Chapter 7
Ivan
Maeve’s voice was low and wrong when I woke up. It was enough that my body moved before my brain did.
I was on my feet in a second. The floor was freezing. Artem was already upright, every line of him tense. Gregor was moving, because of course he was. Maeve stood at the kitchen counter with one hand braced against it and the other pressed hard to her stomach. Her face had gone pale.
Artem reached her first. “Maeve?”
She didn’t look at him. Or me. Or Gregor. She kept staring at the counter like if she concentrated hard enough, her body might stop doing whatever it had decided to do.
“I think...” She sucked in a breath so sharp it made my own chest lock up. “I think something’s wrong.”
That landed somewhere low and ugly.
Gregor did not waste a second. “Car. Now.”
I grabbed my jacket and was out the door before Gregor finished the sentence.
The stairs blurred under my feet. The car was across the road.
I hit the unlock, got in, and started the engine with hands that were shaking from panic.
I spun the car around in the road, landing right at the curb outside of the cafe.
Gregor was already there with Maeve in his arms. That image did something violent to me.
Not because it was tender, though it was. Gregor held her like she was precious and breakable and he’d kill the street itself if it made her hurt more. But because Maeve had let him.
Her face was buried against his shoulder, one hand fisted in his jacket, breath coming in short little bursts that made every instinct in me sit up and bare my teeth.
Artem got in beside them so fast he practically teleported.
I drove.
In the back seat, Gregor kept one arm around her shoulders while Artem held her hand like if he let go something terrible might happen. Maeve was trying not to make noise, which somehow made it worse. Every tight inhale from the back seat hit me like a nail under the ribs.
“Breathe,” Artem said quietly.
“I am breathing,” she managed.
“That one sounded sarcastic,” I said.
“That’s because I’m in pain,” she snapped.
“Excellent. Sarcasm means you’re conscious.”
A tiny, furious sound came from her.
Good. I would take furious over being frightened any day of the week.
The hospital was only a ten minute drive.
Inside it was all fluorescent lights, disinfectant, and the kind of forced calm that makes you want to start a fight with a wall.
Maeve was taken through almost immediately, Artem still attached to her hand.
Gregor and I followed because there was no universe where we were leaving her alone with strangers and clipboards.
The nurse was brisk, kind, and completely unfazed by the fact that three oversized Russian men had just materialized around one very pregnant omega at an ungodly hour.
“Let’s get you checked, dear.”
Maeve nodded, wide-eyed and pale, but she didn’t argue. That scared me more than if she had. Maeve looked like someone who argued with furniture when it inconvenienced her. Silence did not suit her.
I took up position in the corner of the room because there was nowhere else to put six-foot-something panic in an NHS examination cubicle.
Machines beeped. Paper rustled.
Artem sat beside Maeve with his whole body locked tight except for one hand, which kept stroking slow circles over her knuckles like that was the only part of him still capable of movement. Gregor stood by the door with his usual expression of controlled murder, but his fists were white.
Then the doctor came in, checked Maeve over, listened, pressed, waited, and finally said, “You’re having contractions, but they’re irregular. The baby's heartbeat is strong, and you’re not dilated. It looks like Braxton Hicks. False labour. We’ll monitor you for a while to be safe.”
Maeve blinked at the ceiling.
Then she said, with the hollow dignity of a woman who had been personally betrayed by anatomy, “I would like to complain to whoever named it false labour.”
The doctor’s mouth twitched. “Would you?”
“Yes. False suggests imaginary. That was not imaginary. My uterus just staged a coup and invited an audience.”
Even Gregor smiled, tight as it was but in fairness to him it was practically jazz hands.
Artem lifted Maeve’s hand and pressed his mouth to her knuckles. “I’ll file the complaint.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Don’t kill anyone.”
“I wasn’t going to kill anybody.”
“You paused.”
“I was considering solutions.”
“That is Russian for who do I kill?”
I laughed before I could stop myself.
The sound in the room changed after that. Maeve’s shoulders came down a little. Artem looked marginally less like he was about to bite through a wall. Gregor’s stance eased by maybe half an inch, which I counted as a spiritual breakthrough.
A nurse handed Maeve a gown and asked her to change for monitoring.
Maeve nodded, but her fingers shook when she reached for the ties of her dress.
Artem stood immediately.
He didn’t make a speech about helping. Didn’t ask if she was all right every four seconds. He just stepped in and did what was needed, slow and careful, hands steady where hers weren’t.
That was the thing about Artem. People saw the suit, the money, the control, the whole impossible bratva heir package and assumed he was all forced. But he could be careful in a way that snuck up on you.
