Chapter 1: Wolfsbane

~Malia's POV~

The bond didn't break quietly. It tore.

One second I was on my knees on the infirmary floor with Killian's small body seizing against my arms, and the next, something behind my ribs tore loose so fast I screamed before I understood why. Not grief. Not fear.

A physical thing — a wire snapping taut then slack, five years of tether gone in an instant, and for one disorienting heartbeat I didn't know which pain belonged to which, the one convulsing in my lap or the three weeks old that I didn't even know existed yet.

"Malia." Cora's hands were already on Killian, glowing faintly gold with a suppression working. "I need you to breathe. His heart's still going. Yours needs to keep going too."

"Something happened." My voice didn't sound like mine. "Something happened to the bond, I felt it snap—"

"Bonds don't snap on their own." Cora didn't look up from Killian. "Something has to sever them. Someone has to want it gone."

I didn't have room to sit with that yet. Killian's lips had gone the color of ash, and Cora was talking fast now, the way healers talk when they've decided not to waste time being gentle.

"It's wolfsbane. Someone got a dose into him, and his wolf is trying to force an early shift to burn it out of his system. His body isn't built to survive that shift, not at four years old. I can suppress the wolf and flush the bane out chemically, but I need bloodline blood to do it. Yours won't work. You're human."

"Then take his." I was already reaching for my phone, like the reaching itself could make him appear. "Take mine too if it helps even a little, take anything—"

"Your blood won't touch this, Malia. I need Aiden. I've called every pack for two hundred miles. Nobody's close enough in the bloodline to matter." She crouched down in front of me, and for the first time all night, her voice cracked open at the edges. "You need to get your husband. Now."

I dialed. It rang four times and dropped into his voicemail, flat and clipped, a voice built for pack business. Not for me.

I should have felt something before I ever picked up that phone. That's the part I still can't make peace with, even after everything. A bond is supposed to carry a scream down the wire whether you want it to or not — his son's dying in a room three miles away should have put him on his knees wherever he was standing, should have had him running before I even thought to call. It didn't. The line between us sat there dead and silent as a disconnected phone, and some small, stupid, hopeful part of me told myself it just meant the bond had never worked right on a human anyway. That was the lie I told myself. I'd gotten good at those.

"There's something else." Cora touched my arm, and that's how I knew whatever came next was going to be worse than the first thing. " You're test results came in positive. You're pregnant. About three weeks."

I laughed. One ugly, broken sound escaped my throat. "That's not possible. The healers told me after Killian that a human body can't carry a wolf pup twice — that whatever it cost me the first time, it took the door with it. I stopped hoping years ago. After we tried and tried and nothing came, after Aiden started believing that maybe the Goddess had only meant to give him one, and maybe I should stop grieving something that was never mine to have twice."

"The Goddess doesn't consult the healers before she decides these things." Cora's voice gentled, right before it did the worst thing it had done all night. "Which is exactly why I won't risk a procedure on you, even if your blood were useful. Your body's already unstable carrying a wolf pup as a human. I'm not gambling one life on the chance of saving another. I'm going to save them both, or I'm going to lose them both trying — and either way, it has to be Aiden's."

Two lives. She said it plain, like I wasn't sitting there trying to hold my own ribs shut with my hands.

I called again. Voicemail. A fifth time. By the tenth I'd stopped crying altogether, just sat there watching the screen light up and go dark, and a small cold thought slid in sideways where I couldn't stop it — it was our anniversary.

He'd texted that afternoon. Held up with pack stuff, sorry babe. Seven words, when two years ago he'd have called just to hear me complain about the kids' bath time. Back when he still caught me by the waist in the kitchen and told me it was his favorite place in the world to put his hands. Back before the comments started, small and sideways, *you'd carry yourself more like a Luna if you just* — trailing off, like not finishing the sentence made it a kindness instead of a knife.

I put that thought away like a letter I wasn't ready to open. Not tonight. Not with Killian behind that door, his small body burning up from the inside, fighting a shift that would kill him faster than the poison would.

