บททั้งหมดของ PREGNANT AFTER THE ALPHA’s REJECTION: บทที่ 11 - บทที่ 20

I moved before anyone told me to.Lyra was off the chair and in my arms in one motion, book abandoned on the table, small hands gripping my jacket with that instinctive tightening that children do when their body understands danger before their mind has finished processing it.“Kael,” I said.He was already in the bedroom doorway.Of course he was.He had probably been awake since the first howl, lying in the dark doing what Kael did, gathering information and waiting for the moment he was needed. He crossed the room to my side without being told and stood there with his shoulder against my hip and his eyes on the door.Four years old.Both of them are four years old and already reading a room better than most adults I have known.Damien was at the window. He had moved the curtain one inch and was looking out at the tree line with the focused stillness of a man running threat assessments in real time. Rhys was on his phone, low and fast, calling warriors, calling the packhouse, buildi

My legs stopped working.Not dramatically. Not a collapse. Just a quiet mechanical failure where my brain sent the instruction to keep moving and my legs decided that particular instruction was unreasonable given the circumstances and simply declined to carry it out.I stood at the edge of that tree line and I looked at the woman walking toward me and I counted the things I knew about her.One photograph. Folded and soft at the creases from years of handling.A name. Anika.A letter written in handwriting that slanted in the same direction as mine.A smile that lived on my daughter’s face.That was everything. Twenty three years of everything, the entire inheritance of a mother I had been told was dead, reduced to those four items, and now the source of all of them was crossing a clearing toward me on careful feet and the morning light was on her white hair and her eyes were fixed on my face with an expression that I did not have a name for because I had never had anyone look at me th

Damien moved first.I was half a step behind him and I did not ask permission for that. We went through the packhouse corridors fast, Rhys materialising from somewhere to fall into step beside us, and behind us, I could hear Caius following without being invited which under any other circumstances would have been a problem and right now was simply a fact.The former Alpha’s rooms were on the second floor of the packhouse east wing. The oldest part of the building, stone walls thick enough that sound did not travel through them the way it travelled through the newer sections. Private. Contained. The rooms of a man who had spent forty years being the most powerful person in a building and had not entirely relinquished that even after the title passed to his son.Damien knocked.Three times. Solid and deliberate.Nothing.“Father.” His voice was controlled. Flat in the way of someone controlling it very hard. “Open the door.”Nothing.I pressed my hand to the door. Old wood, iron hinges,

A shifter.Not a wolf shifter. Something older and considerably more specific. A skin walker, the kind that existed in the oldest pack legends alongside the Lunara, alongside the Apex bloodline, alongside all the things the current pack hierarchy had spent generations categorising as mythology because mythology was easier to manage than truth.Someone who could wear another person’s face.Who had worn Marta’s face into the lodge this morning and sat at our table and listened to every word we said with cold grey eyes behind borrowed warmth and then walked back out and reported to someone who was not Caius and was not Sera and was not anyone we had named yet.I looked at the person standing between Priya’s warriors.They were not bothering with Marta’s face anymore. It had dropped the moment Priya brought them into the meadow, like a coat shrugged off, and what remained was a woman of indeterminate age with grey eyes and no expression and the particular stillness of someone who has been

Half.I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and felt it. The warmth that had started in my mother’s palm and moved through me and then stopped, cut off mid-transfer by a distraction I had not seen coming, by children who had been moved while I was looking at a list of names with my back turned.My fault.That thought landed and I let it land because there was no use in not letting it. I had turned my back in an open meadow with my children six feet behind me and I had been so focused on the name on the paper that I had stopped tracking where they were and someone had used that thirty-second window with professional precision.My fault.And now I was going to fix it.“How far is Silvermark?” I said.“Twenty minutes by car,” Rhys said. “Twelve if you shift and run the border route.”“Alliance warriors have vehicles at the boundary line,” the lead warrior said. He was still three feet away, still holding the weight of what he had just told me, watching my face with the careful attent