The nausea came at dawn on the ninth day.
I had felt it circling for a week — a low queasy tide I had blamed on the silver cuffs, on the stew Blaire kept sending down, on grief. Grief did strange things to a body. I knew that. But when I woke that morning with my mouth full of salt and my hand pressed flat against the low curve of my belly before my mind had caught up, I understood what Edna's silence over my ribs had meant. What her three-finger question had really been asking.
I was carrying his pup.
I sat up against the cold wall. The silver cuffs pulled at the raw skin of my wrists. I did not cry. I had stopped crying somewhere around the fourth night, and my body had not offered me tears since.
Instead, I did the math.
A pup born in Omega quarters would be marked from the first breath. Blaire would know within a week — she scented the pack like a hunter — and Oliver would receive the news through the bond whether he wanted it or not. And Oliver, who had walked past me in the corridor without turning his head, would decide what happened to the child the way he had decided what happened to me. By doing nothing. By letting Blaire decide for him.
I pressed my fingertips to my wrist under the cuff. One. Two. Three.
On the fourth beat, the calculus rewrote itself.
I was leaving.
---
The planning began that same hour.
I lay on my side facing the door and mapped the guards the way I had once mapped rogue patrols. Marcus checked the lock twice at every shift change — 6:00, noon, 6:00 again, midnight. The older Delta on the opposite rotation dozed between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m., his breathing shifting to the slow whistle of true sleep. The corridor torch nearest my door guttered in a draft that came from somewhere east, low along the floor. Edna's drainage gap.
I catalogued the wolves I could still call on. Mira, the Gamma's mate, whose son I had pulled through a fever last winter. Jonas, the perimeter warden whose sister I had stitched back together after a rogue skirmish two years ago. Small debts, most of them. But debts.
I needed to see the healer's wing. I needed to time the walk — how many stairs, how many doors, which corridor emptied when.
I waited until Marcus's shift and pressed my palm to my lower belly and made my voice small.
"I need Edna," I said through the door. "Something is wrong."
He hesitated. I heard him shift.
"Please."
The request went up the chain. It came back down two hours later as permission — grudging, escorted, timed. Blaire, someone had told him, did not want me left alone with the healer for long.
Good. Blaire had a schedule. Schedules could be read.
---
They took me up at midday.
I kept my head down and my steps small. I counted. Twelve steps from the cell to the stone stairs. Twenty-four stairs up to the ground floor. Forty-one paces along the west corridor to the healer's wing. A servant's door halfway down that opened onto the kitchen garden. A second door beyond that led to the perimeter path.
Edna received me with a professional neutrality I recognized as protection. She examined me in front of Marcus, murmured about strain and low iron, pressed a fresh vial into my palm under cover of adjusting my sleeve. Her eyes said everything her mouth would not.
*Soon,* her eyes said. *Soon, child.*
I nodded once. She turned away.
Marcus walked me back to the stairs.
Blaire was waiting on the upper landing.
She had timed it perfectly. Of course she had. Thornecrest wolves trained for ambush, and she had spent years learning the shape of my day. She stood centered on the top step in a pale grey dress, one hand braced against the banister, blocking the descent.
"Give us a moment," she said to Marcus, without looking at him.
He glanced at me. I gave him the smallest nod I could manage. He stepped back down the corridor, out of sight but not out of earshot.
Blaire tilted her head.
"You've been busy," she said. "Asking for the healer. Asking for herbs." She lifted one finger to her throat and traced the bite mark there, slow and deliberate, the way another woman might trace a necklace. "Poor thing. Are you unwell?"
I did not answer.
She stepped closer. The Alpha command still sat cold in my throat but I did not need words for what my face was doing.
"He moaned my name last night," she said softly. "Twice. I thought you'd want to know. The bond must have carried some of it — did it? Did you feel him?" Her smile widened by a degree. "I hope you did."
My hand moved without permission to the low curve of my belly.
She saw it.
Her eyes dropped. Held. Rose again, and something ugly and delighted opened behind them.
"Oh," she breathed. "*Oh.* Look at you."
My stomach turned to water.
"Tell me," she murmured, leaning in, "where do you plan to have it? In the Omega cell? On the stone floor? Or in the gutter, where packless mutts drop their litters?"
I moved to push past her.
I got one step. My shoulder brushed hers. I felt her weight shift — not away, toward — and her hand came up flat against my collarbone and pushed.
It was not a large push. It did not need to be.
My heel caught the edge of the top stair. The banister slipped past my fingers. For one long, weightless heartbeat I saw Blaire's face above me — calm, focused, watching — and then the stone came up.
My shoulder hit first. Then my hip. Then my belly, hard, against the corner of a step.
Something inside me tore.
The world went white.