Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
SOREN
Cassian had left earlier as if the hounds of hell were on his tail, and I faced the room knowing that whatever kind of library this space was meant to be had come to nothing.
The heat of the fire hadn’t reached the corners of the big bare room yet, and it wasn’t good for sitting in, even if the chair Cassian said I should use was comfortable.
I was distracted because Cassian wasn’t here, and I tried everything to refocus my energy.
Boxes were stacked along every wall, books shoved sideways on shelves that were mostly empty, floorboards pale in the winter light through the north-facing glass.
The two chairs faced the window, and nothing else had ever been arranged around them.
Boxes never opened, nothing put away, dust thick enough in the corners to mean years.
As to the chair, I tried a pillow on the right side, then the left, then tucked it behind me and lower.
Each time the relief lasted until I shifted or breathed or Asha pressed somewhere new, and no combination of pillows was going to fix it.
Thirty-three weeks now, and it wasn’t enough.
Every ache convinced me she was coming too soon, and every quiet hour afterward felt borrowed.
Center 14 might have been my prison, but it had a medical suite, emergency operating rooms, and staff who’d spent years training for this.
There was nothing like that here, and I had to be honest with myself—I wasn’t going to be able to leave in time to get over the border.
Outside, the snow fell so thickly the trees beyond the meadow faded in and out of sight.
It was beautiful until I remembered there was no neighbor over the hill, no farmhouse beyond the woods, no road I could reach if I suddenly changed my mind and ran.
There was only Cassian’s house and miles of white.
Wasn’t this place just as much my prison as Center 14 and, before it, my family’s home?
Read something, my cat said.
Calm.
“In a minute.” He put his head back down. He wasn’t settled either—I could feel him restless behind my ribs.
To pass the time; I went through some of the boxes.
History. Military tactics. A thick paperback on wilderness medicine, spine cracked.
I set it aside. Someone had made margin notes in pencil inside the front cover of an omega law book published over eighty years ago, and I closed it without reading.
There was no law favoring Omegas and never had been.
Near the bottom of one box were two copies of the same novel—one barely touched, one read to pieces—and I held them both for a moment without knowing what to do with them, then put them back.
I took three books I thought I might read, the blanket from the chair arm, and went upstairs to the one place I felt safe—my room.
It was warmer, and even though the nest had slipped when I left it, with pillows scattered and the top blanket pulling at the corner, my cat settled the moment I stepped through the door.
Safe, he said.
Rebuilding took a few minutes. Pillows just right, the blanket from the library folded double and laid on top, the rolled duvet wedged at my back to take the pressure off my spine.
I eased down into the center of it and felt my body start to relax by slow degrees, the ache still there but bearable now, and I got my hands under my belly and adjusted.
“Better,” I told her when Asha kicked.
Outside, the light was flat and white, and the snow kept coming.
I’d been facing the huge floor to ceiling window, watching the tree line east of the house for a while before I realized I was doing it—just watching, tired and unable to settle, tracking the dark line of the pines where Cassian had pointed, thankful I had the same view as from the wannabe library.
I didn’t know how long he’d been out there.
Long enough that the fire had settled from crackling to a low steady burn, and the room had gone quiet.
Then something moved at the tree line, and I peered over the edge of the nest.
A wolf came out of the pines at a steady lope, big and dark against all that white, and I lay still and watched Cassian cross the open ground, and I rolled out of my little haven so I could see him come to the house.
It took a while to get there, but I was in time to watch the shift happen, the bulk of him folding and reconfiguring until Cassian was standing there in the snow on two feet, naked, and breathing hard from the cold.
He stood for a moment with his head down, rolled his neck, then came inside.
I’d only shifted fully once, long enough for my designation to be revealed, and then nothing.
My father had taken it from me with pills slipped into my food, into my drinks, every day of my life until I’d almost forgotten what freedom felt like.
My cat had paced behind walls I couldn’t see, growing quieter with every passing month until I’d started to wonder if he’d died in there.
My throat closed.
I’d mourned him.
Silent tears blurred my vision. All those nights in my room, wondering why I felt so empty, why I couldn’t feel him anymore. I’d thought I was broken. Thought there was something wrong with me. All the while they’d been drugging me, stealing the one part of me that had never belonged to them.
My chest hitched hard enough to hurt.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, though I didn’t know whether I was speaking to my cat, the boy I’d been, or the years we’d both lost. “I’m so sorry.”
Grief crashed over me, raw and endless. Not for the pregnancy.
Nor my family or fear. Not even for the prison I’d escaped.
I cried for every sunrise my snow leopard had never seen.
Every run through fresh snow we’d never taken.
Every choice, every season, every piece of our life that had been stolen before we’d ever had the chance to live it.
I stepped back from the window and lay back down, and the number came back. Two million.
