“She’s on the way,” Finneas said. “Luca booked her on the first flight out. She should be here in a few hours.”
“A few hours? I don’t have a few hours. This baby is coming now.”
“She’ll be here, Andrea. I promise.”
“She better be. If she misses this I’ll...” Another contraction and I lost the end of the sentence to a scream.
“She’ll be here,” he said again, his hand tightening on mine.
Between contractions, in the brief windows where I could think, I thought about my mother.
Not the grief. Not the loss. I thought about her doing this. Lying in a hospital bed, contracting, scared, gripping my father’s hand, bringing me into the world. Was she this scared? Did it hurt this much? Did she look at the ceiling and think about her own mother and wish she was there?
I thought about the rocking chair in the nursery. Grandma’s note.Your mother rocked you in this chair.
I thought about peonies along a fence. A woman who smelled like lavender, talked to her garden, loved her family so hard it filled every room she walked into.
I started crying. Not from the pain. The pain was still there, constant, brutal, but the tears weren’t about that. They were about wanting my mother in this room. Wanting her sitting in the chair by the window, holding my hand, telling me she wentthrough this too and I was going to be fine. She should be here. She should be meeting her grandson. She should be alive. I was about to become a mother, she wasn’t here, she was never going to be here. The losing and the gaining crashed into each other inside my chest until I couldn’t tell them apart.
“Hey.” Finneas leaned close, his face near mine, his hand brushing hair off my forehead. “What do you need?”
“My mom,” I said, and my voice broke in half.
His face cracked. He didn’t say it was okay. Didn’t say he was sorry. Didn’t try to fix it. He just put his forehead against the side of my head and held my hand and stayed there while I cried. Mary squeezed my other hand and didn’t say anything either.
Some things just need to be held.
When the tears slowed and the next contraction was still building, I said it. The thing I’d been carrying for months and never said out loud.
“What if he’s not a shifter?”
Finneas pulled back to look at me. “What?”
“Alex. What if he’s human. Like me.” I was looking at the ceiling because I couldn’t look at his face for this. “Your whole pack, your council, your elders. They accepted me because I’m carrying your heir. What if he comes out and he’s just... human? What happens then? Do they turn on us? Do you lose the pack? Does everything we went through fall apart because our kid can’t shift?”
“Andrea.”
“I’m serious. I’ve been thinking about it for months. Every time someone said the word heir I wanted to throw up because what if he’s not what they want? What if he’s not enough?”
Finneas took my face in his hands. His eyes were brown, solid, the wolf pushed down.
“Listen to me. I don’t care if he shifts. I don’t care if he’s Alpha, Beta, Omega, human, whatever. He’s my son. He’s ours. That’s it.”
“But the pack...”
“The pack will follow me. And if any of them have a problem with my son, they can take it up with me directly. You saw how well that worked out for George.”
I almost laughed. Almost. “You can’t fight everyone who has an opinion about our kid.”
“Watch me.”
“Finneas.”
“Andrea, I love you. I love him. Human or shifter, he’s mine. He’s ours. Nothing changes that. Not the council, not the pack, not a damn thing in this world.”
I looked at him. His hands on my face, his thumbs wiping the tears I hadn’t realized were still falling. He meant it. I could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice, feel it in his hands. He meant every word.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
