Chapter 19 #2
The heat is over. This isn’t the heat. This is something else.
I go to Greta.
She’s alone in the kitchen as always, the meeting’s debris cleared, a pot on the stove. She looks up when I come in and reads my face.
“Sit.”
I sit. My hands are on my knees. The hum in my belly hasn’t stopped.
“Something’s wrong,” I say. “Not the heat — that’s passed. Something else. My wolf keeps turning inward. Toward my stomach. And there’s a—” I don’t have the right word. “A heaviness. Low. Like something settling in.”
Greta dries her hands on a cloth and crosses to me. She puts one cool, dry hand on my forehead. Then she moves her hand to my stomach. Presses gently. Her eyes close. She stays like that for a long time. Her lips move, counting something I can’t hear.
She opens her eyes. “The seed takes root.”
I blink at her. “What?”
“You’re growing a baby, honey.”
“No. That’s impossible.” I’m shaking my head. “I was literally with him a day ago.”
“When was the first time?”
“The first time what?”
“The first time you mated with him.”
The directness of the question is so purely Greta that it cuts through every defense I have.
“Ten days ago. Maybe eleven.” The clearing. The fight, the fall, the knot. My wolf baring our throat. “But the heat only started a week ago. And you gave me the herbs—”
“The herbs suppress the cycle’s symptoms. They don’t prevent conception.” She folds her hands. “A wolf can be fertile before the obvious signs of heat appear. The body prepares before the body announces. If the first mating happened before the heat was fully active—”
“That’s impossible. It was one time. I wasn’t—”
“You bonded—”
“We’re not bonded!”
She waves a hand, dismissing my objection. “A mate bond accelerates fertility. The body recognizes the matched male and responds by making itself ready.” She pauses. Lets me catch up to where she already is. “Did you take his seed into your womb?”
“What?” I choke, my cheeks flaming.
“Do you need me to explain it, honey?”
“No!” My ears are burning now, too. “I mean, yes. I… I probably did.” I fix my focus on my hands. “He had…” I swallow. “He had a knot.”
“Ah.” Greta taps her lip with her fingertip. “Not common, that.” She gives me a look that is very specifically Greta. “You’ve likely been carrying since that first mating.”
I’m not laughing. She almost is.
“I can’t believe this is happening.”
“What’s there to believe? Your wolf knew. She submitted to a dominant alpha, accepted his knot, bared her throat for the bite. That’s not a mating display, honey. That’s an ancient sequence. The submission, the knot, the bite — your wolf was inviting conception.”
I’m staring at her. The kitchen is very quiet. The pot on the stove is making small bubbling sounds.
“It’s been ten days,” I say. “You can’t feel a pregnancy at ten days.”
“You can’t. Your wolf can.” She looks at my hands, which are pressed flat against my stomach.
I didn’t put them there. They found their way on their own.
“The implantation has been happening. That’s the heaviness you’re feeling.
Your wolf is responding to it — the protective turn, the inward focus. She’s guarding what’s been planted.”
The room spins. Not physically. Something in my understanding of the world shifting to accommodate information that doesn’t fit anywhere I’ve built for it.
I’m pregnant. By Garrett Forrester. From the first time — the clearing, the fight, the knot. The mating my wolf engineered while my human mind was yelling. My wolf didn’t just choose a mate that night. She chose a father.
“No,” I say.
Greta waits.
“No. I can’t… This isn’t—” I stand up. Sit down. Stand up again. My hands are still on my stomach, and my wolf is curled around whatever is inside me with a warmth and ferocity I’ve never felt from her.
Joy. The animal is radiating joy.
“A potion,” I say. “There must be something. Something that—”
“There are herbs that end a pregnancy. I won’t give them to you.”
“Why not?”
“Because a mate-bond pregnancy in a wolf as strong as you, with a bond as powerful as what I’m reading in your scent — that child will be extraordinary. And because ending it won’t end the bond. It will break something in you I don’t know how to mend.”
“You don’t get to decide—”
“I’m not deciding. I’m telling you what I know.” She stands, goes back to the stove, and picks up her spoon. “Besides, I’m not messing with that beast of yours. She’d take my throat out if I harmed her baby.”
She’s right, dammit. I know she is.
I’m standing in Greta’s kitchen with my hands on my belly and my wolf singing — actually singing, a warmth so deep it fills me from head to toe.
“Don’t tell anyone,” I say from the door.
“I’ve kept harder secrets than yours, child.”
I walk out. Across the yard. Past the training ground where Sienna is running drills.
Past the children’s room, where Sable is singing something soft and sweet.
Past the cabin where Conner and Willow are talking in low voices about the meeting.
About Martin. About hearings and justice and all the things that matter to people whose lives haven’t just been turned inside out by a single sentence from an old woman with a spoon.
I get to my room and lock the door, then sink onto my mattress. I lie on my back. Hands on my stomach. My wolf settled around the place where his seed has taken, guarding it, warming it, pouring a tenderness into it she has never shown to me.
I carried the rabbit six hundred miles to make a man pay for what his corridor did to children.
Now, I’m carrying his child.
The two truths sit side by side in me. They don’t fit together. They don’t cancel each other out. My wolf doesn’t care about the contradiction because my wolf has moved past vengeance into something older and fiercer.
I press my hands against my belly.
I’m having a baby.