The monitoring took an hour.
An entire hour of beeps and waiting and Maeve lying still while strangers assured us everything looked good.
I aged by about twelve years in the plastic hospital chair. Artem never let go of her hand. Gregor remained by the door because I was sure he still thought she was capable of running again.
When the doctor came back smiling, I nearly kissed her on the mouth.
“Everything looks good. The contractions have stopped. The baby's happy. You’re free to go.”
Maeve let out a breath that turned into a faint laugh. “That’s it?”
“That’s it. But rest. No heavy lifting, no stress, and if it starts again, come straight back. Other than that hopefully the baby will settle until he is due.”
Maeve nodded fast enough to suggest she intended to obey exactly one half of that advice and no one would be stopping her.
“Thank you,” she said, voice wobbly now that the danger had passed and she could afford to feel it.
Artem helped her sit up, one hand at her back. “We’ll take care of her.”
The doctor looked between the four of us with professional neutrality and personal curiosity. “And who’s the father?”
Maeve opened her mouth.
Artem spoke first. “All of us.”
The doctor blinked once. Credit to her, that was the only reaction she had.
“And the husband?”
Maeve made a tired noise. “There isn’t a husband.”
“Not yet,” Artem said smoothly.
Maeve turned her head and looked at him with the exhausted disbelief of a woman too tired to fight but fully intending to remember that comment for future use.
“The NHS forms are going to need more boxes,” she muttered.
I leaned in. “We can provide supplementary documentation. And you’ll be having the baby at a private hospital. We need to decide which.”
The doctor coughed into her hand.
Maeve shut her eyes. “Of course you will. God forbid the Russian mafia would allow their child to be born in the public system.”
Our child.
That was when I knew she was ours and not just because of some fairytale nonsense where our matched scents bonded our souls after one night in Prague.
Though even then all three of us were already hers in the only way that mattered to omegas and alphas.
The ride home was quiet.
Maeve leaned into Artem with her eyes closed, looking wrung out and small in a way I did not like at all.
Gregor sat in the front beside me, one elbow near the window, gaze scanning the street as if Edinburgh might suddenly launch an ambush on the route home.
I drove like the car was made of crystal and Maeve would murder me personally if I hit a pothole.
Rain had washed the city clean. Streetlights turned the wet morning roads gold.
After a while, Maeve spoke.
“I’m sorry.”
Artem’s arm tightened around her. “For what?”
“For scaring you.”
His mouth brushed her temple. “You didn’t scare us.”
I glanced in the mirror.
He was lying, obviously. We’d all been terrified that something was wrong. But the expression on his face said he knew she didn’t need that truth handed back to her right now.
“I’m just glad we found you in time,” he finished. “And now we’re here to look after you.”
“You really are?”
“Of course, Maeve. Do you doubt us?”
She looked between us all as I neared the curb and whispered, “I just want alphas who want me.”
“We want you,” I said.
“More than you realize,” Gregor added.
“You’re ours,” Artem finished.
Her shoulders relaxed as she smiled.
When we pulled up outside the Highland Bean, Gregor was out before I’d fully stopped. He checked the street, the pavement, the stairs, the weather, possibly the structural integrity of the building. Nothing surprised me.
Artem helped Maeve out of the car.
She looked up at the dark windows of the flat. Then at us. Three men crowding the pavement around her like we could build a wall out of sheer intent.
“This is...” She blew out a breath. “A bit much.”
It was. She wasn’t wrong.
I stepped closer, keeping my voice light because she looked one strong emotion away from crying or stabbing someone. “We want you to come to London. Our home.”
Her brows lifted. “I have a cafe.”
This was an omega who ran, so gentle was the way to her heart, not our usual tactics.
“Just until the baby comes,” I said. “Then decide whatever you like. Stay. Go. Throw us all out dramatically. But let us help until then.”
It was a lie, of course. We were never letting her go.
Her gaze moved from me to Artem, to Gregor, then back again.
“Fergus is family.” No instant happily-ever-after because we had one hospital scare and suddenly understood each other perfectly.
“He is,” I added. Still not pushing.
Her gaze met mine. “I’ll think about it. I just need some space and time to think.”
“We’ll stay while you do.”
“Just in case we need to rush you to the hospital again,” Artem said as he stayed at her side on the stairs with a hand warm at her back.
“Of course,” she replied.
Gregor held the door and smiled at me as I carried the bag and hovered near her elbow in case she so much as blinked wrong.
“Home sweet home.” Maeve grabbed Fergus who was lying on the bed with his feet in the air.
The home was sweet but tiny, but if she was here so were we. Because she was never going to be alone again.