After His Pup Ended My Pregnancy, He Locked Me Away

I remember the stairs.

Not the fall itself — that part is gone, swallowed by the impact and whatever came after. What I remember is the moment before. The warmth of her hand at the small of my back. How light it was. How precise. Not a shove born of rage, not the wild flailing of a child who had lost control. A push. Deliberate. Measured. The kind of force that knows exactly what it is doing and does it anyway.

I remember thinking, in the half-second before my feet left the ground: she has done this before.

Then the stairs.

Then nothing.

---

I woke in the healer's wing.

The ceiling was white. The light was the flat, gray kind that comes through curtained windows in the middle of the day. I lay still for a moment, taking inventory the way you do when your body has been through something it has not yet fully reported to your brain. My shoulder ached. My hip ached. My hands were cold.

Then I understood why the room felt wrong.

It was too quiet. Not the quiet of an empty room. The quiet of a room where something has already happened and the people in it are being careful not to name it.

Sera Voss was sitting in the chair beside my bed. She had a chart open on her knee. She was not reading it. She was looking at her own hands.

I knew before I asked. I think I knew before I woke up.

"Sera."

She looked up. Her face was composed. Professional. The face she wore when she was holding something steady that did not want to be held.

"Luna," she said.

Just that. Just my title. And in the space between those two syllables I felt the answer land in my chest like a stone dropped into still water.

Gone.

The gray-green nursery. The soft paint we had chosen together. The ginger tea in the mornings. The version of this life I had let myself almost believe in. All of it, gone. My body had been emptied while I was unconscious, and I had not even been awake to say goodbye.

I pressed my thumbnail into my palm. The skin there was thick now, calloused from years of the same gesture, and it took more pressure than it used to. I pressed until I felt something give.

Sera did not look away. She did not offer comfort. She just sat with me in the quiet, and I understood that this was the only thing she could give me, and I was grateful for it.

We stayed like that for a long time.

---

Alistair came in the evening.

I heard him before I saw him — the particular weight of his footsteps in the corridor, the way the air in a room changes when an Alpha enters it, a shift in pressure that the body registers before the mind does. I had learned to read that shift the way you learn to read weather.

He stopped in the doorway.

He did not come to the bed. He did not pull a chair close. He stood with one hand on the doorframe and looked at me from across the room with an expression I had not seen on him before — not grief, not guilt, not the warmth he had shown me in the sitting room when I told him I was pregnant. Something remote. Composed. The face of a man who has already decided what this moment means and has arranged himself accordingly.

"You need to rest," he said.

I looked at him. I did not speak.

"The pack will not speak of this." His voice was even. Unhurried. The voice of a man who never needed to repeat himself. "It is a private matter."

The Alpha tone came with the last sentence. I felt it move through the room like a frequency, low and wide, passing through the walls and into the corridor beyond. I heard the soft sound of the Omegas in the hallway going still — that particular held-breath stillness of a body that has just received a command it cannot disobey. The silence sealed itself around us like something poured and set.

He looked at me for one more moment.

Then he left.

I listened to his footsteps move down the corridor. I listened to a door open somewhere. I listened to the sound of a bolt sliding home — not my door, not yet, but close enough that I understood what was coming.

Sera was still in the chair. She had not moved during any of it. Her chart was closed now, held flat against her knee with both hands.

She did not look at me.

I did not ask her to.

---

They moved me to the east wing the next morning.

Two household Omegas came with a cart for my things. They did not speak. They did not meet my eyes. They folded my clothes with the careful, mechanical efficiency of people performing a task they have been told not to think about, and they carried the boxes out, and I walked behind them down the corridor and through the east passage and into the suite at the end of the hall.

The room was fine. That was the thing. It was a perfectly fine room. Clean, well-furnished, a window with a view of the back garden. Someone had put fresh flowers on the dresser. White ones. I did not know if that was cruelty or indifference and I decided it did not matter.

The door closed behind the Omegas.

I heard the lock.

I stood in the middle of the room and looked at the window. The bars were on the outside, set into the stone, old iron painted black. They had been there a long time. This room had been used for this before.

I sat down on the edge of the bed.

The flowers were white and they smelled like nothing.

I pressed my thumbnail into my palm and I held it there and I breathed. Four in. Six out. The same count I had used at the banquet, at the pack run, at the border trail with Anya's cold hand in mine. The same count I had used my whole life when the world was doing something to me that I could not stop.

But something was different now.

The grief was there. It was enormous. It sat in the center of my chest like a weight I would be carrying for a very long time. I did not try to move it.

But underneath it — underneath the grief and the silence and the locked door and the white flowers that smelled like nothing — something else was there too.

Cold. Still. Patient.

Waiting.