Pregnant For The Alpha

Chapter 2

Sienna

Nadia opens her door and takes one look at my face and pulls me inside without saying a single word.

That is the thing about a person who has known you your whole life. They do not need an explanation. They just move.

She sits me down on her couch and wraps a blanket around my shoulders and puts a mug of tea in my hands and then she sits cross legged on the cushion beside me and says, "Talk."

So I talk.

I tell her everything. The doctor's office. The shoes by the door. What I heard through the bedroom wall. What Derek said about the coffee. By the time I get to the part about the smoke alarm she is no longer sitting still. She is pacing the length of her small living room with her arms crossed and her jaw so tight I can see the muscle jumping in her cheek.

"Two years," she says. "He did this for two years."

"Yes."

"While you were trying. While you were going to appointments and taking vitamins and—" She stops. Presses her hand over her mouth. "Sienna I want to do something very bad to that man."

"Get in line," I say into my mug.

She stops pacing and looks at me. Really looks at me the way Nadia does, like she is reading something written underneath your skin. "How are you actually doing?"

"I don't know yet." I am being honest. "I think I am still in the part where I am holding it together. I don't know what comes after that."

She sits back down beside me. "Okay. Then we are not going to wait around to find out." She takes the mug out of my hands and holds both of them instead. "You still have time Sienna. Four weeks is not nothing. We can do this."

"Nadia"

"I work at the best fertility clinic in Silver Ridge." She squeezes my hands. "The best in the country actually. And you are my sister. Not by blood but by everything that actually counts." Her eyes are fierce and bright and completely certain. "Let me help you. Let me do this one thing."

I look at her for a long moment.

I have been taking care of myself since I was old enough to understand that nobody else was going to do it. Asking for help has never come easy to me. But I am sitting here with nothing left and four weeks on the clock and the one person in the world I trust completely is holding my hands and telling me she can fix this.

"Okay," I say quietly.

She breaks into a smile so wide it takes over her whole face. "Okay." She stands up immediately like she has been waiting for that word. "Come in tomorrow morning. First thing. I will pull the donor files myself and we will find you someone perfect."

"I cannot afford"

"Do not even finish that sentence." She points at me. "You have savings yes?"

"Some."

"Then it is handled. Our procedure costs are flexible for certain cases and yours is absolutely a certain case." She is already moving toward her kitchen, already in planning mode, already three steps ahead the way she always is. "Are you hungry? I am making food. You look like you have not eaten since this morning."

"I haven't."

"Sienna." She says my name like a full sentence.

"I was a little busy finding out my boyfriend was poisoning me."

She appears in the kitchen doorway holding a wooden spoon and pointing it at me. "Fair point. Sit there. Do not move."

I sit there. I do not move. And for the first time since I walked out of that doctor's office something in my chest loosens just slightly. Not all the way. But enough.

I am going to be okay.

We are going to figure this out.

The clinic is quieter than I expected the next morning.

Nadia meets me at the front desk and walks me back through corridors that smell like clean air and something faintly clinical and leads me into her office where a thick folder is already waiting on the desk.

"Donor profiles," she says, sitting across from me. "I pulled the top candidates myself. Healthy, tested, excellent backgrounds." She pauses. "The best of the best Sienna. Nothing less for you."

I open the folder. There are photographs and medical histories and pages of information and I feel slightly dizzy looking at all of it. "How am I supposed to choose."

"Take your time."

"You just told me I have four weeks."

"Take a reasonable amount of time then." She grins.

I go through the profiles one by one. Nadia sits with me and we talk through each one and somewhere in the middle of it all it stops feeling terrifying and starts feeling almost like something else. Like possibility. Like a door opening instead of closing.

I stop on one profile near the bottom of the pile. A surgeon. Dark eyes in the photograph, a kind face, an impressive medical history. Something about him feels right in a way I cannot explain.

"This one," I say.

Nadia leans over and looks. "Good choice." She stands up and smooths her coat. "Okay. Give me a few minutes to prepare everything and we will get started."

She disappears through the side door that leads to the sample storage room.

I sit in the chair and look at my hands and think about the little girl I used to be in the Silverbrook Children's Home, curled up in a narrow bed in a room with eleven other children, promising herself that one day things would be different.

"Different is coming," I tell her quietly. "I promise."

The side door opens and Nadia comes back in. She looks completely professional. Completely calm. She sets up the procedure efficiently and talks me through every step in that steady doctor voice she switches into when she is working, and I focus on her voice and breathe and think about the promise I just made to myself.

The procedure takes less time than I expected.

When it is finished Nadia holds my hand and tells me to rest for a few minutes and then she says the words that fill my chest up completely.

"Come back in ten days and we will know for sure." She smiles at me. Warm and real and so full of hope it is almost too much to look at. "This is the beginning Sienna. I really believe that."

I believe her.

I walk out of the Silver Ridge Fertility and Wellness Center into the winter afternoon feeling lighter than I have in years. Something is different. Something has shifted. I cannot explain it but it sits in my chest like a small warm light and I hold onto it with everything I have.

Ten days.

I can do ten days.

---

Nadia stands in the storage room alone with the returned vial in her hand.

She almost does not check the label. There is no reason to check it. She prepared everything herself, she pulled the right sample, she was careful the way she is always careful.

But something makes her look down.

She looks at the name printed on the label.

And the vial slips from her fingers.

She catches it before it hits the floor. She stands there in the cold storage room with both hands shaking and her heart slamming against her ribs and she reads the name again because she has to be misreading it. She has to be.

She is not misreading it.

The sample she used did not belong to the surgeon Sienna chose.

The label in her hands reads one name only.

Alaric Voss.