Chapter 26
Kaila Roth arrives at six in the morning carrying a duffel bag, a portable fetal monitor, and two pastries from wherever she stopped for gas on the drive up.
“Luna.” She hands me a pastry before I can object — still warm, wrapped in wax paper, the kind of gesture that’s so reflexively maternal it bypasses my defenses entirely. Her dark hair is pulled back in a braid that’s seen better days and her field jacket has mud on the cuffs from whatever territory she left at three AM. “Dr. Patel sent me the chart. Monochorionic twins, twenty-eight weeks, BP trending up, protein in the urine. How long has she been symptomatic?”
“Her pack’s referral says three weeks. I think it’s been longer. Their healer corps isn’t equipped to catch this early.”
“Mm.” Kaila chews her own pastry and studies me with the particular warmth of a woman who’s spent twenty years walking into rooms full of frightened mothers and learning to read the room before she reads the chart. “Dr. Patel mentioned there’s some history between you and the patient. Family, she said?”
“My twin sister.”
Kaila’s eyebrows rise. She knows the broad strokes — everyone in the regional network knows that the Ironholt Luna was supposed to be Luna of the Julian Pack before her sister took the position. The details are gossip she’s never cared enough to chase. She’s worked alongside me for three years and she’s never seen me freeze a patient out. The flat, clipped tone is new, and she’s clearly recalibrating.
“Okay,” she says, with the careful ease of a woman deciding to work around a complication rather than through it. “Then let’s go see her together. You set the pace.”
----
The patient room is on the second floor, east wing — one of the private rooms we use for extended stays. It’s clean and bright and there’s a window facing the courtyard and someone brought a vase of wildflowers from the kitchen, which is the kind of thing the commune staff does without being asked because that’s the culture I built and it makes my chest tight to see it extended to my twin.
Soleil is in the bed.
I haven’t seen her in six years and my face is looking back at me from a hospital pillow, and for a second my vision doubles — the fitting room, the break room, the toothbrush, the go be gorgeous I’ll see you at dinner — and then the second passes and what’s in front of me is a woman I barely recognize.
She’s bigger, obviously — twenty-eight weeks with twins will do that. But it’s more than the pregnancy. She looks exhausted in a way that goes deeper than a bad night’s sleep, a bone-level depletion that’s aged her face in ways that should be identical to mine but aren’t. Her hair is shorter than I’ve ever seen it, cut to her shoulders, and the sun-streaked highlights are gone — it’s just the dark auburn base we share, flat and dull against the pillow. Her hands are on her belly and they’re swollen, the fingers puffy, and the ankles Asha mentioned are visible above the blanket’s edge, bloated enough that the skin looks tight.
She looks sick and scared. And she looks exactly like me, and the dissonance of seeing my face wearing an expression I don’t feel is something I thought I’d gotten past and haven’t.
The Gift opens.
I don’t fight it. I let it unfurl with the controlled precision Katina’s notes taught me — not the flood from Lauren Holt’s intake, not the uncontrolled deluge of my early days. This is practiced. Deliberate. A surgeon’s cut instead of a torn wound.
What I read in Soleil hits me in layers.
The first layer is physical: pain, low-grade and constant. Headache behind her eyes. Pressure in her abdomen. The deep, bone-tired ache of a body working twice as hard to grow two lives at once. Her blood pressure is audible in my own pulse — fast, too fast, the cardiovascular system straining against a load it wasn’t built to carry alone.
The second layer is fear. Clean, uncomplicated, animal fear for her children. She’s terrified the babies will come too early. She’s terrified something will go wrong and she’ll lose them. This fear is honest and raw and it sits in her chest like a fist and I recognize it because I’ve felt it in a hundred patients — the specific terror of a mother whose body is failing the life it’s supposed to protect.
The third layer is where I stop breathing.
Guilt.
Not the small, hard knot I felt in the break room six years ago — guilt about Ronan, about the secret, about the one thing she was hiding. This is bigger. This has had six years to grow, and it grew the way things grow in the dark: formless, heavy, filling every available space. Soleil carries guilt the way I carry cold — constantly, constitutionally, as a baseline condition of her existence.
She feels guilty about me. Not in the abstract, not as a concept she’s processed and filed away. She feels guilty about the fitting room and the dress and the toothbrush and the “go be gorgeous.” She feels guilty about the whisper campaign and the modernization proposal and the Council tabling my petition. She feels guilty about Ascension morning, about becoming Luna while I rode a supply shuttle to the commune. She feels guilty about every diplomatic contact that was rerouted to her inbox and every supply chain protocol that was attributed to “the Luna program” instead of to Sasha Addison, who built it.
She has felt guilty about all of it, for six years, and she has done nothing.
