After My Alpha Murdered Our Unborn Daughter

The shift did not ask my permission.

My spine kept cracking. My ribs kept spreading. I heard sounds coming out of me that I did not know a throat could make, low and long and not human and not the wolf I had waited seven years to meet. This was something else. Something older. My fingers dug into the frozen dirt and the dirt gave way like snow.

And then I heard footsteps.

Boots. Two sets. Coming down the ridge slow and deliberate, not the way rogues moved, not the way pack warriors moved when they were finishing a job. I tried to lift my head. I could not. My skull felt like it belonged to someone twice my size. My eyes rolled toward the sound and I saw only pines and dark and a shape moving through them.

The first man stopped ten feet from me.

He did not speak. He lifted his face to the wind and he scented me. Once. His shoulders went rigid. Twice. His hand, half raised toward the wolf at his shoulder, froze in the air. A third time. Slow, careful, like a man testing ice.

Then the sound he made.

I have never heard a grown wolf make a sound like that. It was not a howl. It was not a word. It was the noise a chest makes when something inside it that has been held for a very long time finally lets go.

"Sire," the second man said, quiet. "Sire, wait—"

The first man was already moving.

He did not run. He walked. Straight to me, straight through whatever perimeter his own instincts should have kept, and he went down on one knee in the dirt in front of me like the dirt did not matter. I saw his face for one moment before my vision went white at the edges. Older than Elias. Sharper. Something in the cheekbones and the mouth I could not place. His eyes were the color mine were, and I had never seen that color in another person's face in my whole life.

He did not touch me.

He put his hand flat on the ground between us, palm down, the way you show a frightened animal you are not a threat. He stayed there. His breath came out of him hard and uneven, and I saw his throat work like he was trying to speak and could not.

"It's you," he said finally. Just that. In a voice I did not recognize but which my bones did, and something inside the enormous unfolding thing that was becoming me went very still to listen. "It's you. It's you."

My body kept shifting.

I felt fur come in along my spine, silver-white in the corner of my eye, and the man in front of me did not flinch. He kept his hand on the ground. He kept his eyes on my face. When my jaw locked and reshaped, he closed his own eyes for a second like something hurt him, and when he opened them again they were wet.

The second man moved forward carefully. Tall. Broad. A scar down one side of his neck.

"My King," he said, and his voice was low and controlled, "the escort is a half-mile out. I can have them here in—"

"No one else," the first man said, and he did not raise his voice, but every leaf on the ground near me trembled. "Marcus. No one else touches her until she is finished."

"Yes, Sire."

I wanted to ask who he was. I wanted to ask what he meant, it's you, what did he mean it's you, he did not know me, no one knew me, I was Camilla Bennett, disgraced Omega, and my mate had just killed my pup on a stone floor in front of two hundred witnesses.

My mouth would not open around human words.

Something enormous inside me pushed the last of the shift through, and the world went white.

I do not know how long the black lasted.

I came up in pieces. A ceiling I did not know. White light through a curtain. A hand pressing something cool to my forehead and a woman's voice saying, low and urgent, "the wolfsbane is still active in her liver, we need another twelve hours before—" and then black again.

A warm weight over my hand. Fingers, threaded through mine. Bigger than mine. Callused across the knuckles. I could not open my eyes. I could not move my mouth. But I felt the fingers there and I felt them tighten, once, when my breathing hitched, and then loosen again to let me sleep.

A voice outside a door. "He hasn't moved, Marcus. He hasn't eaten. It has been all night."

"Leave him."

Black again.

A smell reached me somewhere in the dark. Not the man's. Something else. Cedar and something clean, like the air after rain. It came in under the door of wherever I was and it went straight down through the middle of me and my wolf—my wolf, my new massive silent wolf—turned toward it in her sleep and made a sound I did not have a word for.

I did not know what it meant.

I did not have the strength to wonder.

Somewhere very far away I felt a hand still holding mine, and I felt the loss of my daughter open up under me again like a floor giving way, and I fell down into it and let the dark take me for the third day.