After His Pup Ended My Pregnancy, He Locked Me Away

Brynn's office smelled like cedar oil and old authority. She was behind her desk when I knocked, already looking at the door like she had been expecting an interruption she did not want.

I told her what happened. All of it. The trail, the border, the shove, the snare jaw waiting in the moss six inches from my face. I kept my voice level. I had practiced level my whole life.

Brynn listened with her hands folded on the desk and her face arranged into something that was not quite patience and not quite contempt. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, "She's a child, Luna. Perhaps you should watch your step."

No cruelty in it. That was the thing. There was no heat, no malice, nothing I could push back against. It was just a door, closing. Politely. Firmly. The way you close a door on a room you have no intention of returning to.

I stood there for another second. I looked at her face and understood something I had been circling for weeks without letting myself land on it.

I was alone in this house.

Not lonely. Alone. There is a difference. Lonely is something you feel. Alone is something you know.

"Thank you, Gamma," I said.

I walked back to the Luna suite. I did not cry. I sat on the edge of the bed and added Brynn's name to the map I was building in my head — the one with the doors and the locks and the exits and now, the people. The ones who would not help. The ones who had already chosen.

Her name went in the same column as Alistair's.

I pressed my thumbnail into my palm and held it there until the feeling passed.

---

Three weeks later, Sera Voss confirmed what I already suspected.

I sat in the healer's wing with my hands in my lap and listened to her tell me I was pregnant, and for one moment — one genuine, unguarded, completely unstrategic moment — I felt something crack open in my chest that was not grief.

It was hope. Real hope. The kind I had not felt since the banquet.

An heir. Alistair needed an heir. Every Alpha needed an heir. And I was carrying one, which meant I was not just a Luna in name, not just a body installed in a suite with empty hangers. I was necessary. I was the thing the whole arrangement required.

I told him that evening.

He was in the sitting room off the main hall, reading, and when I said the words his face changed in a way I had not seen before. He set the book down. He crossed the room and took my face in both hands and looked at me like I had given him something he had been waiting for.

"Ellie," he said. Just my name. But warm. Entirely warm.

He was attentive after that. He brought me ginger tea in the mornings when the nausea was bad. He rearranged his schedule to walk with me in the evenings. He sat with me while I looked at paint colors for the nursery and he had opinions, real ones, and he laughed when I said the pale yellow looked like old mustard and he agreed and we chose a soft gray-green instead.

Anya's provocations stopped.

The pack shifted around me. Ranked wolves who had nodded politely before now held doors, asked after my health, brought small gifts to the suite. The household Omegas moved differently in my presence — not with the careful neutrality of before, but with something closer to deference.

I let myself feel it. I let myself plan the nursery. I let myself imagine a version of this life that was real.

I was not stupid. I knew what I was doing. I was choosing, deliberately, to believe — because the alternative was to sit in the gray-green nursery and understand that none of it was real, and I was not ready for that yet. I needed a few weeks of almost.

I took the almost. I held it carefully. I did not press too hard.

---

But I kept watching.

That was the thing about being a wolfless Omega who had spent twenty-two years invisible. You learn to watch. You learn to file things away without reacting to them, because reacting costs you and filing costs nothing.

I started noticing Anya differently.

Not the things she did to me — I had been cataloguing those for months. The smaller things. The things that did not fit.

Her voice, for instance.

She had a child's voice. High and slightly plaintive, the kind that made adults soften without meaning to. But sometimes, when she thought the room was empty, when she was talking to herself or to the small gray cat that lived in the kitchen garden, the voice dropped. Just slightly. Just enough. It went lower and flatter and it had a texture in it that no child's voice has — the texture of someone who has been performing for a very long time and has let their face go slack for a moment.

I heard it twice. I did not react either time.

Her hands, too.

She was small. Everything about her was small. But when she reached for something on a high shelf — a book, a jar, a glass — her arm moved with a reach that was not a child's reach. There was no stretch in it, no tiptoe, no the effortful extension of a small body trying to bridge a gap. Her arm simply extended to where the object was, with the practiced ease of a body that knew exactly how far it could go.

I watched her take a jar of honey off the top kitchen shelf one morning. She did not look up to find it. She did not feel for it. She reached back and her hand closed around it without searching.

I was standing in the doorway. She did not see me.

I went back to the Luna suite and sat with that for a long time.

The third thing was the way she looked at my belly.

Children look at pregnant women with curiosity, sometimes shyness, sometimes the slightly alarmed fascination of a person who has not yet decided what they think about bodies doing things bodies do. Anya looked at my growing belly the way you look at a problem you have been given time to solve. Still. Calculating. Her eyes moving over me with a patience that had nothing childlike in it at all.

I caught her doing it at dinner one evening. She looked up and found me watching her.

She smiled. The child's smile. Wide eyes, soft mouth, the performance of innocence so practiced it was almost perfect.

Almost.

I smiled back.

I pressed my thumbnail into my palm under the table and I filed it away with everything else, and I thought about the map I was building, and I thought about how much more I still needed to know before I was ready to use it.