That’s the part that makes the anger spike so hard my vision grays at the edges. Not the guilt itself — the guilt is real, and it’s been real for a long time, and in some distant, theoretical way I can acknowledge that carrying six years of guilt is its own kind of suffering. But she knew. She knew what she was doing to me and she felt bad about it and she kept doing it. She felt the guilt and she buried it under composure and competence and the unshakable certainty that she could perform her way through anything, and she never once picked up the phone or wrote a letter or stood in front of me and said I’m sorry for what I did.
Knowing you’re wrong and doing nothing is worse than not knowing. Knowing you’re wrong and performing virtue anyway — the concerned sister, the reluctant Luna, the woman who didn’t mean to overstep — is something I don’t have a word for that isn’t cruelty.
I close the Gift. Carefully, deliberately, the way you cap a well. My hands are shaking. Kaila is beside me, already moving toward the bed with her monitor and her professional focus, and I use the three seconds of her introduction to press my nails into my palms and breathe.
“Hi, sweetheart. I’m Kaila Roth, midwife. I’ve been working with Dr. Patel’s team for a few years now and I’m going to be keeping a close eye on you and these boys.” Kaila’s voice is warm and unhurried — the practiced gentleness of a woman who’s delivered hundreds of babies and understands that the first thing a scared mother needs is someone who sounds like everything is going to be fine. She pulls a chair up to the bedside rather than standing over it. “We’re going to start with a full assessment this morning, and I’ll walk you through every step. Nothing’s going to happen that you don’t know about first.”
Soleil’s eyes move past Kaila to me. Standing by the door, clipboard against my chest, cold hands, steady face.
“Sasha.”
My name in her mouth. The same voice, the same inflection, the same sister-shorthand that used to mean I’m here, I see you. Except now it’s being said from a hospital bed in a commune she never visited, in a territory she never acknowledged, to a woman whose existence her mate is contesting in a legal filing.
“Luna Vasik.” I correct her with the title, and her flinch is small but visible — a micro-contraction around the eyes, the jaw tightening. She heard it. She knows what it means: you don’t get to call me Sasha. Not here. Not yet. Maybe not ever. “I’ll be overseeing your care alongside Dr. Patel and Kaila. The treatment plan will be determined after today’s assessment. Do you have questions about the facility or the process?”
Professional. Every word chosen for its distance.
“No,” Soleil says. Her voice is smaller than I’ve ever heard it — not the confident projection, not the warm authority. Small and tired and afraid. “No questions.”
Kaila gets to work. Blood pressure: one forty-four over ninety-eight, up from yesterday’s intake. Fetal heart tones: both boys strong, rate in the normal range, but the monitor picks up an irregularity in Baby B’s pattern that makes Kaila’s eyebrows draw together. She doesn’t comment on it yet — just writes it down. Urine protein: elevated, confirming what Asha found. Liver function panel: pending from the lab.
I take notes on my clipboard and I don’t look at my twin and the Gift stays closed and my hands are so cold the pen almost slips twice.
Kaila finishes the initial assessment — thorough, patient, explaining each measurement to Soleil in the same gentle voice she’d use for any first-time mother — and then squeezes Soleil’s hand and tells her to rest before pulling me into the corridor.
“Blood pressure isn’t stabilizing. If anything it’s trending up faster than the chart suggests — she was probably symptomatic for weeks before her pack caught it.” She’s flipping through her notes, but her voice has shifted — still warm, but with the steel underneath that means the medicine is serious. “Shared placenta is the complication. Both babies are drawing from the same vascular supply, which means her system is under double the stress. If the pre-eclampsia progresses to severe, we deliver. The question is how many weeks we can buy them.”
“Twenty-eight weeks. The minimum is thirty.”
“Thirty is the goalpost. Thirty-two would be better. Every day we keep those babies in gives them a better shot.” She looks at me, and her expression softens — not pity, not judgment, just the careful attention of someone who noticed the temperature drop between me and my twin and is trying to navigate it without making things worse. “Sasha, I know this is complicated. I’m not asking for details. But her stress levels are a factor — cortisol drives blood pressure. Whatever’s going on, she needs to be as calm as we can keep her.”
The irony is so sharp it could draw blood. My sister needs me to keep her calm. My sister, whose mate filed a legal claim on my personhood, whose pack discarded Petra and broke Lauren Holt and sent a pipeline of damaged wolves to my clinic for five years, needs me to manage my own fury so her blood pressure doesn’t kill her babies.
“Understood,” I say.
Kaila nods and goes back in. I stand in the corridor and press my back against the wall — the same wall from last night, the same posture, the same anger — and the morning light is coming through the east-wing windows and the commune is waking up around me and my twin is twenty feet away carrying two boys and six years of guilt and I’m going to keep her alive because that’s what I do.
