Pregnant for the Alpha and Vampire

Furia scrubbed the kitchen floor on her hands and knees with a brush that had worn down to nothing, and the ache in her back had become something she could no longer ignore. She had been tired for weeks now, months maybe, a heaviness in her bones that sleep could not fix and food could not cure, and she had told herself it was nothing, just the long days and the early mornings and the endless work that Lady Marguerite piled on her shoulders. She was fine, she was just tired, and she was fine. Marta stepped over her to reach the stove and did not spill a drop of the water she was carrying, which was a small miracle given how wide she was and how little space Furia had left her. The cook looked down at her with an expression that was half sympathy and half exasperation, and she shook her head and went back to her pots without saying a word. Furia kept scrubbing because the floor was clean enough to eat from now but Lady Marguerite would find something wrong with it, she always found something wrong with it, and Furia had learned that doing the work twice was easier than explaining why she had done it once. The dining room was bright when she entered, the morning light cutting across the long table where Lady Marguerite sat with her hands folded and her eyes fixed on the door. Celeste sat beside her stepmother, blonde and perfect in a dress that cost more than everything Furia owned, and Rhys sat across from them with his head down and his hands in his lap. Lord Theron was at the head of the table reading a letter, and he did not look up when Furia took her seat. She had been eating at this table for a month now, ever since Lady Marguerite decided that the kitchen was too good for her and she needed to remember her place among the family. It was not kindness that brought her here, Furia knew that, it was control, a way of keeping her close and keeping her watched and keeping her exactly where her stepmother wanted her. Lady Marguerite’s eyes moved over Furia’s face, slow and deliberate, and Furia felt the weight of them like fingers pressing into her skin. Her stepmother had been looking at her like that for weeks now, studying her the way she studied a piece of fabric before she decided whether to cut it or throw it away, and Furia did not know what she was looking for but she had learned not to ask. “You are pale,” Lady Marguerite said, and her voice was flat. “I am fine,” Furia said, and she kept her eyes on her plate. Celeste laughed, a small sharp sound that cut through the morning quiet. “She is always pale, and she always looks like she is about to fall over, and it is embarrassing to sit at the same table with her.” Rhys looked up, and his jaw tightened, but he said nothing. Lord Theron set down his letter and looked at Furia for the first time, his face cold and distant, the face of a man who had decided long ago that his bastard daughter was an inconvenience he had learned to tolerate. “Eat,” he said. “The seamstress comes tomorrow, and you will need your strength to stand still and be measured.” Furia ate, the bread dry and difficult to swallow past the nausea that had been following her for weeks, and she kept her hands steady and her face neutral because showing weakness at this table was like showing blood in a room full of wolves. She had not been hit in a month because her father had put a stop to it when Celeste came of age and the Claiming Night moved onto the horizon, and he made it clear to Lady Marguerite and anyone else who might listen that his daughters would go to the ritual unmarked. Bruises meant questions, and questions meant the lords might look elsewhere, and Lord Theron had spent eighteen years building something with his bastard daughter and he would not see it ruined by a stray hand. Furia was grateful for that, in the hollow way that she was grateful for any small mercy, but she knew it was not mercy at all, it was business, and business could change at any moment. Lady Marguerite sent her to the market after breakfast with a list of things she needed written in her precise hand, and Furia took the list and the coins and walked through the yard and out into the streets of Thornhaven with her heart beating too fast. She had been planning this for days, waiting for the right moment, for a task that would take her past the chemist’s shop without raising suspicion. The nausea had not stopped, the exhaustion had not faded, and she needed to know why, needed someone to tell her that it was nothing, that she was just tired, that the sickness would pass and she would be herself again. The market square was crowded when she arrived, and she moved through the stalls with her head down and her shoulders hunched, collecting the things on her list one by one. Thread from Pell, who squinted at her and asked if she was sleeping, and salt from the merchant at the corner, and a small pot of honey from the woman who kept bees at the edge of town. She left her basket with a woman who sold candles, someone she had traded nods with for months and who took the basket without asking questions, and then she walked toward the chemist’s shop before she could talk herself out of it. The chemist’s shop sat at the edge of the square, its green door half-hidden behind a cart of vegetables, and Furia slipped inside. The bell chimed overhead, and an old man looked up from behind the counter with his hands covered in something dark and his eyes sharp as flint. He was old, older than anyone in Thornhaven remembered, with skin like cracked leather and a face that had seen too much to be surprised by anything. “I need you to look at me,” she said, closing the door behind her. “I have been sick every morning for some time, and I am tired all the time, and I cannot keep food down. I thought it was just the work, the long days, but it is not stopping.” He looked at her for a long moment, and then he walked around the counter and guided her to a chair by the window. He pressed his fingers to her wrist and his eyes went distant, and she watched his face shift from concentration to something heavier, something that looked almost like recognition. He asked her questions in a low voice, when the sickness had started, how long it lasted, whether she had felt any pain or swelling or changes she could not explain. She answered each question honestly, and she watched his face, and she hoped he would tell her it was nothing, a sickness of the blood, an imbalance that could be fixed with herbs and rest, something that would let her pick up her basket and go home and tell herself she had been worried for nothing. He released her wrist and sat back, and his face was the color of ash. “You are not sick,” he said. She stared at him. “Then what is it?” He was quiet for a long moment, and then he reached into his apron and pulled out a small glass vial filled with dark liquid and set it on the table beside her. “You are with child,” he said. “Three months, maybe a little more.” Her face contorted.