Chapter 3

I did not sleep that night.

I lay beside Dorian and counted each time he turned in his sleep. When the room went still, I slid the phone into the lining of my coat, found the door with my fingertips, and left before Moira could bring the morning tea.

I almost made it.

At dawn I was on the stairs, one hand on the cold iron rail. The rails in an Alpha’s house are lined with silver so no angry wolf can shift and run. I used to think that was simply how Alpha houses were built. Now I knew it was a cage, and I had lived in it for three years.

“Going somewhere?”

Celeste stood three steps below me. She slid one bare foot across the stair in front of me and waited for a blind woman to fall.

The old me would have. But my wolf tracked her foot before I did.

“Celeste?” I said softly, looking past her shoulder. “Is someone there?”

I stepped forward, let myself tip, and then turned at the last second. I grabbed the rail and drove my shoulder into her.

Celeste went down four steps. Her ankle cracked. Her scream tore through the pack-link so the whole house heard it twice.

Dorian came fast. He scooped her up like glass.

“Elara. What did you do?”

“I couldn’t see her,” I said, letting my voice shake.

“Kneel.”

The Alpha command hit me. My wolf locked her legs beneath me. For one breath, I stood under Dorian’s command and felt it slide over my skin without finding a place to land.

His eyes narrowed.

So I let myself fall. I dropped to my knees and made it look like the command had done it.

“See?” he said, stroking Celeste’s hair. “She still knows her place.” Then he looked at me with cold disgust. “You are useless to me. I should have gotten rid of you three years ago.”

He shoved me.

One hand to my shoulder. An Alpha’s strength behind it. I fell backward. The edge of a step caught hard across my stomach.

For one second there was no pain. Then the tiny silver thread binding my wolf to my baby’s pulled tight, frayed, and went dark.

The pain came after. Blood warmed my legs.

“Dorian,” I whispered. “Something’s wrong. I’m bleeding. Please.”

He had already turned away. Celeste smiled down at me over his shoulder as he carried her from the house.

At the hospital, a human doctor told me gently that I had been pregnant. The fall had caused too much bleeding. There was nothing anyone could have done.

There was. Someone could have chosen not to do it.

While I signed the forms, voices opened inside my head. My pack-link, silent for three years, had returned with my wolf.

Celeste first: “She’s bleeding. She might run.”

Then Dorian, bored and certain: “Let her run. She won’t get far. Tell Moira to double the dose. By the next moon, I want to stand under that altar and forget she ever existed.”

He had spoken his own death sentence into the mind of the woman he buried.

I opened the number I had never dared to call—the one belonging to Alpha Ronan Vale, Dorian’s oldest rival and the man Dorian blamed for every border defeat.

I sent four words.

I’m awake. Help.