Chapter 35
Briar
I don’t sleep well. This is not new. I haven’t slept well since a man bit my neck and rewired my nervous system and made it impossible to exist in a bed without feeling his absence in it.
But tonight is different. Tonight I’m not fighting the pull toward him.
Tonight I’m lying in my room staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out if I’m ready to stop having a room like this to stare at.
Forrester packlands. Hill Country. The territory I spent weeks crawling across on my belly, watching his compound, planning how to take him down.
He wants me to live there.
My wolf thinks this is the best idea anyone’s ever had. She’s been radiating a warm, settled smugness since the barn conversation that makes me want to shift just so I can bite my own tail. The animal has no doubts. The animal hasn’t had doubts since she spotted him.
The woman has doubts. The woman has a list.
I get up at dawn and skip Greta’s kitchen. Garrett will be there, stacking wood, making oats, being helpful, present, and impossible to ignore. Once again, I go to the south ridge instead.
The run starts strong. Stretching out, four legs eating ground, the Ozark hills opening around me in the early light. The air is damp from overnight rain, and every scent is amplified — loam, resin, the creek running high. The territorial markers of Ravenclaw wolves layered through the undergrowth.
A mile in, my wolf does something strange.
She slows. Not tired; she could run for hours at this pace.
She slows deliberately, dropping from a lope to a trot, and her attention turns inward.
Toward my belly. The protective curl is there, the one she’s been doing since Greta told me what I already knew.
But this is different. She’s listening. Ears up, nose down, her whole body oriented toward whatever she’s sensing inside me.
I stop on the ridge and stand in the morning air with my fur damp from the mist. She’s very still. Focused on something I can’t hear.
Then I feel it. A flutter. Low in my belly, quick and light, gone before I can be sure it happened. My wolf’s ears swivel. Her tail lifts.
Was that—?
Another flutter. Stronger. Like a finger tapping from the inside. Not painful. Not even uncomfortable. Just… present. A body inside my body, making itself known.
My wolf’s response is a full-body shudder of joy. She throws her head back, and the sound that comes from her throat is not a howl. Something quieter. A chuff, the low, warm sound a mother wolf makes when she greets her pups. I’ve heard it from other wolves. I’ve never made it myself.
I stand on the ridge making mother-sounds at a flutter in my belly, and for the first time, the pregnancy isn’t something I’m carrying. It’s someone I’m carrying. The difference is everything.
I shift back to human form because I need to put my hand on my stomach. My palm flat over the place where the flutter happened. Nothing now. Just warmth. But the chuff is on repeat, the animal greeting the cub she’s been guarding.
“Okay,” I say to my belly. To the flutter. To whatever piece of Garrett and me has taken up residence in my body and is now knocking to let me know it’s there. “Okay. I hear you.”
I stand on the ridge with my hand on my stomach and the morning rising around me, and I think about Forrester packlands.
The hills. The cedar. The creek that doesn’t dry up in August. A child running in wolf form through Hill Country scrub, learning to track, learning to hunt, growing up on land that has a history its parents are trying to rewrite.
I think about a man in a barn who said because of you, not because of the baby. And how I believed him. And how the believing didn’t scare me the way it should have.
I walk the rest of the ridge slowly. The flutter doesn’t come again, but I carry the memory of it — warm, protected, the most precious thing I’ve ever held.
I return to the tree where I left my clothes, and I dress, but I don’t leave the ridge.
Willow finds me at the overlook. She sits beside me on the rock, and we look out at the hills.
“He asked me to go to Forrester packlands with him,” I say.
“I know. Conner told me.”
“Of course he did.”
“They’re brothers. They talk now. It’s a whole thing.” She pulls her knees up. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him I’d think about it.”
“And? Have you?”
“It’s all I’ve been thinking about, Willow. I ran the ridge to clear my head, and my wolf decided to stop and listen to the baby instead.”
“Listen to the baby?”
“I felt something. A flutter. And my wolf—” I stop. Start again. “She made a sound I’ve never heard from her. The mother sound. The chuff.”
Willow is quiet for a moment. Her hand finds mine on the rock. “That’s the quickening. The first movement.”
“It’s early.”
“For a human pregnancy. For a bonded wolf carrying an alpha’s child? The timelines are different. The baby is growing fast.” She squeezes my hand. “Briar. What does the flutter tell you?”
“That the baby is real. I know that sounds stupid. I’ve known for weeks. Greta confirmed it. My wolf has been guarding it. But feeling it move… that’s different from knowing. That’s—”
“A person.”
“A person. Inside me. Half his.”
“And you want this person.”
