Chapter 3: She's Human

~Malia's POV~

"Leaving so soon?"

Nora's voice floated down from the top of the stairs before I even had my hand fully around the door handle.

She came down slow, one step at a time, wearing nothing but Aiden's shirt, buttoned crooked, her claiming mark still dark and raw above the collar. Her smile didn't reach her eyes. It never had. I'd just never bothered to check.

"I'm always three steps ahead of you, Mal. Did you know that?" She crossed her arms and leaned into the door frame, blocking it with her whole body.

"You've had the perfect things your whole life without even trying. Perfect bond. Perfect pup." Her eyes dragged over me, slow, deliberate, the way you size up something you're about to throw away.

"Meanwhile I had to actually earn what I wanted. Do you know how many rooms I walked into where he looked straight past you and straight at me, and you never even noticed? You were too busy being comfortable in a bond you thought was safe to realize nobody else was ever going to fight for you the way you thought they would."

"Move," I said. I didn't have the energy to look at her.

"Come on, don't be like that." She smiled wider, like we were still playing a game only she knew the rules.

"Move, Nora."

Her voice dropped cold in half a second like a trapdoor, "Or what? You'll try to kill me too? Like you killed your own son?"

My grip tightened on the strap of my bag until my knuckles ached. "You're disgusting. You don't even have the decency to be ashamed of yourself."

She rolled her eyes, bored, like I'd said something predictable. Then she leaned in close, her voice dropping to a whisper meant only for me.

"You want to know something funny? You never should've carried again after Killian." Her smile curled.

"I made sure of that. Years of something small in your coffee, every morning — nothing a healer would ever think to test for unless they already knew to look. Just enough to keep your body from holding onto another pup." She let that sit, watching my face come apart in real time.

"And the DNA bloodline trace? Clean as a whistle when I needed it dirty. Funny what a pack healer will falsify for the right price."

My mouth opened and nothing came out.

"So this one you've got now," she went on, softer, crueler for it, "wasn't supposed to happen. I don't know how it slipped through, but I'm not letting some accident undo five years of work. You'd be smart to watch your back, Mal. Things fall hard when someone finally decides to push."

She laughed, low and delighted with herself, and I wanted so badly to hit her that my arm rose an inch before I stopped it. There was nothing left to win by hitting her. I pulled the door open myself, and walked out into the dark before she could enjoy my face a second longer.

***

The border road was empty and cold, security lamps buzzing overhead in long stretches of orange and shadow. I dragged my suitcase behind me like a second shadow, wheels catching on cracked pavement, and understood for the first time I had nowhere in the world to point myself toward. No sister. No parents. Nora had made sure, over five years, that even my friends became hers first.

There was no point telling Aiden about this pregnancy either. He'd only call it someone else's, and tonight I didn't have the strength left to argue.

Headlights flared behind me first — too bright, too close, climbing fast enough that my shadow stretched long and black across the road before I even turned around.

A truck swung wide and stopped crossways, blocking the street from curb to curb. Doors opened on both sides.

Three men stepped out, broad enough to fill the whole road. Wrong scent. Unpacked, no territory marking on them at all. Already closing the gap behind me, boxing me in a stretch of road with nothing on either side but chain-link fence and dark.

My heart did something violent and useless against my ribs.

I was human.

I had no claws, no shift, no strength worth naming against whatever these men were — and some cold, clear part of my mind understood, instantly and completely, that I had no actual way to survive the next five minutes if they decided I shouldn't.

Rogues.

"Going somewhere, Mrs. Ashford?"

"It's Miss Hayes," I said automatically, hating myself a little for how fast the correction came, like some small part of me was still trying to survive the night with dignity intact.

"I'm in a hurry," I told them. "I have somewhere I need to be."

They laughed, unhurried, like men who already knew nobody was expecting me anywhere on earth.

"Pretty thing, moving that fast through our stretch of road? Didn't think you had it in you," one of them said, and the others laughed harder, like it was the funniest thing they'd heard all week.

