All Chapters of PREGNANT WITH THE ALPHA'S UNWANTED HEIR : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

"Get him up," Wolfe says.His voice is completely controlled but his hands are not. He catches Eli before the boy hits the floor, both arms around him, and Eli is not unconscious, his eyes are open and his hands are pressed flat against the ground and he is breathing in the specific way of someone whose body is doing something involuntary and enormous.I slide off the examination table.Nadia says my name behind me. I don't stop.I cross the room and I crouch in front of Eli where Wolfe has him sitting against the wall and I look at the boy's face. He is pale the way people go pale when blood has redirected itself to somewhere more urgent. His jaw is clenched and his eyes are silver at the edges, just barely, the thinnest rim of it around the dark iris, and his hands on the floor are shaking."Eli," I say.He looks at me. His breathing is ragged.I know what this feels like, I say. The thing trying to come through. Like a word you can't finish saying.He nods once. Just barely.Don't

"She said it was a fever," I say.I am not talking to Bastien specifically. I am talking to the hall wall across from me, which is available and not requiring anything from me right now, which is the kind of audience I need for exactly this moment.Ivy has gone very still beside me."Our mother," she says.Your mother was different, I say quietly. Different woman. My mother died when I was four. I look at my hands on my knees. My father said it was a fever outbreak. Winter. Common enough in pack territories twenty years ago before the medical protocols improved. I pause. I never had a reason to question it. I barely remembered her. You can't interrogate a memory you don't have."But Reva has documents," Bastien says. He has crouched down to be at eye level with me, which is something he has never done before, making himself smaller in a space, and I notice it in the way I notice all the small new things he has been doing since the stairs. Documents your mother left with her six years

"Sign here," Maren Voss says. "And here."She places the pages in front of Wolfe with the same efficient calm she brought to my welfare declaration three days ago, which feels like three weeks ago, which is a feature of the last seventy-two hours that I have stopped trying to account for.The council witnessing room is on the third floor, a neutral space Maren uses for exactly this kind of documentation: a plain table, four chairs, a recording device, and morning light through a single window. Bastien is beside me. Soren is at the back wall. Wolfe is across the table with Eli seated beside him, and Eli looks like a different person than the boy on the car bonnet yesterday, not dramatically different, not visibly transformed, but present in a way he wasn't. His eyes track the room. His posture has something in it that was missing before. The specific quality of a person who is fully inside their own body.Wolfe reads every page before he signs. All eleven of them. He does this without

"I already know," Ivy says.She is sitting on the edge of the bed in her room when I come in, the leather case from Reva's territory on the seat beside me, and she looks at me with the expression of someone who has been waiting for a conversation and has used the waiting time to get ahead of it."Nadia told you the results," I say.Nadia told me the test came back positive and then said she needed to wait for you before explaining what positive meant. Ivy looks at her hands on her knees. So I sat here for three hours and I thought about everything I have heard in the last three days and I arrived at the answer myself. She looks up. "I'm Volana."Yes, I say.She nods once. The nod of someone receiving a confirmation, not a shock.The feeling like something's missing, she says. My whole life."The suppression," I say. He had it done when you were three weeks old. Before your wolf could develop any presence of its own.Her jaw moves. Just once. The specific movement of someone absorbing

"He wants to trade," I say.Bastien looks at me across the library.He has information about the conduct review that he says changes the situation for everyone, I say. That's not a man with resources. That's a man with one card left and he knows it. I picked up my phone and reread Soren's message. He wants to give it to me directly because he thinks I'm the only one in this building who will understand why it matters.Or he wants you alone so he can make one more attempt to manage you, Bastien says."Yes," I say. It's probably both.I type back to Soren: Set the meeting for tomorrow morning. Council observer present. Neutral floor, not the secure floor. Bastien attends.Soren's reply comes back in thirty seconds: He specified Lena only.I type: Then he gets nothing. His terms or my terms, not both.A longer pause this time.Then: He agreed. Tomorrow, ten AM.I put my phone down.Bastien is watching me with the expression he uses when he wants to say something and is choosing the right