The Alpha's Accidental Heir

Chapter 2

Nora opened her apartment door before I even finished knocking, took one look at my face, and pulled me inside without a word.

We'd grown up two beds apart in the same group home, the kind of sisters you choose instead of the kind you're born with, and in eleven years I'd never once had to explain to her why I was crying. She just held on until I could talk.

"He's been sabotaging my birth control," I said into her shoulder, the words tearing loose all at once. "Two years, Nora. Crushed pills in my coffee every single morning. And today my doctor told me I'm basically out of time to ever have a baby at all, and I don't know if that's because of what he did to me or if it would have happened anyway, and I don't... I don't know how to be in my own life right now."

Nora went very still. Then, very quietly, she said, "I'm going to kill him."

"Get in line," I managed, and it came out half a laugh, half a sob.

She sat me down on her couch, made tea neither of us drank, and let me lay the whole afternoon out in pieces: the doctor's appointment, the shoes by the door, the sound of the bed frame, the way Jason's face had shown relief instead of guilt. By the time I finished, the sun outside her window had gone from gold to gray.

"Okay," Nora said finally, wiping her own eyes. "Here's what I know for certain. You are not going to let that miserable excuse for a man take away the one thing you've wanted your whole life. Not while I have anything to say about it."

"Nora, my doctor said weeks. Maybe less."

"I know exactly what she said, because I work in this field, remember?" Nora leaned forward, taking both my hands. "Clara. You don't need Jason to have a family. You never did."

I stared at her. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying you come work with me tomorrow." Her voice had that steady, clinical calm I remembered from every crisis we'd survived together. "Sunvale Clinic runs one of the best donor programs in the state. Vetted donors, full health screenings, complete anonymity if you want it. Women do this every day, Clara. Successful, happy women who decided they weren't going to wait around for a man to get his act together."

The idea sat strange and heavy in my chest, but underneath the strangeness, something else stirred. Something that felt almost like hope.

"I don't even know if I can afford it," I admitted. "And I just... Nora, I don't have a partner anymore. I don't have anyone."

"You have me." She squeezed my hands hard enough to hurt. "You have always had me, and you will always have me, and as for the money, we'll figure it out. I get an employee discount, and I am absolutely using it for this."

I laughed, wet and unsteady, and for the first time since I'd heard Kayla's laugh through that bedroom door, I felt something other than grief.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. Let's do it."

The next morning I called my boss, Mrs. Whitfield, hands still trembling from the day before, to ask for the afternoon off. She was frostier than usual on the phone, which I chalked up to a bad morning until I got to her house that evening to pick up Mia and Toby for their afternoon at the park, and found the front door locked with a note taped to it instead of a greeting.

Your services are no longer needed. Please don't return.

No explanation. No goodbye to the two children I'd cared for since Mia was in diapers, who I'd walked to school every morning for the past year, who called me by a nickname their mother didn't even like. I stood on that porch for a long time, staring at the note, before I understood.

Jason.

He'd have known exactly who to call. Mrs. Whitfield ran in the same social circles as half the city, and it wouldn't have taken much, just a whisper here, a fabricated story there, to make sure I lost the one steady thing left in my life. Punishing me for leaving him, or maybe just making sure I couldn't afford to fight back if I tried.

I didn't cry this time. I was too angry to cry.

I called Nora from the sidewalk outside the Whitfield house, and by the time she picked up, my voice had gone flat and hard in a way I didn't recognize.

"He got me fired," I said. "Jason got me fired from my nannying job. I don't know how, but I know it was him."

There was a pause on the line, and when Nora spoke again, her voice had gone flat too, the two of us matching each other in fury. "Then we don't wait, Clara. We do this now, while you've still got savings left, while you've still got time on that fertility window. Come in tomorrow morning. First appointment of the day."

"I don't have a lot of money left after this."

"I told you, I'm covering what I can. You are not letting that man take this from you too." Her voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word. "You've wanted to be a mother since we were kids sharing a bunk bed and dreaming about it out loud after lights-out. I'm not going to watch him take that away because he was too much of a coward to tell you the truth."

I looked up at the Whitfield house, at the porch light Mia always begged to turn on herself, at the note still taped to the door with my whole old life folded up inside it.

"Okay," I said again, the way I had the night before, except this time it didn't feel like fear talking. It felt like the first real decision I'd made in years.

"Tomorrow. First appointment."

I had no idea, standing on that porch with my old life in pieces around me, that the sample waiting in a cold storage drawer at Sunvale Clinic, mislabeled, misplaced, one vial swapped for another in a moment of ordinary human error, belonged to a man powerful enough to reshape my entire future before I even knew his name.