All Chapters of Pregnant By The Alpha : Chapter 1 - Chapter 9

The supply closet at Moonridge Clinic was the only room in the building with a lock that worked, so that was where Lyra Voss went to find out whether her life was over.It smelled like bleach and old cardboard. A single bulb hung from the ceiling on a cord, and it buzzed whenever she stood too close to the shelves. She stood too close to the shelves. She stood with her back pressed against a crate of gauze and her hands shaking so badly she had to set the test down on a box of gloves, just to stop it from rattling in her fingers.Three minutes. That was all the box said. Three minutes, and then you would know.She had stolen it. Not really stolen, since she was the one who ordered the clinic's supplies and she had simply added one extra item to the invoice and paid for it herself out of her own pocket, but it felt like stealing.Everything about the last six weeks had felt like stealing. The late nights. The back stairs. The way she had learned to move through the pack house like a dr

It came out flat. Not cruel. That was what made it so much worse. It was the plain honest voice of a man who truly did not have the words, and she felt it go through her like cold water."Okay," she said."Lyra—""No. It's okay." She was nodding. She couldn't seem to stop nodding. "That's fair. That's actually fair."He turned around. His face was open in a way she'd never seen it, all the walls down, and what was underneath was not anger and not joy. It was fear. Pure, naked, bone-deep fear."Do you understand what this is?" he said quietly. "Do you actually understand what it means?""It means we're mates.""It means more than that.""Then *tell* me." Her voice rose. She couldn't help it. "Tell me, because I've been walking around with a secret for six weeks and I don't know a single thing. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel. I don't know if I'm supposed to be happy. I don't know if I'm supposed to run. Everyone in this pack knows more about my body than I do right now, and I'm

Seraphine Calloway did not scream. Lyra would have preferred it.She had braced for a scream, for a slap, for a bottle thrown against the shelves. Anger she knew how to stand in front of. She had grown up in a clinic, and she'd watched grief tear through doors in every shape it came. What she did not know what to do with was a woman in a pale blue dress closing the door softly behind her, as if she'd come in to borrow a pen.The latch clicked. The bulb swung on its cord, and three shadows slid across the shelves."Sera," Dante said. His voice was hoarse. "Let me explain.""I think you'll have to." She still wasn't looking at him. She was looking at Lyra's neck, at the scarf, at the faint silver light pulsing through the silk. "How long?"Nobody answered."It's a simple question. How long has this been going on?" She turned her ring a quarter turn on her finger. A thin silver band, a pale stone. "I'd like to know how long I've been the last person in Moonridge to hear.""Since spring,"

He moved her on a Thursday, in the dark, like contraband.Lyra had thought about how it would go. She'd pictured a conversation, maybe, or a plan with some shape to it. Instead there was a knock at her door at four in the morning and Rhys Hallow, Dante's oldest friend, standing in the corridor with his hood up and his eyes carefully on the floor."He sent me," he said. "Get your things. Quietly."She'd already packed. She'd packed three nights ago and unpacked and packed again, and the duffel sat at the foot of her bed with the tea tin wedged in the middle, wrapped in a sweater so the coins wouldn't rattle. Her mother's comb was in her coat pocket. That was everything. Six years in that room, and it all fit in one bag.Rhys carried it without being asked. He didn't say a word as they went down the back stairs, past the kitchens, out through the laundry door into a night so cold it hurt her teeth. A truck waited at the end of the service road with its lights off. They drove north for f

It was a coward's question. She knew it the moment it left her mouth. But something relaxed in his shoulders, and she hated herself for that, and hated him a little too."It was my mother's," he said. "Before she married my father. Her family kept it for hunting season, and she used to come up here when she needed to be alone." A faint, crooked smile. "She told me once it was the only place in the territory where nobody could find her. I was about eleven. I thought that was the saddest thing I'd ever heard.""And now?""Now I think it's the only place I can keep you safe.""That's not the same as wanting me here.""No.""Do you want me here?"The question was out before she could swallow it. It hung in the warm air between them, naked and small.Dante looked at her. It was the first time all night that he'd really looked, with the walls down, and what she saw was so unguarded she nearly flinched."I want you everywhere," he said, very low. "In every room I walk into. At every table I