Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
SOREN
The dream went from terrifying and all-consuming to gentle.
Not the usual kind, no locked doors, no sound of shoes on tiled floors.
This was warm and dark and scented with something reaching back to when I was small, barely a kit, still imagining what a safe alpha smelled like.
The instinct was there, hidden in my chest like something that never gave up, and in the dream I had it—the scent, the arms, the solid certainty of being held by someone who would not let go—and I slept like I hadn’t slept in years, huddled into warmth and fur, Asha quiet, my cat quiet, everything quiet.
I woke to human skin. Arms, not fur, and Cassian’s throat within reach of my nose, and I’d buried my face to his pulse point in my sleep. I was breathing him in without thinking; my hand rested on his chest, and I went still.
My cat was silent and pressed into me the way he did when he was certain of something.
I knew I should pull back. Shift away, put space between us, but instead, I pressed closer, enough that his arm tightened around me in his sleep, and I closed my eyes and breathed him in again, deliberately this time, storing it, memorizing it.
I’d never had this. Not once. This was supposed to be terrifying; this was supposed to be the thing I’d spent my entire life knowing to fear—an unknown alpha’s arms, an alpha’s scent.
But it was the only true peace I’d ever known.
The tears came without warning, quiet and stupid, running sideways across my face into the pillow. Asha stirred against my ribs. My cat pressed harder into the warmth, and I let him, and I lay there crying in Cassian’s arms, and for a few minutes, I let it be what it was.
Cassian’s hand cupped my head. He wasn’t awake. His heartbeat stayed even, slow, the deep rhythm of someone still under, and I held completely still and let him, because I was a coward and I wanted it to last another few seconds.
His breathing changed. Then, barely audible, whispered into my hair: Raff. The tears stopped, and I didn’t make a sound.
Cassian woke in stages. The change in his breathing first, then the small involuntary tension of a body surfacing, and then the moment he registered me. The arms around me went rigid. For one held breath, we were frozen.
He stiffened, then inhaled, caught himself, pulled back, and I sat up to make it easier for him to leave.
“Shit, I—I’m sorry, I didn’t—” he pushed himself upright, getting his legs over the side of the nest, running a hand through his hair with the expression of a man trying to work out how he’d got here.
I didn’t look at him directly.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I shouldn’t have done that.” He’d turned partly away, elbows on his knees.
He stopped. Tried again. “I’m not usually…
” That sentence didn’t make it anywhere either, or he gave up.
He was hard, and I looked away, and he made it worse by very obviously noticing that I’d noticed, and a muscle jumped in his jaw. “Just the morning. Ignore it.”
“I am,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true, but that wasn’t anything either of us needed to talk about.
He got to his feet, cupping himself, and moved toward the door, then stopped with his back to me. I could see the tension across his shoulders, the set of his neck.
“Do you want to come down for breakfast?”
Was he hoping he’d be able to avoid me? “I’ll come down,” I murmured.
“Sure,” he said, and went.
A shower helped, or at least it gave me something to do, and maybe delayed going down.
He’d left so fast, shocked at what his wolf had done in the night, and I’d shamelessly buried myself in his arms. We’d have to deal with the awkwardness like adults, but yeah, I’d slowed down my shower anyway.
I stood under the water until the temperature dropped, still running on the emotional residue of the morning, the scent of Cassian slow to wash away, my cat sulking about the loss of it.
I’d cried in an alpha’s arms. I’d stolen his warmth while he slept.
I’d listened to him say another man’s name.
Raff. Of course, he’d say another man’s name—he wasn’t my alpha.
I turned my face into the water and didn’t think about it.
A sharp slice of pain across my abdomen drove the breath out of me, and I grabbed the shower rail with both hands and bent over it, waiting.
My legs were unsteady. Asha was still. The water kept running, loud against the tiles, and I hung over the rail and counted my heartbeats and told myself to wait, just wait, don’t spiral until there’s something to spiral about.
Nothing followed.
The pain didn’t build. Didn’t repeat. Eased from sharp to a dull pressure and then to nothing at all, and I stayed bent over the rail for another full minute just to be sure, my hair in my face and the water turning cold and Asha apparently unbothered, resuming her usual occupation of pushing steadily into my ribs.
“You terrified me,” I told her. “Not yet, okay?”
