The Alpha's Accidental Heir

Chapter 5

I stared at her, waiting for the rest of the sentence to make sense, the way you wait for a word on the tip of your tongue.

"What do you mean it wasn't the donor I chose?" My voice came out strange, too calm for what my chest was doing underneath it. "Nora, what does that mean?"

"There were two deliveries that morning. Yours, and a private donation from a high-profile client." She wouldn't quite meet my eyes. "The vials got mislabeled at intake. One of my nurses grabbed the wrong one during prep, and I... I didn't check closely enough before the procedure. I trusted the label."

The room tilted slightly. "So whose..." I couldn't even finish the question.

"Logan Vance's," she said. "The billionaire I mentioned. That's... Clara, that's the sample you were given."

I thought of the iron gate. The dark eyes that had tracked me down the sidewalk four days ago, like he was cataloguing something about me he couldn't name. I've seen you with the children before. I felt suddenly, sickeningly certain that it hadn't been coincidence at all. Some part of him, some instinct I didn't understand yet, had already sensed something my own body hadn't confirmed to me.

"Nora, I don't understand. How is that even possible? Doesn't the clinic have protocols? Safeguards?"

"We do. They failed. I don't have a better answer than that, and I am so, so sorry." Her voice broke on the last word, and I saw, underneath her fear for me, a deeper fear for herself: for her career, her license, everything she'd built since the two of us had promised each other, at fourteen years old in a shared bunk bed, that we would make something of ourselves no matter where we'd started. "I could lose my job over this. I could lose everything. But that's not, Clara, that's not even the part I need you to understand right now."

"There's more?"

Nora hesitated, and in that hesitation I felt the floor of my whole life shift another inch beneath me.

"Logan Vance isn't just a businessman," she said carefully. "He's a shifter. A werewolf. And not just any werewolf. He's an Alpha, running a campaign to become supreme Alpha King over every pack on this coast."

I laughed. I couldn't help it, a short, disbelieving bark of a sound, because it was simply too much, too far outside anything I understood about the world, to sit inside my chest alongside everything else that had happened in the past two weeks. "Nora, werewolves aren't real."

"They are." Her face didn't change, didn't crack into a smile to tell me she was joking. "They've always lived alongside us, mostly quiet about it, mostly kept separate from human affairs by choice. I've worked in fertility medicine for six years, Clara. I've treated shifters before. It's not common knowledge, but it's not some secret either, not if you know where to look."

I sat very still, trying to fold this new, impossible fact into a world that had already broken twice in the last two weeks. "So the baby... if I'm pregnant..."

"Would be half shifter," Nora finished quietly. "Which is not a small thing, Clara. Not to him, and not to his pack."

My phone buzzed on the table between us: the reminder I'd set ten days ago for the test I was supposed to take this morning. I stared at it like it belonged to someone else's life.

"I still need to know," I said finally. "Whatever the truth is. I need to know if I'm pregnant."

Nora nodded, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, and reached for the test kit she must have already set out on the counter, anticipating this exact moment. I took it into her bathroom with shaking hands, and the two minutes that followed were the longest of my entire life.

When I came back out, I didn't have to say anything. Nora read it in my face before I even opened my mouth.

"Positive," I whispered.

For one single, perfect second, before anything else in the world existed, before Logan Vance, before packs and politics and everything about to come crashing down on me, I let myself feel nothing but joy. Pure, uncomplicated joy, the kind I'd been chasing since I was old enough to know I wanted it.

Then Nora's face, still pale, still frightened, pulled me back into the reality waiting on the other side of that joy.

"Clara," she said gently. "We need to get you to an ultrasound. Today. I need to see how far along you actually are, and there's something else I have to tell you about shifter pregnancies that you're not going to want to hear."

"What?"

"They don't develop like human ones," she said. "They're faster. Much faster. If this happened when I think it did, you might already be showing signs most humans wouldn't have for weeks yet."

I pressed a hand flat against my stomach, that same instinctive gesture I'd made on the exam table ten days ago, except now it carried an entirely different weight.

"Okay," I said, my voice steadier than I felt. "Then let's go find out exactly what I'm carrying."

I had no idea, walking out of Nora's apartment that morning, that I was about to meet Logan Vance for the second time in five days, and that this time, there would be no iron gate between us to keep his fury at a distance.