Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
SOREN
I woke in a panic.
I was wet through. The sheets under me were damp, and my hair was plastered to my face, and I was breathing too fast, already reaching for Cassian’s wolf. I pressed my face into his neck and breathed pine, clean air, and waited for my heartbeat to slow.
The room was dark, and my cat was awake and still, ears up, waiting. I lay there, listening to the quiet, felt the warmth of the wolf against me, and thought about nothing. The nightmare blurred and lost its edges, the way they always did when I was pressed to all that warm dark fur.
Cassian’s wolf turned his head.
Then the pain hit.
This was a fist closing around my entire lower body, hard and relentless and enormous, and it didn’t release.
It built. I made a sound that I didn’t recognize and gripped the sheets and curled forward around Asha.
The wolf was already moving, scrambling off the bed, shifting so fast I heard his bones crack.
He grabbed the sweats I’d stolen from him two days ago and pulled them on and crossed back to me in two strides. He put both hands on my face.
“Soren. Look at me.”
The pain had crested, and then very slowly it began to ease.
“My water broke… a contraction,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. “A real one.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’ve got this.”
He sat with me on the edge of the bed and timed the contractions—twelve minutes, then nine—and by the fourth contraction he’d already called Brec and had the phone on speaker between us on the mattress.
“Soren, hi,” Brec said calmly. “How far apart?”
“Eight minutes,” Cassian answered for me as he scribbled the latest time down even as I was arching with agony. He’d turned on the small lamp next to the bed, and I could see the concentration on his face. I focused hard on him and tried to breathe through the pain.
“How long are they lasting?”
“About forty-three seconds. They were shorter before. They’re getting longer.”
“Okay. That’s good information. Cassian, the most important thing right now is that Soren stays warm and hydrated, and that you keep timing. When they hit three minutes, I need you to call me back.” Another pause. “Soren. You’re doing well.”
“I’m not doing anything,” I gasped. “It’s just happening to me!”
“Yes,” Brec said. “Exactly right. Let it happen. You’re not in charge of this part.”
The call ended, and Cassian filled the water glass on the nightstand, brought a second one from the bathroom, then stood in the middle of the room and stared at me for a long moment. Something crossed his face that I couldn’t read.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. He sounded lost, and the words came out as if he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. This was the man who’d carried me through a blizzard and taken care of a stranger, and he was terrified. “I don’t want to get it wrong.”
“You could sit here with me,” I said. “Right here. That would be okay.”
He sat and offered me water, but the next contraction hit before I’d finished half the glass of water.
I bent forward and breathed through it, my fingers twisted in the blankets while Cassian stayed beside me with one hand braced to the mattress, close enough that I could feel his heat.
When it eased, I sagged back to the headboard, exhausted already.
The room suddenly felt too bright and too small, and another contraction was building deep inside me, gathering strength before the last one had faded.
“Hey.” Cassian touched my shoulder. “Stay with me.”
I saw the concern in his eyes and the determination on his face as he tried to be what I needed. But when the pain started to build again, it wasn’t the man I reached for.
It was the wolf.
“Wolf,” I whispered.
Cassian blinked. “What?”
“Wolf. Please.”
For a second, he stared at me, then understanding crossed his face. “Okay.”
He stood and crossed the room, shedding clothes. The shift came fast, the familiar crack of bone and stretch of muscle, and a heartbeat later, the huge black wolf stood beside me.
The next contraction hit as wolf-Cassian climbed carefully onto the bed beside me.
I buried both hands in thick dark fur and pressed my face to his neck.
The pain didn’t lessen, but the panic did.
He stretched out alongside me, enormous and warm, careful not to put any weight against my belly, and I curled toward him automatically.
Pine and clean air filled my lungs. The familiar scent wrapped around me, grounding me in a way nothing else could.
By the time the contraction finally broke, I was shaking. The wolf huffed softly and nudged my shoulder with his nose.
“I know,” I whispered.
His ears flicked, and I wrapped one hand tighter in his fur.
For the next hour, whenever a contraction came, I buried my face into him and rode it out while Cassian’s scent surrounded me and my cat stayed close. The contractions kept coming, closer together and harder every time, but I wasn’t facing it alone.