They know. They already know about the baby.

"Did Nora send you? Aiden?" My voice cracked on his name.

"Doesn't matter who sent us," the tallest one said. "Easy way or hard way, sweetheart. Your call. Though I'll be honest — easy might take a minute. You're carrying more than we planned for."

I pushed past him. I don't know what I thought that would accomplish, except that some animal instinct that had nothing to do with courage took over my legs for me, refused to stand still and wait for whatever was coming.

A hand closed in my hair and yanked me back. I hit the pavement hard, palms tearing open on the asphalt, and the first kick landed against my ribs and drove every bit of air out of me. I curled instinctively, arms wrapped around my stomach, and one of them laughed close to my ear.

"Boss wants you gone. We don't make the rules."

A boot came down and the world went white at the edges. I couldn't breathe, couldn't scream, tasted blood and gravel both — and underneath the pain, one single thought, clear as a struck bell: protect the baby.

Then — *get up or die here* — colder than fear, louder than the pain.

I don't remember deciding to get up. I remember the tree line ahead, black and solid against the sky.

I ran.

Branches tore at my face and arms, the ground uneven and sudden beneath my feet, every breath a knife between my ribs. Behind me — a howl. Then another. The wet, cracking sound of bone rearranging itself mid-stride.

They'd shifted. They were faster now. And they'd been waiting for exactly this — waiting for me to run somewhere with no witnesses at all. No pack law.

Something slammed into me from the right and the ground came up to meet me so hard it whited everything out for a full second. I rolled, tasted dirt, forced myself upright on legs that didn't want to hold anything anymore. A rogue stood where I'd been — massive, low to the ground, lips peeled back off teeth longer than my fingers. A second one stepped out from between the trees. Then a third.

They circled, unhurried, the way predators circle something that's already lost.

"Nothing personal," the closest one said, voice rough and thick through a half-shifted jaw. "Boss wants to make sure you don't become the one thing that could actually hurt her."

He lunged.

I dropped and kicked out with everything I had, caught him under the jaw, felt the impact shudder up through my own leg. He staggered. The other two snarling.

Run. There has to be somewhere left to run

There wasn't. I knew it even as my legs carried me backward anyway, one step, then another, until the ground under my heel simply ended.

The ground disappeared.

One step it was solid under me. The next it simply wasn't.

I fell — rocks and roots and black air spinning past, each impact a fresh white burst of pain, the world tumbling over itself until I hit the bottom hard enough to drive every particle of air from my lungs.

I lay still. Breathing was a project I worked at one shallow pull at a time, staring up through the canopy at a sky scattered with cold, indifferent stars.

They followed me down. Of course they did. Nora had paid for finished business, not almost-finished.

When I finally got a hand underneath me to push upright, my palm came away warm and dark, and it took my stunned brain a full second to understand it wasn't only the cuts on my arms. Something lower. Something that shouldn't have been bleeding at all.

No. No, no, please, not him too. Not both of you in one night.

I pressed my free hand flat against my stomach like pressure alone could hold a life in place.

"Please—" My voice came apart. "I'll leave. I'll disappear, I swear it, just let me go. I'm pregnant—"

"Too late for that." The largest one lunged, jaws wide, and I threw my arms up and screamed, bracing for teeth that never landed.

Something enormous hit him out of the air sideways. I blinked, and the clearing was suddenly full of wolves — huge, silver-dark, wolves I'd never scented on any registered territory in my life — tearing through the rogues with a precision that didn't look like rage. It looked like training.

"Get your filthy hands off her!"

They took the rogues down in under ten seconds. One of the huge wolves shifted mid-stride into a man — tall, broad-shouldered, grey eyes, an air of authority that didn't need announcing. He crouched in front of me, and I watched his eyes widen as whatever he was scenting off me finally registered.

"She's human." Sharp. Almost disbelieving.

"Bring her to the Supreme Alpha. Now."

"My baby—" My own voice, barely a whisper, already fading at the edges.

Then everything went black...