I Was Pregnant When His Real Luna Returned

The pack run was announced at dinner the night before, and I spent the hours between then and dawn lying awake in Sabrina's borrowed sheets, staring at the ceiling and trying to remember the last time I'd shifted in front of anyone.

I couldn't. I never had. Omega wolves didn't run with the pack. We stayed behind and made ourselves useful in other ways.

But I wasn't Omega here. Here I was Sabrina Moore, daughter of an Alpha, future Luna. So when the knock came at my door before sunrise, I got up.

The forest behind the pack house was old-growth, the kind of trees that have been standing long enough to have opinions. The whole pack gathered at the tree line in the grey pre-dawn light — Deltas, Gammas, ranked wolves whose auras pressed against mine like a physical weight. I stood near the back and kept my breathing even.

Enzo was already at the front. He hadn't looked at me yet.

The shift moved through the pack like a wave. One moment there were people, and then there were wolves — massive, powerful, the kind of animals that remind you the human shape is just a courtesy. The Gamma's wolf was slate-grey and enormous. Damien's was black with a white chest, precise and watchful even in animal form.

I shifted.

My wolf is smaller than the ranked wolves. She always has been. Amber fur, which I've always thought was a little embarrassing — too warm, too visible, nothing like the dark or grey coats that signal power in a pack like this. She shook herself once, getting her bearings, and I felt her take in the forest, the pack, the overwhelming cedar-and-rain scent that meant Enzo was close.

She went very still.

I braced for the moment someone noticed. For the glances, the assessment, the quiet recalibration of expectations.

Then Enzo shifted.

I had thought he was unsettling in human form. His wolf was something else entirely. Massive and dark-furred, almost black, with the kind of presence that made the air around him feel different. Every wolf in the pack oriented toward him without seeming to mean to, the way iron filings find a magnet.

He moved to the front of the group. And then, without any apparent reason, he turned and walked back through the assembled wolves until he was beside me.

Not in front. Not behind. Beside.

His shoulder was level with the top of my head. He glanced down at me once — those dark eyes, even in wolf form, still measuring — and then he faced forward.

No one said anything. No one could, in this form. But I felt the shift in attention, the quick flicker of glances from the wolves nearest to us, and then the deliberate way they looked away again.

When the run started, he matched my pace exactly.

Not slowing down to accommodate me. Not pulling ahead and circling back. Just — running beside me, stride for stride, through the dark between the trees as the sky went from grey to pale gold above the canopy.

My wolf stopped whining. She ran.

I let her. For a little while, I stopped thinking about Sabrina's name and Sabrina's documents and the mate bond pulling at my ribs, and I just ran through the Ironveil forest at dawn with a massive dark wolf at my shoulder who moved like he had nowhere else to be.

It was the most dangerous twenty minutes of my entire stay.

---

Petra found me on a Wednesday.

I was coming out of the laundry room — domestic, invisible, exactly where an Omega instinct tells you to be — when she stepped into the corridor and blocked it with the particular ease of someone who has never had to wonder if they have the right.

She was Delta-ranked, older than me by maybe ten years, with the kind of face that had decided a long time ago it wasn't going to be warm. She looked me over the way you look at a document you suspect has been altered.

"Sabrina." Not a greeting. A test.

"Petra." I'd memorized the pack roster. Small mercies.

"I heard you were in the Crescentwood warrior training program." She tilted her head. "Third cohort, wasn't it? My cousin ran the assessments that year. She mentioned you."

She hadn't. There was no cousin. I could hear it in the slight pause before *mentioned*, the way she watched my face for the flinch.

I kept my expression easy. "She must have a good memory."

"She said you were fast." Petra's eyes didn't move. "Said you had a temper in the sparring ring."

Sabrina did have a temper. That part was probably true. But I had no idea what the Crescentwood warrior program looked like from the inside, and Petra knew it, and we both knew she knew it.

"I've mellowed," I said.

She held my gaze for another beat. Then she stepped aside and let me pass.

I didn't look back. I walked to the end of the corridor, turned the corner, and stood against the wall with my eyes closed for ten seconds.

That evening, I heard Damien's voice outside Enzo's office. Low, careful, the tone of a Beta delivering information he's not sure how to frame. I couldn't make out the words. I didn't need to.

I pressed my fingertips together and waited.

Nothing happened. No summons, no confrontation, no cold-eyed Alpha appearing in my doorway with Sabrina's documents in his hand. Just silence, and then the sound of Enzo's office door opening and closing, and footsteps moving away down the hall.

I didn't sleep well that night.

---

The library was the one place in the pack house where I forgot to be careful.

It was late — past midnight, the building quiet in the way large buildings get quiet when everyone with somewhere to be has gone there. I had the brief open on my laptop, a book cover concept half-built in layers, and I was so deep in it that I didn't hear the door.

I heard him.

Not a sound, exactly. More like a change in the quality of the air — that cedar-and-rain scent, and the particular stillness that meant Enzo had stopped moving and was watching something.

I looked up.

He was in the doorway. Jacket off, sleeves pushed up, the kind of late-night version of himself that the rest of the pack probably never saw. He was looking at my screen.

I shut the laptop.

The sound was too loud in the quiet room. We both heard it.

He didn't say anything about the design. He crossed to the desk, set a glass of water down beside my elbow — not in front of me, beside me, like he'd thought about where it would be least intrusive — and straightened.

"You should sleep."

That was all. He left.

I sat in the empty library with the glass of water and the closed laptop and the ghost of cedar-and-rain in the air, and my wolf was so insufferably, embarrassingly pleased that I had to press both hands flat on the desk just to stay grounded.

He'd seen the design. He hadn't said a word about it. He'd just brought me water and told me to rest, like my being awake at midnight was something that concerned him.

I stared at the closed door for a long time.

Then I opened the laptop again, because it was the only thing in my life that was entirely mine, and I needed to remember what that felt like before the warmth in my chest convinced me I was allowed to want more.