The pack healer said the words quietly, almost reverently, the way healers do when they believe they are delivering a gift.
"You're pregnant, Alina. Six weeks."
Margaret made a sound I had never heard from her before. Something between a sob and a laugh, raw and unguarded, and then her arms were around me before I could stand, her silver hair pressed against my cheek, her perfume—lavender and warm wool—filling my nose.
"Oh, my darling." Her voice broke on the second word. "Oh, surely now. Surely now he'll—"
She didn't finish. She didn't need to. We both knew what she meant.
I held her back. I let myself be held. Across the long dinner table, the candles threw their warm light over the crystal and the half-eaten solstice cake, over the faces of the pack's inner circle turned toward us with raised glasses and easy smiles.
All except one.
Giuliana's wineglass was still in her hand, but her knuckles had gone white around the stem. The tremor was small. Anyone else might have missed it. I didn't miss it. I had spent ten years learning to read this room.
She set the glass down with a careful, deliberate click.
"Excuse me," she said, soft and pleasant. "I'm not feeling well. I think I need some air."
Jameson watched her go.
I felt it the way you feel a cold draft from a door opened in another room. His attention shifted—just for a second, just a fraction—before it came back to me, back to Margaret's joy, back to the performance of the man whose mate had just announced a pregnancy.
"That's wonderful," he said. His hand covered mine on the table. His smile reached his eyes. He was very good at that.
Margaret was still talking—marking ceremony, spring timing, the east chapel—and I nodded and smiled and let her fill the silence, because I was watching Jameson's jaw.
Two minutes. Maybe three.
Then he touched a napkin to his mouth and rose. "I should check on Giuliana," he said, easy as breathing. "Peyton's away. She shouldn't be alone if she's ill."
Pack business. Always pack business.
"Of course," I said.
Margaret squeezed my hand. Someone refilled my water glass. The dinner table moved on around me, warm and oblivious, while I counted to sixty in my head.
Then I excused myself to use the restroom.
---
The underground garage smelled of cold concrete and motor oil and the particular stillness of a space that believes itself unobserved.
I didn't rush. I moved the way I always moved through the pack house—quietly, purposefully, the healer making her rounds—and I followed the thread of scent the way my nose had been trained to follow a fever through a crowded ward. Jasmine. Black orchid. Cedar and iron gone warm.
I knew where they were before I saw the SUV.
The back windows were fogged. The engine was off. I moved between two parked vehicles, close enough that the concrete pillar was cold against my shoulder, and I took my phone from my pocket.
I pressed record.
Giuliana's laugh came first. Bright and careless, the laugh of a woman who has never once considered that she might be heard.
"I still can't believe she actually thought it was natural." A pause, the soft sound of movement. "One little pinch in her herbs and the problem solved itself."
The air in my lungs turned to something solid.
*Her herbs.* My prenatal herbs. The ones I had dried and measured myself, stored in the labeled cloth pouches I kept in my healer's cabinet. The ones I had trusted because I had prepared them with my own hands.
I had not prepared all of them.
Someone had access to that cabinet. Someone who moved through the pack house as freely as I did.
Jameson's voice, when it came, was low and unbothered. The voice of a man discussing a closed account.
"I handled the healer. Report says natural causes. It's done."
*I handled the healer.*
Dara. Senior healer. The woman who had held my hand through the grief of it, who had told me these things happened, who had brought me chamomile tea and looked me in the eye without flinching.
I paid her, his voice said, without saying it. *I paid her and she looked you in the eye.*
I stood in the dark between the cars and I did not move. I did not breathe more than I had to. My wolf was absolutely silent inside me—not gone, not broken, just very, very still, the way a wolf goes still before it decides something permanent.
I recorded until there was nothing left worth recording.
Then I lowered my phone, slid it into my pocket, and walked back toward the stairs on healer's feet that made no sound at all.
My hand found my stomach in the dark.
Just once. Just briefly.
*Not this time,* I thought. *Not this one.*
I climbed back into the light.
