They let me rest through the night after the ceremony, and it was Killian who came for me the next morning, quiet in a way that felt protective rather than distant.
“Our father wants to see you,” he said outside a door I hadn’t been through yet.
“He’s been waiting a long time for this. Longer than you know.”
I didn’t know how to meet a father.
I’d grown up without one, raised in a pack orphanage that had never felt like more than a place to sleep.
I had no memory to measure this against.
The man inside stood the moment I entered, and everything in the room went very still around him.
Roman was older than I’d pictured, silver threading through dark hair, his eyes the exact pale gray I saw in the mirror every day of my life.
“Maeve.” My name in his voice sounded different than it had from anyone else.
“I’ve looked for you for twenty-six years.”
“I didn’t know I was lost.” My voice came out rough.
“I thought I was just an orphan.”
“There was never a day we stopped.” He told me the rest slowly, sitting across from me while I absorbed it — a war before I was a year old, my mother running with me toward a safehouse when our territory was breached, caught by rogues taking advantage of the chaos.
She’d fought them long enough for me to be found, hidden, safe, and lost all at once — found by the wrong people, renamed, raised somewhere no search party ever thought to look.
“She died protecting me,” I said, testing the shape of the words.
“She loved you before you could even understand what love was.” Roman’s voice broke.
“Your brothers carried this too. We built a life around the space you left. It was never a life without you in it. It was a life waiting for you to come back.”
I didn’t know I was crying until I felt it on my face, and once I started I couldn’t stop — twenty-six years of believing I was unwanted breaking apart all at once in front of a man I’d known for less than ten minutes.
The door opened, and Killian, Bastian, and Lucian filed in, drawn by something none of them could fully explain, and within moments I was surrounded by all four of them at once.
For the first time in my life, I understood what it felt like to belong somewhere without having to earn it first.
The relief of it was so enormous that my vision started to blur at the edges, the room tilting even though I was already sitting down.
“Maeve?” Roman’s voice, sharp with concern.
“Maeve, look at me.”
The room went dark before I could answer him.
I woke to Vera’s hands checking my pulse, Roman’s voice tight with worry somewhere close by.
“She’s waking up,” Vera said, and the room came into focus slowly.
Roman sat beside the bed, his face drawn with exhaustion. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Killian stood near the window, arms crossed, watching me with an intensity that made my chest tighten before I understood why.
“What happened?” My throat was dry.
“You collapsed,” Roman said.
“Yesterday. Your body finally gave out.”
“There’s something else,” Vera said.
“Something we found while running tests to understand why.”
My stomach dropped before she said it.
“You’re pregnant, Maeve.”
The room held still.
“That’s not possible,” I said automatically, though I was already counting backward, already finding the answer I didn’t want.
“I was only ever with—”
“Darius,” Killian said quietly, his voice gone flat in a way that scared me more than anger would have.
Twenty-four hours ago I’d learned I had a family who’d never stopped looking for me.
Now I was being told I was carrying a child fathered by the man who’d rejected me in front of that same family’s future pack.
“How far along?” My voice barely worked.
“Early,” Vera said.
“A few weeks. Before the rejection ceremony.”
“He doesn’t know,” I said.
“He rejected me before either of us could have known.”
“That doesn’t change what he did to you.” Roman’s voice had lost all its gentleness.
What replaced it was cold, controlled fury.
“He humiliated you in front of his entire pack. He let you be sent away weakened and injured, and he let you walk into rogue territory alone, pregnant with his child, without a single person to protect you.”
“He didn’t know about the blood.” I wasn’t sure why I still felt the need to defend him.
“He knew enough.” Killian’s voice was quiet, dangerous underneath the quiet.
“He knew you were begging in front of his entire pack and he pushed you down anyway. Ignorance of one detail doesn’t erase everything else he chose to do.”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
Some old, worn part of me still wanted to defend him.
A larger, more exhausted part of me understood Killian was right, and that I was tired of making excuses for a man who’d let two women beat me on the floor of his own hall.
“What happens now?” I asked, because it felt safer than examining any of that further.
“Now you rest,” Roman said, though the fury hadn’t left his eyes.
“You have a family who will protect you and this child. That part isn’t in question.”
“And Darius? Hellfang? Astra?” This story is hosted at g.com.
Roman exchanged a look with Killian, wordless and grim.
“What was done to you will not go unanswered,” Roman said carefully.
“Not by this family.”
“I don’t want revenge.” My voice shook.
“I just want to be safe. I want this baby to be safe.”
“Then let us handle the rest,” Killian said.
“You don’t have to want revenge for us to want it on your behalf.”
I looked between them and understood, with a strange mixture of comfort and unease, that I had just watched a family decide Hellfang was going to answer for what happened to me, whether I asked them to or not.
Vera checked my pulse once more, satisfied.
“All of you, out. She’s had enough for one day.”
Roman squeezed my hand before he left.
Killian lingered at the door.
“You’re safe here,” he said.
“Whatever else happens. That part isn’t going to change.”
Then I was alone, carrying a child I hadn’t known existed an hour ago, surrounded by more family than I’d had in my entire life, and still, somehow, more uncertain than I’d ever felt.
I pressed my hand against my stomach, testing the strange new reality of it.
Grief for the mate who’d never really been mine to keep.
Fear of what carrying his child inside a pack preparing for war against him might mean.
And underneath all of it, something small and fragile I almost didn’t recognize, because it had been absent from my life for so long.
Safety.
Not perfect.
Not simple.
I hadn’t even finished the thought before the door opened again, too fast, no knock.
“Alpha.” One of the border patrol, still breathing hard from running.
“You need to see this. Hellfang scouts. Two of them, at the northern line, asking questions about a woman who came through here on foot four days ago.”
The room went cold all over again.
Whatever peace I’d found in the last twenty minutes had just run out.
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