They weren’t regular, not in any perfect way, but they headed in one direction only—closer together, longer, harder.
At some point between contractions, he shifted back, pulled on a pair of sweats, and resumed his place beside me, but he didn’t try to talk me through them.
He didn’t say much at all. He put his hand flat on my back when it got bad and left it there, warm and steady.
Every time he left the bed, my cat tracked him.
When he crossed to the bathroom for more towels, I found myself watching the door until he came back.
It didn’t make sense. I knew where he was, but some deep instinct in me still wanted him close. His scent was everywhere in the nest, and my cat stayed. I focused on Asha, on the next contraction, and on Cassian’s hand on my back, and that was all I could do.
Sunrise began to lighten the room, and a contraction hit while I was braced on my hands and knees, lasting almost two minutes. I pressed my forehead into the headboard and bit my hand to keep from screaming.
Cassian called Brec. “Last contraction was nearly two minutes.”
“Okay.” Brec was crisp, awake, no hedging. “Cassian, you have everything you need. Trust your hands. First babies can move fast. Don’t assume you’ve got all day, and Soren, listen to your body. When you feel the urge to push, don’t fight it.”
“I know,” I said. “I know, I know, I know—”
Another one. Enormous. I rode it and rode it.
It broke over me and left me gasping, and I was already repositioning without thinking about it.
I turned toward the pale light filling the window, and the urge arrived with the next wave—total, undeniable, the most animal thing I had ever felt in my life.
“Cassian,” I said. “Now. I need to push now.”
He was there. I heard him say something brief and technical to Brec, and the phone went on speaker. Then it was just his hands and his voice, low and even, telling me what he needed from me. The light in the room was gold by then, early sun spilling across the bed and my cat was very quiet.
Waiting.
Cassian’s scent was everywhere. It had been in the nest for days, but now it was immediate—on the sheets, on the sweats pulled up around his hips, on his hands and arms—and my cat leaned into it and held on.
Three hours since the first contraction. Maybe a little more. The sun was fully up.
“One more,” Cassian said. “One more, Soren. You’ve got this.”
I pushed.
And then Asha was there.
I didn’t hear her.
The silence went on too long. I could hear Cassian working, hear Brec’s voice from the phone giving instructions in a steady murmur, and I waited, and nothing happened, and the quiet stretched, and I thought please, please, please in a loop that didn’t have words attached to it, just the simple animal fact of needing her to be here and not knowing yet if she was.
Cassian said. Fearful. Urgent, “Come on.”
Then she cried.
Outraged. Thin. Real. And something in my chest that had been clenched since Center 14 let go all at once, so hard my vision went white at the edges.
“She’s here,” Cassian said, his voice cracking. “She’s crying, Soren. She’s okay. She’s beautiful.”
One second, he was moving, listening to Brec, and doing all the practical things. Then he really looked at her, and his eyes widened in wonder.
He worked fast and sure, listening to Brec, clearing her airway, checking her over with hands that didn’t shake, wrapping her in the clean towel he’d had ready.
I heard him talking to Brec in a steady murmur, answering questions, confirming things, and I understood almost none of it because I couldn’t take my eyes off Asha.
Then he clamped the cord, talked me through the cut, guided my hand around his and held it steady, and I felt the resistance, then the give, and then it was done, and she was fully, completely free.
He cleaned me up without fuss, efficient and careful, and I sat propped against the headboard because I had no energy left. A glass pressed into my hand. “Drink,” he said, and I drank as he fussed with formula and a bottle and towels, all while holding her.
Then he put her in my arms.
Asha. Small and furious and perfect, fists still clenched against her face, smelling of me and of something new that was entirely her own.
My cat surged forward immediately, crowding close beneath my skin as though it had been waiting for this all along.
I wasn’t crying. I thought I would be, but I wasn’t.
I turned her to the bottle that Cassian passed me, and she rooted immediately, instinctive and determined.
I laughed at that—a short, broken sound—and Cassian, standing at the end of the bed, stared.
My cat pressed close and went still. Asha batted at me and made a tiny noise, and my cat purred.
Family.
I didn’t say anything. I just held her, and in the early morning light, I couldn’t look at anything else.
“Don’t forget this,” he whispered, placing Yannick’s stuffed wolf within my reach.