Wolfsbane doesn't get into a packhouse kitchen by accident. Every plate that reaches a pup's mouth passes through hands the pack has vetted for years — that ward isn't decoration, it's law. Someone inside those walls had done this on purpose, and my mind kept circling the same ugly loop and finding nowhere soft to land. Catalina, maybe. No. Catalina had loved Killian since the week we brought him home, had sung to him in Spanish every time the nightmares came.

Except Catalina had asked for the night off. Her sister's wedding. Which meant it was my hands that made dinner — the mac and cheese Killian always begged for — my hands, in my own kitchen, an hour before he started seizing on the nursery floor.

I called Nora, because five years of habit doesn't die just because it should. My voice came apart the second she answered.

"Nor — it's Killian, he needs Alpha blood and I don't have it and Aiden isn't answering, he isn't even — I can't feel him at all—" And then, without meaning to, like it just fell out of me: "and I'm pregnant. Three weeks. I don't even understand how."

A pause. Half a second too long for a wolf, who should have gasped before I'd even finished the sentence.

"Oh my Goddess, Mal." Her voice came back soft and warm and just a little too smooth, like something rehearsed. "That's wonderful news. A second pup, after everything." A small laugh, entirely wrong for the moment. "Don't you dare worry about Killian. He's going to be completely fine. I promise you that."

It was a strange thing to promise. Not I'll pray for him. A promise. Flat, certain, already finished — like she already knew how tonight was going to end before I did. I didn't clock it that night.

Cora walked me to the doors herself. "Find Aiden. Drag him here yourself if you have to. I can hold Killian. Maybe two hours. Not more."

***

I don't remember the drive back to the packhouse. My eyes had gone past crying, dry and raw in that way that only happens once you've spent everything you had.

His scent reached me before the porch light did. Fresh. Close. Here — when four hours of silence should have meant anywhere else on earth. I stood on the steps for one full second just breathing it in, almost grateful, almost ready to forgive him already for not answering his phone, because he was home, he was safe, he could still fix this—

I smelled her before I opened the door.

Five years of loving a wolf teaches a human nose things it was never built for. Not everything — I couldn't track blood a mile off or read a stranger's mood in their sweat — but I knew this house's scent the way you know your own name, and underneath Aiden's, laced through it, unmistakable, was something floral and expensive that had never once belonged inside these walls.

Nora's perfume. I'd know it anywhere.

I let myself in on legs that didn't feel like mine anymore, and I slipped my heels off out of an old habit — quiet for Killian, so I wouldn't wake him — before I remembered, with a fresh and vicious cruelty, that Killian wasn't asleep upstairs tonight. Killian was somewhere else, fighting to stay alive without either of his parents in the room.

That's when I saw them at the bottom of the stairs. A heel, knocked on its side. A blouse. A bra — deep red lace— hanging off the banister post like it had been shed in a hurry and never meant to be found. I knew that bra. I'd stood in a dressing room with Nora two months ago, holding it against her reflection, telling her the red was made for her, paying for it myself because it was her birthday and she was my best friend and I loved her — and some small, ugly, half-formed thought had crossed my mind even then, standing in that dressing room: I could never wear it. Not as his Luna — Aiden hated it when other men looked at me like that." — I'd hated myself for thinking it.

A sound reached me from above, low and unhurried, and my legs carried me up the stairs before the rest of me caught up. Past our mating photos. Past Killian's crooked crayon drawing — Mommy, Daddy, and me. My hand found the bedroom door, cracked three inches, gold light bleeding through the gap. Aiden's voice came through it, saying a name into the dark, slow, easy, unhurried — the voice of a man with nowhere in the world he needed to be.

It wasn't mine.

I understood, standing there with my hand on the door, exactly what I'd felt snap in my chest back at the infirmary.

He'd cut the bond himself. On purpose. While our son was dying three towns away.

I pushed the door open anyway. I don't know why I needed to see it with my own eyes when the bond had already told me everything — except that some part of me, the human part that had never gotten to feel a wolf's certainty about anything, needed proof before I let myself believe it.

I got it.

And in the one long, silent second before either of them noticed me standing there, I realized the truest, ugliest thing of the whole night: some cold, clear-headed corner of my mind was no longer thinking about Killian, or the child growing inside me.

It was thinking about how, exactly, I was going to make him regret cutting it.