Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
SOREN
Cassian picked up his phone and dialed. He turned away from me while it rang, but the kitchen wasn’t big enough to make it private.
“It’s me.” A pause. “I know… did you find Ronan…where the hell is he? I need you to talk to him and get him to call me.” His voice dropped but didn’t soften.
“Brec—” A short exhale. “I don’t care what you think about that.
No.” His free hand pressed flat on the counter.
“My wolf is not your business.” Something Brec said made his jaw set hard.
“I need you to talk to Soren… the omega…no hospital… I don’t give a fuck…
he doesn’t want to go. Talk to him.” He turned back and held the phone out across the table. “He wants to speak to you.”
I took it.
“Hello?” The voice on the line was calm as if he hadn’t just been argued with.
“Hello,” I said with so much caution I nearly tripped over the word.
“My name is Brec.”
“Soren.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Soren, sorry it’s under circumstances like these.” He stopped as if he expected me to fill the silence, then, when I said nothing, because I couldn’t think what to say, he continued. “Is this your first pregnancy?”
“Yes.”
“First viable?”
“First altogether.”
“Can I ask how old you are?”
“Twenty-two.”
“And Cassian says you’re a cat?”
“Yes.”
“What species?”
The answer locked in my throat.
Every instinct I had screamed at me to keep that secret. Naming my species narrowed me down to three Families. It turned me from an anonymous omega into someone who could be identified, claimed, hunted.
I looked at Cassian.
What choice did I have?
“Snow leopard,” I whispered, and watched Cassian’s expression, but it didn’t change. Snow leopards were rare. Omega snow leopard females were uncommon enough, but a male omega capable of carrying a child was rarer still.
A pause. “Any complications? Gestational hypertension, bleeding, glucose issues?”
“No. Just some recent pain.”
“Can you describe it?”
I told him. The pressure that had been building for weeks, the way it changed with position, the backache that never fully eased.
He asked follow-up questions with a precision the doctors at Center 14 had never reached.
I moved in the hard kitchen chair, trying to find something bearable, kept my hand on my belly, and answered everything.
He went through the crash, the cold, how long I’d been unconscious, whether I’d had any bleeding since—all of it in the same register, no alarm, no softening.
“The baby’s position. You said she’s dropped.”
“More pressure in my hips. Lower than a week ago.”
“How long?”
“Three days. Maybe six. Before I… before I left.”
He asked about the tightening I’d had for weeks. Dr. Kavanaugh, a beta woman with cold hands and even colder eyes, had called it ligament strain and dismissed it out of hand.
The pause this time was longer. “I would suggest that this is actually prodromal labor—common in the third trimester, more common in first pregnancies, and after trauma.”
That sounded bad. “Am I having my baby now?”
“No, it doesn’t mean birth is imminent, but in a cat shifter’s first pregnancy, progression from prodromal to active can compress significantly.
More so after physical stress. I can’t predict by how much, though.
Cat pregnancies are so damn rare, and less predictable than wolf pregnancies in the final weeks, and yours has complicating factors with the accident.
I’m not telling you she’s coming tomorrow.
I’m telling you the window could be eight weeks or three. ”
Three weeks? Fuck.
My cat stirred and said nothing. Would the bridge be open by then? We were in the middle of winter, and the snow was never-ending, and I was up a mountain with no way out. Could I make it away? Would Cassian let me go? He’d promised, but what if I was left with no choice?
“What do I need to do to keep her safe?”
“Hydration. Rest. No strenuous activity.” He was moving through a list. “Someone with you around the clock for at least the next week. Not because I think delivery is happening now, but because when the symptoms shift, you’ll need someone present who can make the calls.
Can we include Cassian in this conversation? ”
“He’s in the other room. But I don’t…” I swallowed hard.
I didn’t want anyone else involved.
I’d spent years with strangers making decisions about my body, touching me without permission, discussing me as though I wasn’t standing right there. Every instinct I had screamed to keep everything locked down. Me. Asha. Our space. Ours. Safe.
The thought of anyone else knowing intimate things about my pregnancy made my stomach knot.
Even Cassian.
Especially Cassian.
Because every time he looked at me, my cat leaned toward him instead of away.
Every time he came close, something inside me softened despite every lesson Center 14 had carved into me.
I didn’t want to need him. Didn’t want to depend on another alpha.
Didn’t want to wake up one morning and realize I’d handed him pieces of myself I’d never meant to lose.
But if something went wrong…
If Asha was in danger…
I couldn’t let my fear matter more than she did.
“It’s hard to have other people know about me,” I admitted quietly.
“I get it, and I totally support your right to privacy. I would just say that if you need help…”
Cassian was my only hope if something did happen. Brec was hours away and if Asha decided to come early, or I got sick, or something went wrong in the middle of the night, there wouldn’t be anyone else.
I closed my eyes for a second.
This wasn’t about me anymore. “I can get him.”
“Are you sure?”
I drew a steadying breath and squared my shoulders.
“Yes.” I glanced at the doorway. “Cassian,” I called and he was there fast, as if he’d been waiting.
“Brec wants you.” I held it out. He crossed the kitchen, took it, pulled out the chair beside me—not opposite, beside—and sat down.
I folded my hands in my lap and watched his face while Brec talked.
He was hard to read. His jaw shifted when Brec asked him questions that I could hear. His eyes went to the window, came back to me briefly, and moved away. He asked a question into the phone—short, one sentence—then another. His hand flattened on the table, braced. He nodded once.
“Yeah,” he said. “I understand… I know… I’ll get what’s on the list.” He listened.
“Is there anything specific I should be watching for?” More listening.
A small tightening at the corner of his mouth, quickly gone.
“Understood. I’ll be in touch.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “I’ll contact you if I need you.”
He went quiet, then ended the call even as I could still hear Brec talking and put the phone on the table.
I waited.
“Your baby could come early,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Winter’s not anywhere near ending, and the bridge is closed.”
“I know.”
He stared at the phone, then at me. “There’s a real chance we’re stuck here when it happens.”
“I won’t go to a hospital anyway.”
I thought he might argue, or order me, or force me to do what he wanted; instead, he tilted his head, and his eyes shone amber, a sure sign his wolf was close to the surface.
That should have scared me and sent my cat running, but instead there was this feeling I couldn’t pin down.
Acceptance? Peace? I didn’t know what the hell it was. “I’ll do it on my own.”
He winced. “I’ll be there to help, although I’ve never delivered a baby,” he said, “Brec is sending through a whole load of information, so if we work through that together, we should make sense of what might happen if you go into labor early. Do you think we can work together?”
I considered the question. “Until the snow clears and I can leave,” I asked—demanded, albeit softly and respectfully just in case—but he wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“Yes,” he said, and I didn’t have to be an expert to know he was lying or maybe evading the truth.
He clicked through what he’d been sent. “Okay, for the birth kit. I can source most of it in the house; the rest we’ll have to make do until the bridge…
” He glanced up. “Until you can leave.” He was already elsewhere—logistics, the list. “I’ll need to know your pain pattern. When your uhm… when you feel…”
“Like the baby is coming.”
“Yes. As soon as pain changes—not when you decide it might mean something, when it changes—you tell me first.”
“Okay,” I said, because I had no option.
Cassian filled a glass of water, put it in front of me. I drank it. He went back to the counter and stood there, working through his phone, and I sat with my hands around the empty glass.
For all Cassian’s pretty words about not hurting me, I didn’t feel safe.