Chapter 47 Andrea
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Andrea
The hospital was bright and cold and I hated it immediately.
Finneas pulled up to a side entrance I’d never seen before, away from the main emergency doors, quieter.
A nurse was already waiting with a wheelchair.
The fourth floor, he’d said on the phone.
The private wing. Shifter staff, shifter doctors, a place where nobody would blink if the King’s eyes went gold during delivery.
I didn’t care about any of that right now.
I cared about the contraction that was ripping through me like someone had reached inside my body and squeezed.
“Oh God,” I gasped, doubling over in the wheelchair. “Oh fuck, that’s a big one.”
Finneas was beside me, one hand on my shoulder, the other on the wheelchair handle, walking so close to the nurse pushing me that the poor woman kept bumping into him.
His jaw was locked. His eyes were doing the thing, brown flickering to gold and back, and he was growling.
Actually growling, low in his chest, at every person who came within arm’s reach of me.
A nurse tried to take my arm to help me onto the bed. Finneas stepped between them.
“Don’t touch her.”
“Sir, I need to help her onto the...”
“I said don’t...”
I grabbed his collar and yanked him down to my level. It was hard to do mid-contraction but I managed through sheer fury. “If you shift in this delivery room, I will raise this child to call another man Daddy. Do you understand me?”
His eyes flickered. He swallowed hard. Stepped back.
The nurse, to her credit, didn’t even pause.
She helped me onto the bed, hooked up the monitors, checked my vitals.
Professional, calm, clearly used to dealing with Alpha wolves losing their shit in the delivery wing.
I lay back and the next contraction peaked and I gripped the bed rail so hard the metal creaked under my fingers.
A sound came out of me that wasn’t a scream or a moan but something between, raw, animal, from a place I didn’t know I had.
Finneas was beside me, holding my other hand. His eyes were still flickering gold but he was keeping the wolf down. Barely. I could see the effort in his jaw, in the cords of his neck.
“Breathe,” he said.
“Don’t tell me to breathe. I’ve been breathing my whole life. I know how breathing works.”
The door opened. Mary walked in like she owned the hospital, purse over one shoulder, coffee in hand, hair pulled back like she’d gotten dressed in sixty seconds and driven here at illegal speed.
“I did ninety-five on the highway and I’m not sorry about it,” she said. She looked at Finneas, who was hovering over me with wild eyes and a clenched jaw. “Sit down and stop scaring the nurses.”
He sat. I almost laughed. Mary was the only person besides me who could give Finneas an order and have him follow it.
She took the other side of the bed. Put her coffee down, took my hand, and said, “Okay. I’m here. Tell me everything.”
“I’m having a baby.”
“I can see that. How far apart?”
“Three minutes. Maybe less. They’re getting worse, Mary. They’re so much worse than the Braxton Hicks.”
“You’re doing great.”
“I’m in a hospital gown with my ass hanging out and I can’t feel my dignity. I’m not doing great.”
“You’re doing great,” she repeated, firmer, squeezing my hand. “You’ve got this.”
The hours blurred.
The contractions came faster, harder, the spaces between them shrinking until there were no spaces, just waves crashing into each other.
I lost track of time. Lost track of the room.
The world narrowed to the pain and the hands holding mine and the voice of the nurse telling me things I absorbed about half of because the other half was swallowed by the next contraction.
Mary stayed on one side. Talking me through each one, counting with me, wiping my forehead with a damp cloth she’d conjured from somewhere. Finneas stayed on the other. Gripping my hand back, his face white, his jaw aching from clenching. He’d stopped growling at the staff. Progress.
“Fuck,” I hissed through a contraction. “Fuck fuck fuck.”
“Breathe through it,” Mary said.
“I am breathing. Breathing doesn’t help. Nothing helps. This is hell.”
“You’re doing so good, Andrea,” Finneas said during the lull after.
“If you tell me I’m doing good one more time I’m going to break your hand.”
“You’re doing amazing?”
“Better.”
Another contraction tore through me and I grabbed the bed rail with one hand, Finneas with the other, and screamed through clenched teeth. When it passed I was panting, sweating, and a thought cut through the haze.
“Where’s Grandma? Is she coming? Did someone call her?”
“She’s on the way,” Finneas said. “Luca booked her on the first flight out. She should be here in a few hours.”
“A few hours? I don’t have a few hours. This baby is coming now.”
