THE FABULOUS DOCTOR LUNA HE THREW AWAY?

CHAPTER 9

SERA

Baby.

The word hit me like a bullet to the chest. Clean entry. No exit. Just lodged there, buried deep, tearing through everything soft I had left.

I stared at Katya. She stared back at me with those ice blue eyes and that perfect smile, her hand resting on her flat stomach like she was cradling something precious.

Precious. Right.

The room tilted. Or maybe I tilted. I couldn't tell anymore because everything was spinning and the only thing standing still was the woman in the red dress who ruined my marriage, now standing in my ex-husband's house, pregnant with his child.

Funny how life worked. You spend years clawing yourself out of one nightmare, only to walk straight into another.

"Sera." Dimitri's voice was behind me. Tight. Strained. Like he was choking on something.

Good. I hoped he choked.

"Congratulations," I said to Katya, and my voice was so calm it scared even me. "Boy or girl?"

Katya blinked. She wasn't expecting that. She was expecting tears. Screaming. A broken woman falling apart at her feet. That was what she wanted, wasn't it? A show. A performance of my pain so she could feel like she won.

She didn't know me. She never did.

"It's too early to tell," Katya said, recovering quickly, her smile stretching wider. "But Dimitri and I are hoping for a boy. An heir. Every Alpha needs an heir."

Every word was a knife wrapped in silk. She knew exactly what she was doing. She knew about the baby I lost. The one I never got to hold. The one that bled out of me at eight weeks while Dimitri was at a meeting he couldn't cancel, because the empire always came first.

He came home to find me in the bathroom, on the floor, covered in blood. He held me and cried. That was the only time I ever saw Dimitri Volkov cry.

Three months later, he was in her bed.

"Katya." Dimitri's voice was a warning. Low and dangerous. "This is not the time."

"When is the time, darling?" She turned to him, her hand still on her stomach. "I've been calling you for days. You don't answer. You don't come home. And now I find you here with her?"

Her. She said it like my name was a disease.

"You need to leave," Dimitri said, and there was no warmth in it. No softness. Just ice.

Something flickered across Katya's face. Surprise. Then anger. Then that smooth, practiced calm that women like her wore like armor.

"I'm carrying your child, Dimitri," she said. "You can't just dismiss me."

"I said leave."

The room went quiet. Viktor stood by the door, his arms crossed, his expression completely blank. He was good at that. Years of practice, I assumed.

Katya held Dimitri's stare for a long moment. Then her eyes slid to me.

"You know," she said softly, tilting her head, "I always wondered what was so special about you. Why the great Dimitri Volkov couldn't get over his little runaway wife. But looking at you now, I see it."

She stepped closer to me. I didn't step back.

"Nothing," she whispered. "There's nothing special about you at all."

My wolf lunged.

Not physically. I didn't move. But inside my chest, my wolf, the one who had been dead for six years, the one who barely stirred, barely breathed, suddenly threw herself against my ribs so hard I gasped.

My vision sharpened. My teeth ached. My nails bit into my palms and I felt my canines press against my gums. Heat flooded through me, burning, electric, alive.

Katya's eyes went wide. She stepped back, her confidence cracking like thin ice.

She felt it. Whatever was pouring off me, she felt it. Because even though I had been suppressing my wolf for six years, even though I had been pretending to be human, my wolf was not weak. She was never weak. She was just sleeping.

And Katya just woke her up.

"Sera." Dimitri was beside me now. Not touching me, but close. His voice was different. Careful. Almost awed. "Your eyes."

I blinked. "What about my eyes?"

"They're gold."

Gold. My wolf's eyes. They hadn't turned gold since before the divorce. Since before I shut her down and locked her away.

The heat faded slowly. My canines retracted. The sharpness in my vision softened back to normal. But something was different now. Something had shifted inside me. Like a door that had been sealed shut for years had cracked open, just an inch.

My wolf was awake. And she was angry.

Katya straightened her dress, her composure back in place, but I could see her hands trembling. "Well," she said tightly. "I can see I'm not welcome. But this conversation isn't over, Dimitri. Not even close."

She turned and walked out, her heels clicking against the floor. The sound faded down the hallway.

Nobody spoke.

Viktor cleared his throat. "I'll make sure she leaves the compound."

He followed her out. The door closed. And then it was just me and Dimitri, standing in the wreckage of whatever this was.

"Is it yours?" I asked. My voice was flat. Empty.

"Sera."

"Is the baby yours, Dimitri?"

He looked at me, and I saw it. The hesitation. The fraction of a second where his mouth opened but nothing came out. Where his eyes shifted, just barely, just enough.

He didn't know.

"I don't know," he said quietly.

I laughed. That sharp, ugly laugh that came from somewhere dark. "You don't know. You don't know if you got another woman pregnant. That's perfect. That's absolutely perfect."

"It's complicated."

"It's really not." I shook my head. "You slept with her. She's pregnant. The math isn't hard."

"I ended things with her months ago. If she's pregnant, the timing doesn't add up."

"So she's lying?"

"I don't know." He said it again, and this time he looked tired. So tired. Like the weight of everything was finally crushing him.

I should have felt satisfaction. I didn't. I just felt hollow.

"This changes nothing about the Zanettis," he said after a long silence. "We still need to go to the house. We still need to find those documents."

"I know."

"Can you still do this?"

I looked at him. Really looked at him. The dark circles under his eyes. The tension in his jaw. The way his hands hung at his sides, fists clenched, like he was holding himself together through sheer force.

"I've been doing impossible things since I was twelve," I said. "One more won't kill me."

He nodded. Something passed between us. Not trust. Not yet. But something close to it.

My phone buzzed again. I looked down and froze.

A new message. Same unknown number.

But this time it wasn't a photo of the house.

It was a photo of me. Taken minutes ago. Through the window of the room I was standing in right now.

Underneath it, three words.

"Seventy-one hours left."