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NORA

The pack ceremony had been going on for hours and I had been standing at the far edge of it the whole time, invisible the way I always was at these things, holding my heavily pregnant stomach and wishing with everything in me that I could just disappear back to my room and lie down and pretend none of this existed.

The moon was high and full and the whole pack was gathered across the open grounds, dressed up and loud and celebrating like they had every reason to. I was the only one standing alone.

The only one nobody was speaking to.

The only one whose presence felt like something everyone had agreed to overlook. Even my own husband moved through that crowd like I was not there at all.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and breathed slowly through the ache that had been sitting in my lower back since morning. My stomach felt heavier tonight than it had all week.

My feet were swollen inside my shoes and the noise of the celebration was pressing in on me from every direction.

I just wanted to sit down. I just wanted one night where nothing happened to me.

"Look at her standing there like she actually belongs here," a voice said, loud enough to carry through the nearest group of pack members. Laughter followed it immediately. I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead and told myself not to react.

Zoey came from the side with her girls moving in behind her the way they always did, her eyes already locked onto me with that particular sharp pleasure she got from making absolutely sure I never once forgot what I was to this pack.

"The alpha's little womb," she said it out like an announcement, like she wanted every ear nearby to catch it. More laughter moved through the people closest to us. I said nothing. I kept my face still and my breathing even and I stared at a fixed point past her shoulder.

"It must feel so good carrying a baby that was never really going to be yours to keep," she added, stepping into my space, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off her.

I turned to walk away from her.

She grabbed my arm and pulled me back around to face the crowd. Right there in front of every pack member who had gathered for the ceremony that night. Every person who had been pretending not to watch was now watching openly without shame or hesitation.

"She actually thinks she is something because she is carrying that baby," Zoey said, her voice lifting and carrying right across the grounds so that even the people at the back could hear every word. "She is nothing. She has always been nothing. She was an orphan and a slave and all she ever will be is someone who got used and is still too blind and too foolish to understand it yet."

The silence that followed her words was so much worse than the laughter had been.

Because in that silence there was not one single person who stepped forward.

Not one face in that entire crowd that showed anything that was for me. They all just stood there and watched it happen and did nothing and that stillness from all of them hurt in a way that Zoey's words alone never could have.

My legs were trembling. My stomach tightened and I pressed my palm flat against it and focused on breathing the way through it.

"Say something back," Zoey whispered, dropping her voice so only I could hear it, her eyes lit up with the pleasure of what she was doing to me. "Go on. Say something."

I said nothing. I held whatever was left of myself together and turned and walked away from her and this time she let me go because she had already taken everything she had come for and there was nothing left to take.

I moved through the outer edge of the crowd with my head down and my hand still pressed firmly against my stomach, trying to put as much distance between myself and every set of eyes still lingering on me as I possibly could.

The humiliation was still burning through me, and I just needed to get away from the noise and the faces and find somewhere quiet to breathe.

That was when I heard them.

I was cutting close to the side of the great hall trying to find a shorter path away from the crowd when Kael's voice drifted through the open window just above me.

I stopped walking without deciding to.

"Once she delivers we move straight into the next phase. The pack elder already has everything drawn up. She signed all of it a long time ago without understanding what any of it meant."

I Pause, as my heart skips.

Then I heard Lena laugh.Her tone was soft and warm and satisfied in a way that made my skin crawl.

"And the baby?" Lena asked.

"The baby has always been ours," Kael said, and his voice carried not a single trace of hesitation or guilt or anything human in it at all. "She was just the vessel. Nothing more than that."

I stood outside that window and everything inside me went completely and utterly still.

The vessel.

I had spent months convincing myself. Months of lying awake at night and talking myself out of what I could see with my own eyes. I had told myself that what existed between Kael and Lena was nothing.

That the way he looked at her meant nothing. That the coldness he turned on me like a switch every single day was something temporary, something that would shift once the baby came and things settled and he remembered the promises he had made to me before we were married.

I had held onto those promises like they were the only solid thing in a world that kept moving under my feet.

And now I was standing outside in the cold listening to his voice through a window and every single one of those promises was dissolving in real time and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

A vessel.

That was what I was to him. That was all I had ever been. Not a wife. Not a person he had chosen. Just a body he had needed for a purpose and had discarded the moment that purpose was close to being fulfilled.

My stomach clenched so hard and so suddenly that I gasped out loud and grabbed the wall beside me with both hands.

Then the pain comes, all at once and before I could even understand what is happening.

My water broke right there on the cold ground outside the great hall with the ceremony still carrying on across the grounds and the sound of Kael and Lena's voices still drifting down to me through the window above my head.

I cried out and my knees buckled and I grabbed the wall harder trying to hold myself upright.

A maid passing close by turned and saw me and screamed out for help before I could say a word. Feet came running from every direction.

Voices crashed into each other all around me. Hands reached out and grabbed at me trying to steady me and I could feel the cold of the ground beneath me and the warmth of blood and fluid soaking through my clothes and the pain was coming in waves now, each one bigger and more consuming than the one before it.

And through all of it, every hand and every voice and every frantic sound of people rushing around me, all I could hear was his voice playing back in my head over and over again without stopping.

She was just the vessel.

A scream tore out of me as another wave of pain crashed through my whole body and the night and the noise and the faces above me all began to blur and bleed together into one overwhelming darkness that I had no more strength left to fight against.