The Alpha's Accidental Heir

Chapter 6

The ultrasound room felt colder than I remembered from ten days before, though I knew that was just fear talking. Nora moved quickly, quietly, prepping the machine with hands that weren't quite steady, glancing at the door every few seconds like she expected trouble to walk through it.

"Lie back," she said. "This will feel cold."

I did, lifting my shirt, watching the ceiling tiles instead of the screen because I didn't trust myself not to cry the second I saw anything at all. The gel was cold. The wand pressed gently against my stomach, and a moment later, a sound filled the room: quick, steady, unmistakably alive.

A heartbeat.

"There it is," Nora breathed, and despite everything, despite the fear still written all over her face, something soft and genuine broke through for just a second. "There's your baby, Clara."

I started crying before I even saw the screen, the sound of that heartbeat undoing something in my chest that had been wound too tight for two straight weeks. When I finally looked, I saw only a small, indistinct shape, nothing that looked like a baby yet, but Nora's professional gaze was already narrowing on details I couldn't read.

"That's strange," she murmured, more to herself than to me, leaning closer to the monitor. "Clara, this is measuring... this shouldn't be possible at ten days."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean whatever's in there is developing faster than it should be. Much faster." Her frown deepened, and I watched real fear creep back into her expression, the same fear from her apartment kitchen an hour earlier. "This isn't just fast for a human pregnancy. This is fast even for what I understand about shifter gestation, and I don't have enough experience with it to know if that's dangerous or just... different."

"Different how? Nora, you're scaring me again."

She opened her mouth to answer, and that was the exact moment the exam room door slammed open hard enough to bounce off the wall behind it.

Logan Vance filled the doorway like he'd been carved to fit it, dark eyes blazing, jaw set in a hard line that made every soft, fragile feeling in the room evaporate at once. I yanked my shirt down instinctively, gel and all, my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my throat.

"What is the meaning of this?" His voice was low, controlled, and somehow that made it more frightening than shouting would have been.

"Mr. Vance, this is a private exam..." Nora started, moving to stand between us, but he wasn't looking at her. He was looking at me, and the intensity of it pinned me to the exam table like a physical weight.

"I can smell my pup," he said, each word deliberate, dangerous. "From the hallway. Explain to me right now how that is possible, when I have never touched this woman in my life."

The room went silent except for the machine still playing that fast, steady heartbeat between us, the only proof I had that any of this was real.

"There was a mix-up at the clinic," I managed, forcing my voice to stay level even though everything in me wanted to shrink. "Ten days ago. My sample was switched with yours. I didn't know. I swear to you, I had no idea until an hour ago."

"A mix-up." His eyes flicked to Nora, and whatever he saw in her face, guilt, fear, the truth written plainly across it, made something in his expression go colder still. "Do you have any understanding of what you've done? Either of you?"

"It was an accident," Nora said, her voice shaking now. "A clerical error. Mislabeled vials. I take full responsibility, but I promise you, Clara had no part in..."

"I don't care about accidents." He cut her off flatly, and then his gaze returned to me, dark and unreadable and impossibly heavy. "I care about the fact that you are carrying the only heir I have ever conceived, human or otherwise, and I have absolutely no reason to believe a word either of you says about how that happened."

"You think I planned this?" Disbelief burned through my fear for just a moment, hot enough to steady my voice. "I didn't even know your name a week ago. I certainly didn't know you were..." I gestured helplessly, unable to even say the word werewolf out loud in front of him. "Whatever it is you actually are."

Something shifted behind his eyes at that, not quite doubt, but not quite certainty either, like he was recalculating something in real time and didn't like where the numbers were landing.

"Whatever you believe you didn't plan," he said, low and final, "this changes everything now. You're carrying a pup with royal shifter blood in a world you know nothing about, at the exact moment I can least afford a scandal touching my name." His eyes swept over me one more time, cataloguing, calculating, the same way they had on that sidewalk five days ago, except now I understood exactly what he'd been sensing, even before either of us knew the truth.

"So what happens now?" I whispered, because some part of me already knew the easy part of my life, the part where I'd simply been hurt by Jason and was quietly rebuilding on my own terms, had just ended completely.

Logan Vance looked at me for a long moment, and when he finally answered, his voice held no comfort at all, only the flat certainty of a man used to getting exactly what he decided he wanted.

"Now," he said, "you and I are going to have a very long conversation about what belongs to me.”