“She’ll be here, Andrea. I promise.”
“She better be. If she misses this I’ll...” Another contraction and I lost the end of the sentence to a scream.
“She’ll be here,” he said again, his hand tightening on mine.
Between contractions, in the brief windows where I could think, I thought about my mother.
Not the grief. Not the loss. I thought about her doing this. Lying in a hospital bed, contracting, scared, gripping my father’s hand, bringing me into the world. Was she this scared? Did it hurt this much? Did she look at the ceiling and think about her own mother and wish she was there?
I thought about the rocking chair in the nursery. Grandma’s note. Your mother rocked you in this chair.
I thought about peonies along a fence. A woman who smelled like lavender, talked to her garden, loved her family so hard it filled every room she walked into.
I started crying. Not from the pain. The pain was still there, constant, brutal, but the tears weren’t about that.
They were about wanting my mother in this room.
Wanting her sitting in the chair by the window, holding my hand, telling me she went through this too and I was going to be fine.
She should be here. She should be meeting her grandson.
She should be alive. I was about to become a mother, she wasn’t here, she was never going to be here.
The losing and the gaining crashed into each other inside my chest until I couldn’t tell them apart.
“Hey.” Finneas leaned close, his face near mine, his hand brushing hair off my forehead. “What do you need?”
“My mom,” I said, and my voice broke in half.
His face cracked. He didn’t say it was okay. Didn’t say he was sorry. Didn’t try to fix it. He just put his forehead against the side of my head and held my hand and stayed there while I cried. Mary squeezed my other hand and didn’t say anything either.
Some things just need to be held.
When the tears slowed and the next contraction was still building, I said it. The thing I’d been carrying for months and never said out loud.
“What if he’s not a shifter?”
Finneas pulled back to look at me. “What?”
“Alex. What if he’s human. Like me.” I was looking at the ceiling because I couldn’t look at his face for this.
“Your whole pack, your council, your elders. They accepted me because I’m carrying your heir.
What if he comes out and he’s just... human?
What happens then? Do they turn on us? Do you lose the pack?
Does everything we went through fall apart because our kid can’t shift? ”
“Andrea.”
“I’m serious. I’ve been thinking about it for months. Every time someone said the word heir I wanted to throw up because what if he’s not what they want? What if he’s not enough?”
Finneas took my face in his hands. His eyes were brown, solid, the wolf pushed down.
“Listen to me. I don’t care if he shifts. I don’t care if he’s Alpha, Beta, Omega, human, whatever. He’s my son. He’s ours. That’s it.”
“But the pack...”
“The pack will follow me. And if any of them have a problem with my son, they can take it up with me directly. You saw how well that worked out for George.”
I almost laughed. Almost. “You can’t fight everyone who has an opinion about our kid.”
“Watch me.”
“Finneas.”
“Andrea, I love you. I love him. Human or shifter, he’s mine. He’s ours. Nothing changes that. Not the council, not the pack, not a damn thing in this world.”
I looked at him. His hands on my face, his thumbs wiping the tears I hadn’t realized were still falling. He meant it. I could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice, feel it in his hands. He meant every word.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“If you’re not worried, I’m not worried.”
“I’m not worried.”
“Good.” Then a contraction slammed through me and I grabbed his wrist and squeezed. “Shit. Shit shit shit.”
“Breathe.”
“Stop telling me to breathe.”
Dr. Okafor came in. Checked me. Calm, efficient, a woman who’d clearly delivered hundreds of babies and didn’t rattle. “You’re at ten centimeters. It’s time to push.”
“Oh God,” I said.
“You’ve got this,” Mary said.
“I absolutely do not have this.”
I wiped my face with the back of my hand. Took a breath that shook on the way in. I looked at Finneas on one side, red-eyed, jaw set, holding my hand. Mary on the other, mascara smudged, coffee forgotten, solid. The chair by the window was empty.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s fucking do this.”
I pushed and it was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
Harder than quitting my job, harder than leaving Atlanta, harder than standing in a clearing full of wolves telling them I wasn’t going anywhere.
The pain was total, consuming, blinding.
I screamed and gripped Finneas’s hand so hard something popped in his fingers.
He didn’t flinch. “You’re incredible,” he said, close to my ear. “Keep going.”
“Shut up,” I panted. “Just shut up and let me...”
