Chapter 16 - Caitlynn #2
The thought ran through her chest like something cold and serrated.
She had no model for this. Every mother she’d ever known had given her back.
The biological one had died. The foster ones had signed papers and watched her pack a garbage bag and walk to a car.
She’d been seven, nine, eleven, fourteen—a series of departures so consistent they’d calcified into something she carried inside her like a second skeleton: people leave.
They look at you, and they weigh you, and they decide you’re too much, and they leave.
And you will do the same, because that’s the only thing you know how to do, and you will pass it on like a disease.
“Hey.” Olivia’s hand on her arm. “Breathe.”
Caitlynn exhaled. It came out uneven, which infuriated her, because she didn’t shake—not visibly, not like this.
She was the woman who had walked into a ring with a shifter and gotten up every time she was knocked down.
She had stood in front of Kahn Voss on her first night in this place and told him she’d show him what she was worth without letting her voice crack once.
She did not sit on bathroom floors and fall apart over things that millions of women handled every day with grace and appropriate emotions.
She pressed her palms flat against the tile.
And that was when it happened—underneath the cold, underneath the fear, underneath the long-trained instinct to calculate exits—something else moved.
It came from nowhere she could identify.
It came from below conscious thought, below language, below all the careful architecture she’d built between herself and things she couldn’t afford to feel.
Heat. Low and fierce and entirely irrational.
Her hand moved to her stomach without her permission.
Flat still—nothing to see yet, nothing to feel, no evidence of the pulse the silver light had found.
But her palm pressed flat against the fabric of her shirt, and the heat was there.
The certainty of it, animal and absolute, that whatever was growing inside her was hers in a way that nothing in her twenty-four years had ever been hers.
Not the bakery. Not the apartment. Not the boxes she’d moved from city to city without opening because opening them meant deciding she was staying.
Not like this.
This could not be reassigned. Could not be returned with a signature and a social worker’s card. Could not be taken back, redistributed, or placed with a more suitable party.
Mine.
The word arrived without sound, without ceremony—a detonation somewhere below her sternum, silent and total, shaking the foundations of everything she’d decided about herself.
She sat on the tile and held her flat stomach and felt both things live inside her at the same time, the terror and the ferocity, the ice and the heat, neither one strong enough to cancel the other out.
Just both. Simultaneously. In the same body, in the same woman, who was apparently larger on the inside than anyone had ever bothered to check.
“I need to tell Kahn,” she said.
Her voice came out strange. Thick, the way voices came out after the body had used up all its equilibrium and hadn’t restocked yet.
“You do,” Olivia said. “When you’re ready.”
“I don’t know when that’s going to be.”
“That’s allowed.”
Caitlynn looked at the door. Beyond it—the hallway, the stairs, the study where he was probably sitting with his patrol reports, and that crease between his brows she’d stopped pretending not to notice.
He would want to know. He would have reactions and plans and the particular brand of controlled intensity he applied to everything that mattered, and she was not remotely equipped to manage his face right now. Not while her own was still in pieces.
Telling him made it real in a way that this floor with Olivia did not. Telling him meant watching his face rearrange itself, meant reading what this meant to an Alpha, meant letting him see what it meant to her—and she didn’t have that answer yet. She barely had a grip on the question.
She stood up. Her legs held, which was more than she’d expected to get from them.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she said.
“I won’t.”
“Chris. Elena. No one.”
“I won’t.” Olivia stood beside her, unhurried, and looked at her the way she had on a handful of other occasions that Caitlynn would not have admitted to remembering: with the steady, uncomplicated regard of a woman who was deciding she was worth keeping track of.
“But Caitlynn—the bond will tell him something’s changed before you do, if you wait too long. His wolf will feel it.”
Caitlynn turned to the mirror. Put her face back together piece by piece the way she always had—the stillness first, then the jaw, then the eyes.
The expression she’d practiced in twelve different bathroom mirrors in twelve different houses until it looked like a person who was fine, or at least like a person who had decided that fine was the only available option.
“Then I’d better figure out what to say before it does.”
She opened the door and walked out into the hallway, and her hand was at her stomach again before she’d made it three steps.
She didn’t move it.