I turned the water off, found a towel, and stood in front of the fogged mirror while my heartbeat settled, examining my bruises.
Diagonally across my chest, from shoulder to opposite hip in shades that had moved from deep purple to yellow and were now fading.
They’d be gone soon, and the car accident would just be a memory.
“I’m not ready for you to come out yet, Asha,” I whispered to my belly.
Soon. My cat answered. I’d learned the biology from books and the detailed intake assessment at Center 14.
A cat shifter’s pelvic structure began shifting in the third trimester, cartilage loosening at the joints in a process that ran closer to mid-shift than to human anatomy, enough that birth in human form was possible, messy and hard but possible, and Asha was positioned well for it.
My body knew what it was doing even if I didn’t.
The pain was probably just a practice run.
“Not yet,” I repeated to Asha.
If it happened now, it wouldn’t be a crisis; it would be a manageable birth. They happened; shifter babies came early all the time and some of them were fine.
“I can do this,” I said, summoning every ounce of bravery and conviction I had, and I breathed until my heart rate dropped to something reasonable, and I reminded myself that the pains hadn’t come back, and I should go downstairs.
My cat was already waiting.
“I don’t want things to be awkward,” I blurted at the kitchen door before I was even properly in the room.
Cassian was at the stove with his back to me, and he was wearing sweatpants and nothing else.
He was broad, wide across the shoulders and back, and I’d been held against that chest in the dark, and it had felt like heaven.
He had a large tattoo on his back, a detailed wolf howling at the moon, with the name in block lettering. Rafferty.
Raff, my cat murmured.
A spike of jealousy and irrational despair carved into me that this beautiful, strong alpha wasn’t mine. It wasn’t fair.
He turned.
“It’s not awkward.” He lied so badly that my cat’s ears went up.
“Are you okay?” He was already moving to the table, setting down a plate of toast cut into triangles, and then went back for butter, jelly in two flavors, a jar of chocolate spread, and a dish of honey.
There was a halved orange and an apple on a separate plate, along with dried fruit, and then a pot of yogurt.
“I’m okay. I slept well.”
He bit his lip. “I heard your nightmares,” he said, not quite meeting my eyes. “My wolf knew something was wrong.”
“Instinct,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Yeah.”
Cassian ate standing at the counter while I worked through the toast in small pieces and managed most of the orange and tried not to think about what happened upstairs or the name Raff.
My cat got there first. He’d been watching Cassian since we came downstairs, quiet and attentive in a way he rarely was, ears up, processing something.
Ask him, he said.
No.
Ask him.
“You called out the name Raff in your sleep,” I blurted.
My cat was joyful; I was pissed. You’re an asshole!
“You’ve mentioned him before.” I glanced down at the clothes I wore, loose sweats I’d had to poke holes in, so they sat over my belly, and a pale lemon T-shirt with a band logo on the front.
I’d never heard of The Cheetahs, but it was a well-worn shirt.
Cassian went still for a moment with his mug halfway to his mouth. He set it down, then focused on the counter instead of me.
“He was my omega. We were bonded,” he said. “He died three years ago.”
I knew about bonds the way most people did.
They were something that happened to other people, rare enough to be almost mythological, like a male omega being able to carry a baby to term, or dragons.
One in several thousand shifters. A mate-bond was permanent, involuntary, and total, and a connection that rewrote your biology around another person.
It didn’t break when they died. It tore.
And when it tore, almost always, the surviving mate followed within months, if not days.
I’d read that the grief alone was enough. The body stopped cooperating.
“Three years ago?” I asked in case I’d misheard. After three years, how was Cassian still alive?
“Yeah.” He picked his mug back up and took a slow drink, and I had so many questions, the biggest of which was why he was still here. He sighed. “And, before you ask, what’s keeping me alive is finishing things in the house, making it ready to pass on to the Haven Network.”
“I wasn’t going to ask,” I lied. “How did he… I mean… was he ill?”
“No, he was killed.”
Compassion flooded me, and the horror of what he’d just revealed was too much to bear. “Someone killed your omega? That’s… Goddess, I’m so sorry.”
Cassian shook his head. “He was on my ORT team.”
“You had an omega working in the Omega Rescue Teams?” That didn’t make sense—omegas weren’t the big guys who could handle other alphas abusing omegas; we were the ones who needed rescuing.