“Yes, I want this person.” My voice catches.
“I want this person so much it scares me, Willow. I’ve never wanted anything I couldn’t fight for with my hands or run down with my legs.
This is something I have to grow. Something I have to be still for.
Something I have to let happen to me instead of making it happen. ”
“You hate that.”
“I hate that.”
“And him?”
I look out at the hills. The morning is fully up now. The compound below us is working; Greta’s chimney, Merric on the fence line, the sounds of wolves living their day. Somewhere down there, Garrett is shoveling straw and waiting for me to finish running from him.
“When I was on the ridge,” I say. “When the flutter happened, and my wolf made the mother sound, the first thing I thought… Not the second thing, not the thing I thought after I’d had time to construct a rational response… The first thing I thought was: I want to tell him.”
“So tell him.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
“Because telling him about the flutter means telling him I want the baby. And telling him I want the baby means admitting I want a future that has him in it. And admitting I want a future means—” I stop.
The words are stacking up, each one pushing against the next.
“It means I’m choosing this. All of it. Him.
The packlands. The history. The work of making something new out of something broken.
And I’ve spent my whole life running alone, Willow.
My whole life. I don’t know how to stop. ”
“You stopped on the ridge this morning.”
“My wolf stopped.”
“Your wolf is you, Briar.”
I look at her. She looks back with the steady patience of a woman who cares about me and won’t let me lie to myself about it.
“I love him,” I say. “I love who he’s becoming.
The man who mucks stalls and makes oats and holds a rubber ball like it’s holy.
I love that man. And I’m terrified of losing him.
And I’m terrified of keeping him. And I’m terrified that if I go to Forrester packlands and build a life with him and raise this baby on that land, I’ll wake up one morning and find out the man I love was just a version he was performing and the corridor was who he really is. ”
“Do you believe that?”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing on this rock?”
The question sits between us. The morning wind moves through the trees below. A hawk circles the far ridge.
“I’m being afraid,” I say. “And I’m almost done.”
She doesn’t push further. We sit for a while. The hawk makes lazy circles. The compound noises drift up. Somewhere down there, a child laughs, the sound carrying the way children’s laughter carries in still air.
Willow stands and brushes off her jeans. “Come find me later if you need me.”
“Willow.”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For not giving up on me.”
“I would never.” She touches my shoulder. “You’re the most stubborn wolf I’ve ever met, Briar. But stubborn isn’t the same as lost. You’ve always known where you were going. You just needed time to admit it.”
“I’m glad you see that.”
“You know what else I see?”
“What?”
“You’ve talked more since you met this man than you did in the entire time I knew you before. I think that’s a good thing.”
She walks down the ridge. I watch her go.
The sun climbs. The rock is warm under my hands.
I sit with the warmth and the flutter-memory and the knowledge that Willow is right, and my wolf is right, and the baby tapping against my insides is right.
The only one who’s been wrong is the woman who spent six weeks pretending she hadn’t fallen in love with a man she was supposed to destroy.
I’m done pretending.
The realization doesn’t arrive with fanfare. No thunderclap. No dramatic shift. Just a settling. Like the flutter in my belly, like the mother-sound my wolf made on the ridge. A natural thing, arriving in its own time.
I love him. I want the baby. I want the packlands and the hard ground and the man who’ll be standing on it waiting for me. And there’s something else. Something I’ve been carrying alongside the pregnancy, and the love, and the fear. Something unfinished.
The mark on my neck. His teeth. His wolf’s claim, given in a clearing while I screamed.
There’s no mark on him.
The thought arrives, and once it’s there, it takes up all the space.
His wolf claimed me. My wolf submitted. The bond runs in one direction: his to mine, the alpha’s bite, the dominant male’s mark.
Every wolf who sees my neck knows I belong to someone.
But Garrett’s neck is bare. Unmarked. No wolf looking at him would know he’s taken.
He’s mine. And nothing on his body says so, aside from the scars I left on his arms, and those serve a different purpose entirely.
My wolf rises at the thought. A fierce, sudden surge.
Territorial. Possessive. The intensity of it surprises me.
I’ve never been possessive about anything except my weapons and my solitude.
Now my wolf is baring her teeth at the idea of Garrett Forrester walking through the world without her mark on his skin.
I stand up. The rock is warm. The morning is bright. My body feels different: lighter, clearer.
I know what I need to do. Not because Willow told me or Greta pushed me or the bond demands it. Because I want to. Because the woman and the wolf agree for the first time since we were scouting around the Forrester compound.
What they agree on is that the man in the barn belongs to them, and it’s time he knew it in his skin.