Chapter 1
Maeve
I tapped the credit card against the table as I stared at the pretty cot on my laptop, hoping a magical discount would appear on the screen, and drop the price by a few hundred quid out of sympathy.
"Don’t judge me," I said to Fergus, who watched me from the foot of the bed. "I gave you a home."
Fergus blinked slowly, which felt pointed.
I’d found him on the doorstep of the bookshop-cafe I worked at, the Highland Bean, three months ago. He was shaking like a tiny, furious dishcloth, and desperate for food and a friend.
I’d needed the latter badly enough to overlook having a dog and the long-term implications.
Fergus was a tiny Yorkshire Terrier who weighed approximately three pounds, most of which was hair and attitude.
Luckily, he wasn’t any bigger, because there was barely enough room for the two of us to exist in this flat without filing a formal complaint against each other.
The flat in question had only one bedroom and was above the coffee shop.
I used the term "bedroom" loosely, but that was how the landlord described it.
It had one room, and there was a bed in it.
But the bed touched two of the four walls; the third wall led to the tiny bathroom, and an alcove which had a kitchenette.
The fourth wall was where I’d built an IKEA unit with gritted teeth, a lot of hope, and a sprinkle of violence. Above the unit was a shelf that tilted to the left. I made sure not to put anything round on that, but it was strong enough to hold my library books.
Below me, the coffee machines of the Highland Bean hummed their morning warm-up. That sound was now mine. I’d used the last of my bank balance to buy the lease, and now I had a lease I could barely afford, but I did because I had a stubbornness that even Presley had called "medically concerning."
I didn’t care. I had a business. I had a home. And I now had Fergus who, it turned out, didn’t have a home. I did check before I kept him. He was a terror, and based on his current posture, was planning to eat the toe of my slipper.
I tapped the card on the counter again.
Fergus’s gaze dropped to the slipper at his paws, then back to me and the card.
“No,” I said, pointing at him. “This is not food. It is poor judgment, but that’s different.”
He tilted his head as if he disagreed before he dipped his head again, sinking his teeth into my slipper.
"Fergus. I said no." I stood up to stop him, but the thing about being eight and a half months pregnant is that nobody tells you the waddle is involuntary.
I’d been telling myself it was a choice.
A power move, even. I was simply taking up more space in the world, as one should.
But the truth was, my center of gravity had relocated to somewhere around my kneecaps, and my body had decided the best way to transport itself from the bed to the kettle was a side-to-side lurching motion that made me look like a penguin having a crisis of faith.
Fergus just looked at me, his paw on the slipper..
"Fergus, that is the only pair I own that still fits my feet.”
I’m sure he smirked before his teeth sank into the slipper, and with all the might he could find, he shook it as if he thought it was alive and he had to kill it.
I groaned as I sat back down on the bed. My back ached, reminding me that the human spine was not, in fact, designed to carry a bowling ball at the front. And my baby felt like a number sixteen.
The little… darling kicked. It wasn’t a polite little flutter. It was a full-on, studs-in, someone-call-the-referee kick that connected directly with my ribcage and made me gasp.
"Brilliant," I wheezed. "You’re going to be a footballer. Or a cage fighter. Or one of those people who kicks down doors for a living. What are they called? Firefighters.” He kicked again. “Yes, you’re going to be a firefighter."
The baby kicked once more, probably letting me know he was sick of being in there too.
My phone buzzed on the pillow. I already knew who it was without looking. I picked it up.
"How are you?" Presley asked before I’d finished saying hello.
"Everything is fine."
"Maeve."
"Everything is mostly fine." She’d worked out I had lied to her about being a successful bookshop-cafe owner. Take away the word successful, and the lie wasn’t so bad. Truth was, I was lucky to break even after my lease costs were paid.
"Maeve Porter."
"Oh, she’s using my full name." At least the name I’d told her I was called. I glanced at my dog. “That’s how you know it’s serious, Fergus.”
Fergus was too busy destroying my slipper to care.
Presley lived with her pack and children in Kensington. She had more than one room to move around in, and a sofa that didn’t have springs poking through the left cushion. Her pack had built her a tiny cottage in the garden that was bigger than the place I called home. She had it all.
"How’s the shop?" she asked.
"Thriving."
"Is 'thriving' the word you use when you mean 'breaking even on a good day and hemorrhaging money on a bad one'?"
"Thriving is the word I prefer to use when I don’t want to talk about money, Pres."
