The clearing settled. Andrea walked back to Luca’s second. Her hands were shaking. I could see them from across the clearing, the tremor she’d hidden while she was speaking now visible inthe way she pressed them against her belly. She’d been terrified the entire time. She did it anyway.
George stepped forward from his side. Conrad’s hand left his shoulder. The crowd parted between us.
This was it.
I walked to the center and every step was heavier than the last. I was walking away from Andrea. Away from the belly where my son was kicking, toward a fight that could leave her standing in this clearing without me. The bond pulled in my chest with every foot of distance between us.
I passed her on the way. She was standing where she’d spoken, hand on her belly, face tight, green eyes bright with tears she was refusing to let fall.
I stopped in front of her.
“Go stand with Luca,” I said.
“I know.”
“I love you.”
She reached up and touched my jaw, her fingers cold against my skin. “I know. Go.”
I held her gaze for one more second. The green of her eyes, the set of her jaw, the dimple that wasn’t showing because she wasn’t smiling. Then I turned and walked to the center of the clearing and didn’t look back.
George was waiting. Young, coiled, breathing hard through his nose, jaw locked. I met his eyes. He held them. Either brave or stupid and I was about to find out which.
I thought about Andrea’s voice carrying across the clearing. Brennan bowing. The baby kicking under her hands. The yellow nursery. The reading nook. The Post-It in my jacket pocket. All of it behind me. All of it depending on what happened next.
I shifted.
The wolf took over, massive, black, amber-eyed. The world sharpened, colors flattening, scents exploding, every sound amplified. I could smell George’s fear underneath his adrenaline. I could smell Andrea’s perfume from thirty feet away, coconut and something floral, the scent that meant home.
George shifted across from me. Gray wolf, smaller, leaner, hackles raised, lips pulled back over teeth.
Two wolves in the center of the clearing. Hundreds watching. Andrea at the edge with her hand on her belly and Luca beside her.
The gray wolf snarled.
I was still.
45
— • —
Andrea
I couldn’t feel my hands.
I was standing at the edge of the clearing with Luca beside me, his body angled between me and the crowd, and my hand was on my belly but I couldn’t feel it because every nerve in my body was focused on the two wolves in the center of the clearing.
George was gray, lean, moving in tight circles, teeth bared. He was snarling, low and continuous, the sound vibrating through the ground under my feet.
Finneas was still.
Massive, coal-black, amber eyes locked on George with a focus that made the air feel heavy. He wasn’t circling. Wasn’t posturing. Wasn’t making a sound. Just standing there,watching, the way he watched everything, patient and lethal and completely in control.
Alex hadn’t moved in ten minutes. I was choosing to believe that was solidarity and not distress.
George lunged first.
My hand tightened on my belly so hard my knuckles ached. The gray wolf launched across the clearing, fast, a blur of muscle and teeth, and Finneas sidestepped. Just sidestepped, casual, like a man stepping out of the path of a bicycle, except the bicycle was a hundred-and-something-pound wolf with its jaws aimed at his throat. George’s teeth snapped shut on empty air and his momentum carried him past.