I was fourteen when I presented. The examiner came to the house, came to my room, and I stood in the center of the rug while she went about her work, and she didn’t ask my name or whether I was frightened.
She poked and prodded and took blood, and my parents watched as I shifted my first and only time.
They’d already given up on me as soon as it was obvious I was omega, but at least I had some kind of future—a quiet arranged marriage or a life of service.
My life changed the moment the doctor pronounced the verdict.
Fertile. Viable. Pure bloodline success. Womb structure within the standard range for successful gestation.
My father’s relief when she said it became a calculation because I was no longer the one nobody had found a use for yet.
Suddenly, I had value, and from that day, my room had become my prison as alpha after alpha kept me from the world.
My first heat came a few months later. After that, my family tracked my cycle as carefully as they watched over their money and power, recording every date, every change, every sign that my body was doing what they needed it to do.
My father wanted to wait, kept me in a gilded cage, a suite of rooms on the family estate in Weston, waiting for the perfect alpha match, but Emric?
He was different. As soon as our father died, he’d hurried the timeline, forced Malachai to use me, all for a pure-blood child to cement his power.
I was nothing more than a number in a registry and a bloodline they could use.
“I won’t lose you.” Asha moved again, pressing into my palm, and my cat nestled close.
Cassian said I was safe, his focus on me.
He’d understood the weight of my family name, alphas with money and power and half the legal system of the North East in their pockets, and he hadn’t blinked.
The matter was apparently settled, but I’d wanted to tell him it wasn’t that simple, only I hadn’t, because some part of me was too tired to argue with someone who sounded that certain about my life, and some other part of me had wanted to hear it said again.
I wanted someone to protect us.
Someone who cared.
“He’s strange,” I told Asha. She kicked at my ribs, and I adjusted the pillow.
“He’s angry at everything, including himself.
He says things wrong and then knows he’s said them wrong and doesn’t know how to fix them.
” I let my eyes close partway. “He made me breakfast, showed me the library, and went out in a snowstorm to walk a fence line. You saw how he slept in wolf form against the back door all night.” I was talking to both Asha and my cat now.
“But we’re leaving when the roads clear; try to make it to the border at least. That’s what we agreed. ”
My cat said nothing, which wasn’t the same as agreeing.
The afternoon went quiet after that. The snow kept falling, the fire burned steadily, and I was so tired it had settled deep in my bones. At some point, I stopped holding myself awake and let my eyes stay closed.
The dreams were muted. More color than content. Fragments of fear, Yannick’s voice, the smell of Center 14, the locked doors. When I woke, it was to darkness and Asha pushing steadily at the right side of my ribcage with what felt like both feet.
“I get it,” I told her, groggy, and lay still for a moment while the room came back to me and the knock came while I was still putting myself back together.
I worked myself upright. “Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me. I have some stuff you might need.”
“Hang on.”
I made my way to the door, worked the key lift-then-turn and opened it a crack. Cassian was standing in the hall carrying a stack of white towels folded neatly, a shallow wooden crate balanced on top.
“Brec gave me a list,” he said and tilted his head at the crate. “Go through it and check, but I just wanted you to know it’s here.” He set the crate down just inside the door—without crossing the threshold, I noticed—and straightened. “The towels are for… well… you know.”
“I do.”
“Right. Well, there are scissors, sterilizing tablets. A lamp I can move if you want more light in here. Brec sent some notes on positioning for a cat shifter in a first birth. I can print them if that’s useful for you.”
I looked at the crate. Folded cloths. A sealed first aid kit with an ORT label half-stripped from the side. Three small bottles of sterile saline, medical gloves still in the packaging. He’d found things, thinking it through, and my throat constricted again.
“Thank you,” I managed. “There’s something in the car I need. I know it’s probably snowed in, but I… would you be able to get it? I understand if it’s too much to get it, but…”
“Of course.”
“It’s a wolf, a stuffed wolf.”
He seemed confused but didn’t ask me to explain. “Not a problem,” he said. “The car’s buried deep, but I’ll check after dinner. I made lasagna. Can you manage to come down for something, or do you want me to bring it up to you?”
“I’ll come down.”
He glanced back at the nest, which made me feel odd because nests are very personal, and I waited for him to tell me I was doing it wrong.
Not that I’d know if it was wrong or not, given that I’d never had this instinct before, but he didn’t criticize, just smiled gently, then pulled the door almost closed and went downstairs.
I got the feeling he approved.
Our alpha loves our nest, my cat corrected.
“He’s not ours,” I muttered, then took a moment to breathe, sitting on the edge of the bed with the crate on the floor, and my cat was quiet and satisfied in a weird way that I wasn’t used to.
Safe, my cat said, one more time, and curled up.
I let him.