"And the baby?"
I looked down. The bump was extraordinary. I’d always been slim, so the pregnancy had nowhere to hide. It just... announced itself. “I look like I’ve shoplifted a watermelon and was hoping no one would notice.”
Presley laughed. “It won’t be long now. Are you prepared? I sent a little something in the post.”
I looked around my room. “I’m fully prepared.”
“Are you sure? You sound…”
"I’m fine. The baby is perfect," I said. Something warm moved through my chest. That part wasn’t a lie. "Though he is currently trying to relocate my liver with his feet, but otherwise perfect."
"And you? How are you?"
This was Presley. She knew there was something wrong, so she asked the same question in a different way. And that question landed in the room like a rock thrown through glass.
How was I?
I was eight and a half months pregnant. Alone, unless you counted a tiny dog with a slipper fetish.
Luckily, he was otherwise cheap to feed.
I was running a coffee shop in a city where I knew nobody, under a name that wasn’t quite mine, with a scent I’d buried so deep under sprays that even I sometimes forgot what I really smelled like.
My bank account was dwindling away, and I had a cot catalog open on my laptop.
But I did have a black credit card that had been burning a hole through the lining of my coat pocket for nine months.
"I'm grand," I said. My Irish accent came through thick. The word "grand" covers everything from "mildly content" to "actively on fire." It was the most versatile word in the English language and possibly the most dishonest. Obviously, depending on one’s tone.
"Maeve, I need to tell you something."
I closed my eyes.
Presley now had the tone. Though hers was gentle, and almost too careful, in an I’m-about-to-drop-something-heavy-and-I-need-you-to-listen tone.
I knew it well. She’d used it when she told me my brothers had found her in London and asked my whereabouts. She’d used it when I admitted I’d been claimed by an alpha who hated me, and I needed to have my bond dissolved.
"Don’t you think you should find the baby’s father?" she asked.
My hand went to my stomach. "Pres."
"Call the bar in Prague. They might go there all the time."
"Which means they might have lots of babies being born. I’m fine."
“Or perhaps they’re looking for you.”
The image of Gregor, six foot four of silent Russian muscle in a gray suit, standing in Edinburgh Waverley looking at the arrivals board, almost made me laugh.
Almost. Because I left my life in Ireland to get away from mafia men, and the moment I knew Artem, Ivan, and Gregor were Russian Bratva, I had to flee.
"It was a few nights that I needed in Prague, Pres. That’s all."
“But you can’t get pregnant outside of a heat, Maeve. Not unless—”
“They’re not my mates, Presley. I must have been in heat and didn’t know about it.”
“You’d know.”
I thought the pain was phantom, and the need for them to share me, was too. I knew the slick running down my leg was real but I never believed it was them. Not until I saw the two pink lines did I realize it was a true heat.
“Then maybe it was the bond severing. Perhaps it made my body weird.”
Silence on the other end.
Presley thinks I’m lying to myself, but she loves me too much to say so.
"You could come to London," Presley said, voice low. "You know my pack would protect you from whatever you’re running from. We can help you. You don’t have to do this alone."
"I'm not alone. I have Fergus."
Fergus chose that moment to growl at the wind as it rattled against the single pane of glass that kept this room warm.
"Fergus is a miniature Yorkshire Terrier, Maeve."
"And he’s very brave."
“You said he barked at a bin lorry yesterday,” Presley said.
“He’s suspicious about everything.”
“It was collecting the rubbish.”
“Exactly. Men have been doing that for years and we still don’t trust most of them.”
Presley went quiet for a second, then laughed softly. Not because it was especially funny, but because she knew what I was doing. Taking the sharp thing and putting a ribbon on it. Making it smaller before it could swallow me.
“You always do that,” she said.
“What?”
“Make me laugh when I’m trying to worry about you.”
“That’s called efficiency. You get emotional range and entertainment. Some people pay extra for that.”
“Maeve.”
“Presley.”
“You know being funny doesn’t mean you’re fine.”
The words landed with annoying accuracy.
I looked at Fergus, who was now glaring at the window as if the wind owed him money. “No, but it does mean I’m not boring, and I think we can all agree that’s important in a crisis.”
“You’re doing it again. You’re hiding. Yes, you’re in a city now and not in a caravan park, but you’re still—”
“I’m surviving, Presley. Being a single mother will be easy compared to what I’ve been through.”
“I’m coming to visit.”