But nobody said I had to be kind about it.
----
The days compress. They have a rhythm — morning assessment with Kaila, afternoon review with Asha, evening data entry where I update the treatment log and cross-reference Soleil’s numbers with the pre-eclampsia protocols from the archive. Katina’s notes mentioned the Gift sometimes reading the unborn as patients — opening without permission, flooding the Moon Twin with distress signals that aren’t the mother’s. That’s been happening. Twice during assessments the Gift has cracked open and fed me a faint pressure below my ribs, a heartbeat that isn’t mine or Soleil’s. Baby B. The one with the irregular pattern. He pushes through my walls whether I open the door or not.
Soleil’s blood pressure climbs. One forty-six on day two. One forty-eight on day three. Kaila adjusts medications and restricts activity and monitors the babies every four hours, and each assessment is a negotiation between time and risk — how long can we wait, how much can her body take, when does the math tip from buy more time to get them out now.
I’m in the room for every assessment. Professional, precise, my clipboard a barrier between my body and the bed where my twin lies with her hands on her belly and her eyes following me around the room. She doesn’t try Sasha again. She calls me Luna Vasik with a careful formality that sits wrong on her tongue, as if the title is a shape her mouth hasn’t learned to make.
The Gift stays mostly closed. I open it for the medical checks — reading her pain levels, her stress response, the babies’ distress signals that sometimes come through as faint echoes, a pressure below my own ribs that isn’t mine. Then I close it. Because every time the Gift is open in Soleil’s presence, the guilt floods in, and the guilt feeds my anger, and the anger feeds my blood pressure — not hers, mine — and nobody in this facility needs two patients with hypertension.
On day four, Aleks tells me the council rejected Ronan’s claim.
He finds me in the archive at nine PM — my table, my lamp, the familiar geography of the one place in the commune that’s still entirely mine. He sits beside me and puts a single sheet of paper on the table.
“Summary dismissal,” he says. “The council reviewed the filing and threw it out. Sasha Vasik is a registered member of the Ironholt Pack, bonded and titled, with five years of documented service. The claim has no standing.”
I pick up the paper. The language is dry, official, definitive. The petitioner has failed to demonstrate a legitimate claim. The respondent’s pack membership, bonding, and title are affirmed under existing governance precedent.
“That was fast.”
“I made calls.” His voice is neutral, which means the calls were not. “Every Alpha in the northern territories knows what Ronan was trying to do. Nobody wanted their name near it.”
I set the paper down. The relief should be enormous — the claim dismissed, my name affirmed, the legal threat dissolved. And it is a relief, structurally — a load-bearing wall holding during a storm. But the relief doesn’t reach the anger. The claim was always a symptom. The disease is upstairs in a treatment room with climbing blood pressure and six years of unspoken guilt.
“Ronan’s been visiting her every day,” I say. “During visiting hours. Petra says he sits with her for an hour, holds her hand, talks to the babies.” I stare at the dismissal letter. “It’s the one thing I can’t fault him for. He actually shows up for her. He always did — that was never the problem. The problem was that showing up for her meant disappearing me.”
“I know.”
“And when the babies are born and she’s stable enough to travel, he’ll go back to his pack and his title and his life, and none of this will have cost him anything.”
Aleks is quiet for a long time. His hand finds mine on the table — warm palm over cold knuckles, a gesture so familiar it’s become the punctuation of our marriage. He laces his fingers through mine and the warmth seeps in by degrees and my wolf settles against my ribs with a quiet certainty that has nothing to do with the anger and everything to do with him.
“It’s going to cost him everything,” Aleks says. “When you’re ready.”
I look at him across the table. Pale eyes, dark hair, the scar at his throat catching the lamplight. The man who waited for me to find the Gift myself. Who waited for me to kiss him first. Who waited for me to choose Luna.
He’ll wait for this too. Until I’m ready. Until the babies are safe and Soleil is stable and the medical crisis is resolved. And then he’ll do what he promised in this office three days ago, and it will be thorough and deliberate and devastating, because that’s who Aleksander Vasik is.
“Not yet,” I say. “The babies first.”
His hand tightens on mine. “The babies first.”
We sit in the archive with our hands locked together and the lamp warm on the table and the dismissal letter between us, and upstairs my twin’s blood pressure is still climbing and the math is still running and the babies need two more weeks and I don’t know if we’ll get them.
But the claim is dead. My name is mine. And whatever comes next, I’ll face it as Sasha Vasik, Luna of the Ironholt Pack, with five years of records and a husband who promised to take everything Ronan has.
When I’m ready.