I Was Pregnant When His Real Luna Returned

I almost missed it.

Enzo reached over without looking at me, without breaking the conversation he was having with Damien, and straightened the collar of my cloak. One hand, two seconds, completely automatic — the way you'd adjust something that belonged to you.

I went very still.

Around us, the pack was assembling for the gathering in the main courtyard. Ranked wolves, Deltas, the Gamma's unit forming up near the east wall. I watched, in my peripheral vision, the three unmated males nearest to us take a single, synchronized step backward. Not dramatic. Not obvious. Just — back. Like something had been communicated that I hadn't heard.

Enzo finished his sentence to Damien and moved forward to take his place at the front.

I stood there with my cloak sitting perfectly straight on my shoulders and my wolf so quiet inside me that for a moment I thought something was wrong. Then I realized she wasn't distressed. She was just — still. The way you go still when something you've been waiting for finally arrives and you don't want to move in case it leaves.

I spent the rest of the gathering staring at the middle distance and trying very hard not to think about how warm his hands had been.

It didn't work.

---

I found the clinic by accident, three weeks ago. A small place on the edge of Millhaven, the human town twenty minutes from Ironveil, tucked between a pharmacy and a dry cleaner with a sign so modest you'd miss it if you weren't looking. I'd driven past it twice before I stopped.

I gave them a false name. Sarah. Sarah Collins. The receptionist didn't look up.

The examination room was small and very white and smelled like antiseptic and something faintly floral, and I sat on the edge of the table with my hands in my lap and waited for the healer to tell me what my body had been trying to tell me for days.

Four weeks.

She said it gently, the way people say things they've learned to deliver carefully. I nodded like I'd expected it, which I had, and then I sat there after she left the room and pressed my hand flat against my stomach and felt two things at exactly the same time.

Joy. The kind that comes up from somewhere so deep it frightens you, fierce and immediate and completely irrational given everything — the false name, the borrowed identity, the mate bond I had no right to. It was there before I could stop it, warm and absolute, and it had nothing to do with logic.

And terror. The kind that empties you out from the inside, that takes everything you've been carefully not thinking about and lays it out in front of you all at once. The documents with Sabrina's name. The pack that thought I was someone else. The Alpha who had touched my cloak this morning like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I sat in that white room for a long time.

On the drive back to Ironveil, I made a decision.

I was going to tell him. All of it. My real name, the pregnancy, the night my parents handed me Sabrina's luggage and told me to be someone else. I was going to walk into his office and I was going to tell him the truth and whatever happened after that — whatever he decided, whatever it cost me — at least it would be real. At least it would be mine.

I rehearsed it the whole way back. The words, the order, the part where I said *I'm not Sabrina* and watched his face change. I rehearsed it until it felt almost possible.

I was still rehearsing it when I walked through the front door of the pack house.

---

I heard her before I saw her.

That voice — bright and carrying and completely at ease with the space it occupied, the way Sabrina had always been at ease with every space she walked into. I stopped in the entrance hall doorway and my brain took a moment to catch up with what my eyes were seeing.

Sabrina. Standing in the foyer with her luggage piled behind her — three bags, the expensive ones, the ones our mother had bought her for the trip she'd refused to take. She was talking, her voice filling the room the way it always had, something about *her rightful place* and *the arrangement* and *what she was owed*.

Enzo was in front of her.

His hands were on her shoulders.

From where I stood, in the doorway, with the light coming from behind them — it looked like a reunion. It looked like two people who had been waiting for each other. His head was bent slightly toward hers, the posture close and private, and Sabrina's face was turned up toward him with that particular expression she wore when she was getting exactly what she wanted.

My wolf made a sound I had never heard from her before. Not a howl. Something worse — a low, broken thing, like something tearing.

Every insecurity I had ever carried detonated at once.

Of course. Of course this was how it ended. I had walked into a life that was never mine, wearing a name that wasn't mine, and I had let myself feel things I had no right to feel, and now the real Sabrina was back and Enzo's hands were on her shoulders and the universe was simply correcting its own mistake.

I had always been the substitute. I had just forgotten, for a little while, to remember that.

I pressed my fingertips together. Hard. The familiar pressure, the old anchor.

I turned around.

I walked back through the front door, down the steps, across the gravel drive. I didn't run. Running would have meant something was wrong, and I needed, more than anything, for nothing to look wrong. I needed to be invisible one more time. I was very good at invisible.

The evening air was cool against my face. The pack house lights were warm behind me.

I kept walking.

I did not tell anyone about the pup.