My Ex Alpha Tried to Take My Babies

I set Reuben's carrier on the lodge counter at 9:02 in the morning, three years to the week since I'd last stood on Silverfang land. Maia stirred against my chest, a small fist working loose from the wrap. I didn't look around at the pines, the gate, any of it. I looked at the attendant.

She was young, human-pretty in the way trained Omegas learn to be, and she was scrolling a clipboard like it might bite her. "Ms. Mitchell. We have you down for the recovery cabin. West edge, past the kennels." She said it the way you'd read out a weather report. "Alpha Pierce's office confirmed the booking personally."

Of course he did.

"I won't be needing the cabin." I set the folio on the counter, seal-side up. The Lycan crest caught the light — silver wolf, crossed moons, ink that never faded no matter how many hands touched it. "I'll take the Luna suite."

Her eyes dropped to the seal and her whole posture changed, spine snapping straight like a hand had yanked a string behind it. "Of — of course. Right this way." She didn't ask my name again. She didn't need to.

The suite had a nursery already fitted with two cradles, moon-carved oak, older than the lodge itself. I laid the twins down and stood over them a long moment, just breathing them in — milk and cedar and something underneath that still made my chest ache, because it smelled like him.

Sena Voss came in for the wellness check an hour later. Silver-streaked, brisk, the kind of healer who's seen four decades of newborns and stopped being impressed by any of them. She leaned over Reuben's cradle with her stethoscope already out.

Then she stopped breathing.

I watched it happen in real time — the stethoscope slipping from her fingers, her knees folding, her forehead dropping nearly to the floorboards before she caught herself on one trembling hand. "Forgive me," she whispered, to the carpet, not to me.

I said nothing. I let her finish the exam with shaking hands, let her leave without meeting my eyes, and I did not explain a single thing.

Duncan's letter came that afternoon, carried by a Silverfang runner who wouldn't cross the threshold. Ethan Cole's neat handwriting, Duncan's ugly demands underneath it — present yourself at the pack house, no Crown venue, no documentation, his terms. I read it once. I filed it behind the seal in my folio and wrote back through the lodge's channel instead: neutral ground, Council protocol, my full name under Caleb's guarantee stamp. I imagined Duncan's face when it landed on his desk. I didn't have to imagine long — Ethan told me later he heard the slam through two walls.

That night I sat on the suite's window seat with the twins finally asleep and opened the bond.

*Sena dropped to her knees today,* I told Caleb. *Duncan's already trying to summon me to his territory like nothing's changed.*

His voice came low, even, but underneath it I felt his wolf pacing, a low current of contained heat. *The Guard is already on the northern road.*

*I don't need you here yet.*

A pause, long enough that I felt his jaw tighten three hundred miles away. *I know.*

The link closed. I sat with my hand flat against my throat, over his mark, until the ache in my chest went quiet.

Coraline arrived the next morning like a storm that had been building since dawn — cuffs flashing at her wrists, belly rounded under a dress too fitted for someone who wanted sympathy. She came into the common hall while I was crossing toward breakfast, Maia drowsy against my shoulder, and her voice hit the room like a slap.

"Who authorized a wolfless rogue for the Luna suite?"

The hall went dead silent. I didn't hurry. I set the tithe invoice on the table between us, the number stamped in Crown ink, more than Silverfang's whole month bled dry.

She stared at it. Snatched it. Crumpled it in one fist.

"You whored yourself out to some rogue with money," she hissed, cuffs — my mother's cuffs — catching the light as her hand shook.

I took the paper back, smoothed it flat against the table, one slow pass of my palm. I didn't say a word. I turned and walked back to my suite while the whole hall watched her stand there, trembling, until she fled for her car.

Her mind-link to Duncan lit up before she even started the engine — I could feel the frantic edge of it bleed through the air itself, sharp and cracking, the first real seam in three years of polish.