blurred into smears of black and brown. My headlights cut a weak path through the night, but I wasn't really looking. My mind was still in the foyer. I was visualizing Dax circling me like I was prey while his guests were laughing at me, the facade Luna.

Seventy.

The first tear fell. Then another. I hadn't cried in years—had trained myself not to, because crying never changed anything. But now the floodgates cracked, and I couldn't stop it.

I was so stupid. So desperately, pathetically stupid.

Three years. Three years of cooking his meals he wouldn't even taste. Three years of sleeping alone in a bed that smelled like him but never hosted him. Three years of deceiving myself that the Moon Goddess might touch his heart someday and he would see me as a wife instead of a burden.

But he never saw me.

And now it was even more obvious he never would.

Seventy-five.

The Honda shuddered. The tires hummed a warning I didn't hear. My vision blurred—tears, or maybe the beginning of something worse. I wiped my face with the back of my hand, but more kept coming.

And then I remembered the test.

My free hand flew to my pocket. Empty. My heart stopped.

No—I'd pulled it out. In the car. After I'd slammed the door. I'd stared at it in the dashboard light.

Where was it?

I glanced down. The passenger seat. The floor. Nothing but shadows and old coffee cups.

It doesn't matter, I told myself. You're still pregnant. A piece of plastic doesn't change that.

But it did matter. Those two pink lines were proof. Proof that something good had come from three years of my painful marriage to Alpha Dax. Proof that I hadn't completely wasted my time.

I took my eyes off the road for one second. One.

The yellow warning sign flashed in my headlights—sharp turn, 15 miles per hour, the one I'd passed a hundred times. But I was going seventy-five. The wheel was already drifting right. The tires had already lost their grip on the damp asphalt.

"No, no, no—"

I wrenched the wheel left. The Honda obeyed too late. The back end fishtailed. The world tilted sideways—not a gentle lean, but a violent lurch that threw me against the driver's side door.

And then something stepped into the road.

A deer.

Massive. Antlers branching like ancient trees. Eyes wide and white, reflecting my headlights into twin moons of terror. It stood frozen, exactly in my path, exactly where I would have been if I'd stayed straight.

I swerved.

Not a choice. Instinct. My body moved before my brain could stop it.

The tires caught gravel. The Honda launched off the pavement. For one suspended second, there was silence—no engine, no wind, no screaming. Just the slow, impossible tilt of the world as the car sailed over the guardrail.

Then gravity remembered me.

The nose dropped. The trees rushed up. I saw the pregnancy test fly out of my pocket. The two pink lines spinning through the air like a goodbye.

And then, the crash.

Glass exploded. Metal screamed. My body folded against the seatbelt, then snapped back. Something sharp cut my forehead. Warm blood began running into my eyes, turning the world red.

The car rolled.

Once. Twice. I lost count. Each revolution slammed me against the door, the roof, the center console. My ribs cracked—I felt them go, a wet, splintering sound that didn't seem real. My left arm twisted wrong. My teeth bit through my lip.

And through it all, I thought of one thing.

The baby.

My hands flew to my stomach—too late, too stupid, as if I could shield a cluster of cells from a car crash with my palms. The seatbelt crushed against my abdomen. An awful pain lanced through me.

The car stopped.

Silence.

I hung upside down, held by the seatbelt, staring at the shattered remains of the windshield. Stars peeked through the broken glass. Pretty. Distant. The kind of stars you'd look at on a night when everything was fine.

Everything was not fine.

I could smell blood. Mine. Metallic and thick. I could feel it dripping from my hair, pooling in my ear, running down my throat.

My legs were pinned. I couldn't move them. Couldn't feel them.

The baby.

I pressed both hands to my lower belly. The pain there was different—not sharp like my ribs, not burning like my arm. It was a deep, cramping ache. The kind that meant something was wrong.

"Please," I whispered. My voice came out broken. "Please, don't take this. Don't take the only thing that is left for me."

The stars blurred. Not from tears—from something else. Something darker, pulling at the edges of my vision.

I was fading.

I could feel it. The warm slide into nothing. The way the pain started to feel distant, like it belonged to someone else.

If I die, I thought, they win. Dax wins. Sera wins. But then a sharper thought followed: What about the baby? I interrogated myself, concerned.

I couldn't die so easily. Not yet. Not while there was still a chance.

I tried to move. My body refused. My arms went limp. My eyes lost focus.

The last thing I saw was the pregnancy test, lying in a patch of moonlight on the forest floor. The two pink lines. Still there. Still real.

Then the darkness swallowed me whole.