After His Mistress Killed Our Unborn Pup

The call came through on the eighth night, on a phone Antonio had given me before he drove away—a line only three people had the number to. I almost didn't answer it. I was elbow-deep in blue hydrangea pieces, half a border assembled on the library table, and Wilder was across from me turning a piece over and over between his fingers like he already knew where it went but wanted an excuse to sit there a little longer.

The screen said CADEN HOLT.

I stepped into the hallway before I picked up. Wilder didn't follow. He never did.

"Emberly." Caden's voice was rougher than I remembered it. "I need you to know something happened. I'm not calling to hurt you. I'm calling because you should hear it from me before it turns into pack gossip that gets it wrong."

"Okay," I said. That word again. It seemed to be all I had left for bad news.

He told it plainly, the way Betas are trained to report things—facts first, feeling stripped out, though I could hear the feeling trying to leak through anyway. He'd found the recorder under the floorboard. He'd brought it to Ledger's office and set it on the desk without a word, because there were no words that fit, and he'd left before Ledger pressed play.

"He locked the door," Caden said. "I stayed outside. I could still hear it. The walls in that place aren't as thick as everyone thinks."

I knew what was on that recording. I'd made it. I remembered the tile floor under my knees, cold enough to burn, and the sound my own voice made when I stopped trying to sound calm.

"He listened to all of it," Caden said. "Ninety-nine counts. I know because I was counting too, standing out there, waiting for him to turn it off. He didn't. Not once."

I pictured it without meaning to—Ledger alone at his desk, my voice crawling out of a small silver speaker. *Call eighty-seven. Eighty-eight. Eighty-nine.* I tried to feel something at the image of him hearing it. I reached for the place where anger should have lived, or grim satisfaction, or anything with a name.

There was only the shape of an outline. Nothing inside it.

"He checked his own call log after," Caden went on. "Forty-seven minutes at the auction. Then a receipt. Two hours, itemized. A diamond collar." A pause, like even he needed a second before saying the next part. "He went into the Luna suite after that and put his fists through the mirror. The vanity. The walls. I had to physically drag him out before he broke his own hands past healing. His wolf howled the whole time, Emberly. I've heard him angry a hundred times. This wasn't anger."

"What was it," I said. Not really a question.

"Grief," Caden said quietly. "Like something finally understood what it lost."

I leaned my head against the hallway wall and looked at the mountains through the window at the end of it, dark shapes against a darker sky, and waited to feel the old ache. It didn't come. I only felt tired, the way you feel tired reading about a stranger's accident in the news—sorry, distantly, for a life that wasn't touching yours anymore.

"There's more," Caden said. "That same night, the pack started smelling something in the halls. Honey. Lavender." His voice thinned. "Your scent, Emberly. Except you're two hundred miles away and your rooms are wrecked. He won't let the Omegas near the suite. He set you a plate at breakfast this morning. I set mine across from his and didn't say anything, because what do you say to that."

I didn't answer. There was nothing in me that reached for that image either—not tenderness, not vindication. Just distance, the kind you feel looking through a window at a room you used to live in.

"He called Mallory in and played her the recording," Caden said. "She cried on cue. Said you might have staged it. Said a grieving woman is capable of a lot." A short, humorless breath. "He didn't touch her shoulder this time. First time in fifteen years I've seen him not reach for her when she cries. Something in the way she was doing it—starting, stopping, like a faucet—I think it finally registered with him."

"And now?"

"Now she's told the whole pack she's carrying his pup," Caden said. "Blackout mating, the night of the Solstice. This morning, in front of everyone." A beat. "He didn't even blink, Emberly. He just told Seraphine to run a blood-scent verification before sundown. In front of witnesses."

I looked down the hall toward the library, where lamplight spilled soft and yellow across the floor, where a thousand pieces of sky-blue hydrangea waited half-finished on a table, where a man who had never once raised his voice at me was sitting very still, giving me exactly as much space as I needed and not one inch more.

"Thank you for telling me," I said, and I meant it, in the flat, careful way I meant most things now.

Then I hung up, and went back to the puzzle.