want her back

Chapter Four

The underboss has been talking for almost an hour and he still hasn't said anything worth the time it's costing me.

"Freya would make a fine wife." He says it for the third time, like repetition will make it truer. "Strong bloodline. Battle-tested. And practical matters aside, Kael, this family needs an heir it can be certain of."

"Practical matters." I let the words sit in my mouth like something rotten. "You mean the staff she'll need. The proper diet for a pregnancy. Whether the nursery faces east or west." I lean back in my chair. "You've spent forty minutes discussing curtains, Magnus. Get to the part where you say what you actually came here to say."

He has the decency to look briefly caught out before he presses forward anyway. "Divorce Wren. Formally take Freya as your wife. This family will finally have the stability it's needed for years."

I've heard this same request dressed in a dozen different outfits since the day I brought Wren home, and it never gets easier to sit through.

"Freya is a comrade." I say it flat, final, the way I've said it to him and every one of my father's men who've tried this angle before. "I fought beside her. I respect her. I will take responsibility for the child, whatever that requires. But I have one wife, and it is not a subject open for further discussion."

Something shifts in my chest right as I finish the sentence. My wolf goes still, then restless, pacing at the edge of my thoughts in a way he only does when something is wrong with Wren.

I don't wait for the underboss to finish whatever he was about to say next. I'm already standing, already moving, and I leave him mid-sentence in a room I no longer care about.

The drive back to the penthouse takes too long. Every second feels like it's happening through water. My wolf claws at the inside of my ribs the entire way, and by the time I reach our door I already know before I open it.

Empty.

Not just quiet — empty in a way a room gets when the person who fills it has actually left. The bed is untouched from where I remember it. Her scent is still here, but it's fading at the edges, hours old, and there's no sign of where the rest of her went.

I tear through the closet. Half her clothes are still hanging there, but the bag she kept for traveling is gone, along with the boots she wore the day I first brought her home.

She ran.

The thought lands like a fist. She's forcing my hand, making me choose between her and doing right by the family the way the underboss wants, and some small furious part of me almost respects it even as the rest of me is coming apart at the idea of her out there alone.

I summon my second before I've even finished thinking it. He arrives fast, and I can tell from his face before he says a single word that whatever he found isn't good.

"Speak."

He hesitates, which is answer enough to make my patience disappear entirely. "After you left for the meeting, your wife called for water. The man on duty refused her." He pauses. "She went quiet not long after. We believe she lost consciousness."

The room goes red at the edges.

"Bring me that man."

He's dragged in within minutes, and I don't wait for an explanation before I have him by the collar, my claws already lengthening against my will. "She is your boss's wife. Whatever quarrel exists between her and me is not yours to punish her for. You left her to faint behind a locked door."

He stammers something about assuming she'd fallen out of favor, that he thought—

"You don't get to think." My voice comes out as something closer to a growl than words. "Basement. Now."

Two men haul him away while I try to force air back into my lungs.

"Freya was seen entering the room after," my second adds carefully, watching my face for how much more I can absorb right now.

I find her in the east hall and I don't bother softening the question. "What did you say to her."

Freya's hand goes to her stomach the way it always does when she wants sympathy instead of an answer. "I found her on the floor and tried to help. She wasn't herself, Kael. She said terrible things — that she'd hate you both forever, that she hoped something happened to the baby." Her eyes well up right on cue. "I never imagined she'd actually leave. I'm so sorry."

I look at her for a long moment and something in my gut refuses to accept it, even though I have no proof to argue with.

Wren has never cursed a child in her life. Not once, not even when my father's men humiliated her at every family dinner for five straight years. She absorbs. She goes quiet. She cries alone in rooms where no one can see her do it. She does not spit venom at an unborn child, no matter how much pain she's carrying.

But I have nothing else to go on, and Freya knows it.

I walk back into our room alone and sit on the edge of the bed where her scent is thinning by the hour, and for the first time since I came home, I let myself actually look at what the last two days have cost her.

I gave the underboss forty minutes of patience today over curtains and bloodlines. I never gave Wren that. I gave her soft words and promises to fix things later, and later kept arriving without anything actually being fixed. I let Freya move into a nursery Wren built with her own hands. I locked my own wife in a room like a problem to be managed instead of a person to be heard. I keep telling her she is my only wife and then handing every real decision to somebody else.

The weight of it sits on my chest heavier than anything I carried out of that deal.

That's when I see it. A small box, wrapped in gold paper, tucked half-behind the lamp on her nightstand like it got shoved there in the chaos of the day I came home and never came back out.

I remember it now. She was holding it when I walked through that door with Freya on my arm. I never asked what it was. I never gave her the chance to tell me.

I pick it up. My hands, which just held a man by the throat without hesitation, are shaking now for a completely different reason.

I unwrap it slowly, like some part of me already knows this is going to change everything and wants to delay it by half a second longer.

Inside is a single plastic stick.

Two lines.

For a moment I can't process what I'm looking at. Then it hits me all at once, the full weight of it collapsing on my chest like the ceiling caving in.

She was pregnant. She has been pregnant since before I even walked through that door, and I stood in front of the entire room and told her Freya was carrying my child while she was standing there holding proof that she was carrying mine.

I said no when she asked if I'd send Freya away.

I told her Freya's child was my responsibility too.

While my own child was already growing inside her, and I never even gave her the chance to say the words out loud before I walked out that door to check on someone else.

She is out there right now. Pregnant. Alone. No wolf to protect her, no men watching her back, no idea what's waiting for her past the edge of this territory, and every single reason she had to leave was put there by me.

I'm on my feet before I finish the thought, the box still clutched in my hand hard enough to crush it.

"Get my men!" My voice tears through the penthouse loud enough that I hear footsteps running from three different directions. "Every man we have. Now. We are finding her tonight, and I don't care what it costs."

Because if anything happens to her out there — if anything happens to either of them — I will never be able to live with what I did to make her run.