I Left the Pack Carrying His Twins · Rhea Wolfe

Chapter 2: The Man in the Front Office

I have run three codes in one shift. I have held a man's femoral artery closed with two fingers in the back of a moving ambulance.

Nothing has ever felt like walking into that front office.

He was sitting in one of the little plastic chairs meant for parents, which put his knees somewhere around his chin, and he stood up when the door opened, and five years fell on me all at once.

Not Roan.

Not Roan — and the relief and the disappointment arrived in the same half-second, which tells you everything about how well I'd handled the last five years.

"Sella." Tomas Vale had his brother's build and none of his stillness. He'd been the beta at Cross Creek since he was twenty-two and he'd taught me to drive on the north road when I was sixteen. "Hi."

"Where's my son?"

"Reading room, down the hall. He's fine. He shifted back inside of ten seconds, which, frankly—" He shook his head. "Ten seconds, Sel. At five. I've seen grown wolves lose an hour."

"What did you tell them?"

"Border collie."

"What?"

"There's a border collie that's been getting into the yard all month, it's on their own incident log, I checked before I opened my mouth." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Three second-graders, one loose dog, and a nurse who did not see it herself. It'll hold. It won't hold twice."

I sat down. My legs made the decision for me.

"How did you find us?"

"I wasn't looking for you." He said it fast, almost apologetic. "That's the part you're going to hate. I'm here on a records job — we've been checking every school district in a four-state radius for kids testing out of the human range on the state physicals. Grip strength, resting heart rate, thermal. Marcus started the program two years ago."

The floor went cold under me.

"Marcus is screening for wolf children."

"Marcus is screening for Vale children." Tomas's mouth twisted. "There's been a bounty out of the eastern packs for three years for anything carrying that bloodline. He says he's protecting them. I've stopped believing anything he says by the second sentence."

"And you found Kade."

"I found a five-year-old with a resting pulse of forty-four and a name that would ring a bell in any room in Cross Creek." He met my eyes. "You put his father's surname on the school form, Sella."

"I put it on one form." My voice went up and I brought it back down. "Emergency medical. Because if my son ever gets brought into an ER unconscious and somebody types 'Marsh' into a national system, no wolf physician anywhere would know what they were looking at, and human protocols would kill him with the first dose of anesthetic. It was a medical decision."

"I know," Tomas said quietly. "You always were the smartest person in that valley. That's why it took the program two years to find you instead of two weeks."

Down the hall, a door opened, and small footsteps came at a dead run, and my son hit me at the hip like a cannonball.

Tomas looked at him.

I watched him do the arithmetic. Five, going on six. Cross Creek. Blood Moon.

I watched his face change, and I knew that the last five years were over.

"Sel," he said, and his voice had gone rough. "There's two names on this school's roster with a Vale on the form."

* * *

That night, after they were both asleep, I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher and made Tomas Vale tell me everything.

"He doesn't know," I said first. "Say it back to me."

"He doesn't know." Tomas had a cup of my terrible instant coffee and hadn't touched it. "About the twins, no. About the rest? He's known for two years and it's eaten a hole in him."

"What rest?"

Tomas set the cup down.

"The treaty was fake," he said.

The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere on the street below, someone's car alarm went off and stopped.

"Say that again."

"The Ironbrook treaty. The one that required a Luna the northern packs would accept, the one that made you incompatible with the security of the pack." He recited the phrase with real hatred. "Ironbrook never asked for a mating clause. Not once, not in any draft. Marcus wrote it into the version he read to the council, and he was the only man in the room who'd seen the actual document, because he'd been running the negotiation alone for eight months."

"Why?" It came out as almost nothing.

"Because a Luna outranks a regent. Because if Roan mates a nineteen-year-old omega who happens to have a spine, Marcus Vale is out of the chair inside a year." Tomas turned the cup a slow half-circle on the table. "And because your mother's line has an old land claim on the west valley that nobody's dared file in forty years, and it comes to whoever holds Cross Creek's Luna seat."

I put my head back against the dishwasher and looked at my ceiling, at the water stain shaped like Portugal that I'd been meaning to call the landlord about since March.

"He signed the rejection anyway," I said. "He believed the treaty was real, and he still stood in that room and said I wasn't compatible, and when I asked him to tell me why, he said nothing."

"Yes," Tomas said. "He did."

"So don't tell me it was Marcus. Marcus lied. Roan chose."

"I'm not making an excuse for him." Tomas's jaw set. "I'm giving you a fact, and here's the other one: when he found out about the treaty two years ago, he tore that valley up looking for you. Six months. Private investigators, three states, every hospital registry he could pay his way into." He looked up. "You had already changed your last name on everything that mattered. He never found a thread."

"Good."

"Sella—"

"Good," I said, and my voice cracked straight down the middle, and I hated it. "Do you know what it is to be nineteen and pregnant with twins on a bus with two suitcases? Do you know what I was doing in month six, Tomas? Night shifts on my feet at a diner with my ankles the size of grapefruits, because pack medical was in clause four of the paper they made me sign. He can be sorry. He can be sorry for the rest of his life. He does not get to be sorry at me now that it's convenient."

Tomas was quiet for a while.

"That's fair," he said at last. "Every word of it's fair. Now let me tell you the part that isn't about anyone's feelings."

He took out his phone, opened a photo, and turned it around on the kitchen table.

A screen capture of a database entry. A state physical results table, a student ID, and two rows highlighted in yellow: K. VALE, M, 5 and N. VALE, F, 5.

At the top of the screen, a header bar I didn't recognize.

"That's not our system," Tomas said. "That's the screening contractor's. I pulled this an hour before I drove to that school." He tapped the corner of the screen, where a small timestamp sat beside a name.

Flagged for review — 09:14 — M. VALE.

"Marcus flagged your children this morning," he said. "Six hours before I found them. Which means I'm not the first one who knows, Sel. I'm the second."