“Raff could handle himself. Could read a situation faster than any of us. We used that in the team.”
“He sounds amazing,” I said, stunned at that description when I’d understood that omegas were fragile and used for menial work or imprisoned like me to bear children in advantageous contracts if it was possible.
He half smiled. “At first, he drove me insane because he was nothing like any other omega I’d ever met.
He had opinions about everything, and he never once kept them to himself, and he’d argue with me in front of the whole unit and be right every single time, which was—” He stopped.
Shook his head. “He grew on me. And then we bonded. And then—” He picked up his mug.
Looked into it. “Yeah,” he said, and didn’t finish.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and touched my belly. “If Asha is an omega, I hope she’s brave and opinionated and can be a part of something bigger for omegas. I want her to be braver than I am, for sure. Stronger.”
Cassian offered an expression that told me he had very little patience for what I’d just said.
“Heavily pregnant, no plan, no support, and somehow you got away from where a crime family put you, drove through a whiteout in the mountains, and when you wrecked the car, you crawled out of it and kept going.” He set his mug down.
“You got here. And you let a strange alpha wolf into your nest in the dark because you were hurting and you needed help, and I’ve known trained operatives who couldn’t have made that call.
” He picked his mug back up as though the conversation was finished.
“Asha is going to be exactly as brave as her father. That’s more than enough. ”
My throat closed, and I felt a swell of huge emotion.
He nodded once, as if we’d agreed on something, and went to refill the kettle. We ate in companionable silence for a while, until it occurred to me I hadn’t told him about what happened in the shower.
“You said I should tell you if anything changed.” He stopped mid-action and turned to me. “I had a contraction, and it could be pre-labor.”
“Fuck.” He said it under his breath, already crossing to the table, already picking up his phone. His hands were steady, but his expression wasn’t. He found the contact, hit dial, and pressed the phone flat on the table between us.
It rang twice.
“Cassian.” Brec’s voice, alert, unhurried.
“You’re on speaker. Soren says he’s had a contraction.”
A beat. Then: “Soren.”
“Hi Brec.”
“I’m going to ask you some questions, and some of them are going to be personal. Cassian’s there, and depending on what you tell me, he may need to be involved in what happens next. Do you feel comfortable with him still? Do I have your permission to talk with him in the room?”
I glanced at Cassian. He was looking at the table, jaw set, giving me nothing either way.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. One contraction, or more than one?”
“One.”
“How long did it last?”
“Maybe thirty seconds. Less.”
“Where did you feel it? High, low, across your back?”
I thought about the pain. “Low. Across my abdomen.”
“Any bleeding? Any fluid? Any sensation of release or wetness that wasn’t normal?”
Fuck. Maybe I needed to rethink Cassian being here to listen to this. “No.”
“Has Asha been moving normally since?”
“She kicked me a moment ago.”
“Good. That’s good.” He paused. “On a scale of one to ten, how bad was the pain?”
I thought about it. “Six. Maybe seven.” I had no concept of the pain that would be a ten but knew I’d get there before my beautiful daughter was born. “It took my breath away.”
Across the table, Cassian had gone the color of old plaster.
He’d pulled a notebook from somewhere and had it open in front of him with a pen in his hand, writing down what was said in small, even script.
His shoulders had squared, and I watched him underline something twice and felt an absurd rush of gratitude for him doing this, because I was overwhelmed.
“Okay,” Brec said. “Here’s what I think you’re dealing with.
One contraction at your advanced stage, no follow-up, no fluid, active fetal movement—that’s consistent, especially given the physical stress you’ve been under.
Your body’s recalibrating.” He paused. “That said, I want to be clear about what we’re watching for. Cassian, are you writing this down?”
“Yes,” Cassian said.
“Good. Soren, if the contractions come back and they’re three minutes apart or less, or if they last more than a minute, or if you have any fluid or bleeding, that changes everything, and we’re in a different conversation. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“How are you feeling right now? Honestly.”
I looked down at Asha, steady under my hand, and thought about the shower and the pain and the way it had eased and not come back. “Scared,” I said. “But okay.”
“That’s the right answer,” Brec said. “Cassian, the timing sheet I sent you—page four. Start logging any further contractions immediately. Duration, intensity, interval.”
Cassian was already turning pages.