Another push. Another scream. Dr. Okafor’s voice, calm, sure, telling me I was close, telling me to push again.
“I can’t,” I gasped. “I can’t, it’s too much.”
“You can,” Finneas said. “Andrea, you can. You’re almost there.”
“I really fucking can’t.”
“One more. Give me one more.”
I pushed. Everything went white. Then sound.
A cry. Small, furious, outraged at the world.
Dr. Okafor lifted the baby and placed him on my chest. Wet, warm, screaming. The room disappeared. Everything disappeared. The hospital, the pain, the hours of labor, all of it gone. The world narrowed to this one tiny body on my skin.
I put my hands on him. He was so small. Red-faced, fists clenched, crying with everything he had. I touched his face, his fingers, the dark hair on his head that was matted and wet and already curling like his father’s.
“Hi, Alex,” I whispered. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
He stopped crying. His eyes were closed, his fist uncurled against my chest, his mouth moved, and he settled against my skin. Warm. Alive. Here. My son.
I was crying again. Happy tears, wrecked tears, every kind of tear at once. I couldn’t stop touching his face, his tiny hand, his fingers that were so small they didn’t look real.
I looked up. Finneas was standing beside the bed.
Crying. Open, unashamed, tears running down his face.
His jaw wasn’t clenched. His hands weren’t fisted.
He wasn’t holding anything back. He was looking at his son on my chest with an expression I couldn’t name at the anatomy scan but could name now.
Awe.
“He’s perfect,” Finneas said, and his voice was wrecked. “He’s a strong Alpha. I can feel it.”
“Of course he is. Look at his mother.”
He laughed through the tears. Leaned down and pressed his mouth against my forehead, then against Alex’s head, so gently, like he was afraid of breaking him. “Thank you,” he whispered against the baby’s hair. “Thank you, Andrea.”
Mary was crying on the other side. Wiping her face with her jacket sleeve and taking photos on her phone at the same time because Mary multitasked even during emotional breakdowns.
“I’m sending these to Peter,” she said, sniffling. “He’s going to lose it.”
“Mary, I look like a disaster.”
“You look like a mom. Shut up. These are going on the wall.”
An hour later the door opened and Grandma walked in.
She was still in her travel coat, suitcase handle in one hand, Luca behind her looking like he’d driven from the airport at the same speed Mary had driven from her house. She saw me holding Alex and stopped in the doorway.
Her face folded. All the composure, all the toughness, all the seventy-three years of holding everything together for everyone else, it just crumpled.
She dropped the suitcase by the door, walked to the chair by the window, the empty chair, the one where my mother should have been sitting, and sat down.
She put her hand over her mouth and cried.
I started crying again too because Grandma crying was my kryptonite and always had been.
She wiped her eyes after a minute, stood up, and came to the bed. She looked down at Alex in my arms, touched his cheek with one finger, and her chin trembled.
“He has your mother’s nose,” she said, her voice cracking.
“Same little button. She’d be raising hell right now if she were here.
Bossing the nurses around, rearranging the room, telling your young man where to stand.
” She looked at Finneas. “She would’ve liked you, by the way.
She always had a thing for the stubborn ones. ”
“Runs in the family,” Finneas said quietly.
Grandma almost smiled. She looked back at Alex. “Can I hold him?”
I passed him over carefully, this tiny warm bundle, and Grandma took him like she’d been holding babies her whole life, which she had. She settled him in the crook of her arm, her travel coat still on, her suitcase still by the door, tears still wet on her face.
“Hello, Alexander,” she said softly. “I’m your great-grandmother. I flew first class to meet you, so you better be worth it.” She pressed her lips against his forehead. “You are. You absolutely are.”
I looked at her. At Grandma in the chair with Alex in her arms, looking at him the way she must have looked at me when I was born, the way my mother must have looked at me.
At Finneas beside the bed, eyes red, watching them.
At Mary taking photos through smudged mascara.
At Luca hovering in the doorway trying to look casual and failing completely, his eyes suspiciously bright.
The room was full. Full of people who showed up. Not because of duty or tradition or pack law. Because they loved me. Because they chose to be here, in this room, for this.
I pressed my face against Alex’s head and breathed him in. He smelled like nothing I could compare because he was new and mine and here.
“Welcome to the family, kid,” I whispered. “It’s a weird one. But it’s yours.”