Chapter 3

I asked whether the baby was breathing before I asked who his mother was.

Talia looked up from the nursery chair when I came in with Elias beside me. The baby had Caelan's dark curl at the crown of his head and my healing scent caught in the blankets.

"He's stable," she said. "They said you gave him enough strength to make it through the night."

I held the rail of the crib because my legs were still unreliable.

"They said I agreed?"

Her face drained. "Caelan told me you understood. He said you were a healer. He said you'd never let a baby die because of adult mistakes."

She was right about one thing. I would not have let Milo die.

That knowledge hurt more than anger. If Caelan had asked me, I might have held out my hand myself. He had stolen even the mercy I could have chosen.

"Did he tell you we were separated?" I asked.

Talia's silence was small and immediate.

Elias opened a message thread she had forwarded from Caelan. It contained the ritual time, the name of a healer, and a line that made my stomach tighten: Rhea's gift has always belonged to the pack.

Not an emergency. A plan.

Outside the nursery, Caelan called my name.

I looked once more at Milo's sleeping face.

"Seal every blood-moon record," I told Elias. "Then tell my husband I'm not coming home with him."

Talia's eyes filled, but she did not ask me to forgive her. She only looked down at Milo and whispered that she had believed a healer's wife would be told the truth.

I believed she had.

That did not make the crib easier to look at. My scent clung to the baby like proof of a choice I had never been allowed to make.

Caelan appeared in the doorway. "Rhea, please."

I turned before he could reach me.

"If you'd asked, I might have saved him," I said. "Now I'll never know whether that yes was mine."

His face broke open then, not into absolution, but into the first shape of the consequence he had earned.