Chapter 11 – Lines We Don’t Cross
1529 Words
I stare at him.
The words hang between us like smoke. I hadn’t even known about the second one.
I want to laugh. Or scream. Or both.
“Congratulations,” I say, voice scraped thin. “You figured out cause and effect.”
Corin flinches, just a flicker at the corner of his mouth. “Aeryn—”
“Don’t.” I tug my shirt down over the place where Dr. Alvarez wiped away the gel. My hand lingers over the faint smear of cold on warm skin, over the life still flickering defiant inside me. “You don’t get to make this about your regrets.”
“I’m not—”
“Yes,” I cut in. “You are. You’re very good at that, actually. Turning my pain into your noble suffering.”
His eyes flash, wolf-bright for an instant, then dull to something more human and tired. “I didn’t know you were alive,” he says. “For weeks. No scent, no calls, no—”
“You severed the bond,” I snap. “What did you think, that I’d hang around in the guest room like a good little ex-mate while you courted your alliance?”
He swallows. Guilt, raw and ugly, crawls across his face.
“I thought…” He stops. Takes a breath. “I thought you’d go to your aunt’s pack across the valley. Or to Vaelis’s people. Somewhere with wolves.”
The idea is almost funny.
“Right,” I say. “Because when your alpha rejects you in front of half the house, the first thing you want is more wolves.”
His hands tighten at his sides. The muscles in his forearms flex under rolled-up sleeves. He looks like a man trying not to punch a wall he built himself.
“I made the wrong choice,” he says quietly. “I believed them when they said sacrificing one bond would save hundreds of lives. I walked into that clearing thinking I was doing what an alpha should.”
“And when did you realize it wasn’t?” I ask. “Before or after you smelled me on a random city street?”
Something hot twists through his scent—shame, anger, something that makes my wolf lift her head despite herself.
“The first time I woke up and the house didn’t smell like you,” he says. “The first time I shifted and my wolf went looking for you and found nothing. The first time I stood in a council meeting and realized I’d given them proof that fear works better than trust.”
His gaze drops to my hand on my belly.
“And then today,” he adds, voice roughening, “when I saw you on that sidewalk with blood on your jeans and my child under your hand.”
My throat closes on the reflexive correction—my child, not yours—but it lodges there, tangled with the memory of that little heartbeat flashing on the screen.
“You don’t get to claim him,” I whisper. “Not with words. Not yet.”
He nods, slowly, like that’s a knife he expected.
“I know.”
Silence stretches. The ticking of the wall clock suddenly seems very loud.
“You’re staying in the city?” he asks finally. “Here?”
“For now.” I shrug one shoulder, a gesture that feels too casual for the conversation. “I’ve got a job. A lease. A doctor who doesn’t ask why my pulse runs fast.”
“Where?” The question comes too quick, edged.
I narrow my eyes. “Why?”
“Because,” he says, and there’s the alpha again, under the man, “if you think I’m going to let you walk back to some cramped apartment alone after what just happened, you’ve forgotten who I am.”
“Do not,” I say softly, “play protector now. You forfeited that.”
His jaw works. “Maybe. But I’m still going to walk you home.”
“I don’t need—”
“Aeryn.” He steps closer, stopping when I tense. His voice drops. “Let me at least make sure you and… he”—his gaze flicks to my stomach—“get there in one piece. After that, you can slam the door in my face. I’ll deserve it.”
The worst part is, my wolf wants to say yes.
She remembers nights when his presence at my back turned the dark from threat to warmth. Remembers how his scent used to mean we were safe enough to sleep.
My human side remembers the clearing. The words. The tearing.
“Fine,” I bite out. “You walk me to the building. You don’t come in. You don’t push. You don’t show up without asking.”
His shoulders ease by a fraction. “Deal.”
“Don’t sound so relieved,” I add. “You’re not forgiven. You’re just… temporarily useful.”
Something like grim amusement flickers across his face. “I’ll take useful.”
Dr. Alvarez knocks once and pokes her head back in. “Everything okay in here?”
“Define okay,” I mutter.
She gives us both a look that says she’s seen every flavour of messy couple imaginable. “Remember what I said. Rest. Hydrate. Minimal stress.”
“Yes, Doctor,” I say.
She smiles slightly. “Partners who want to help can start by making sure she eats something and doesn’t carry more than a purse. Not a backpack. Not boxes. Not her entire life.”
Her gaze lands on Corin. The implication hangs there.
“I can do that,” he says.
Outside, the city is a wash of late afternoon heat and exhaust. Corin falls into step beside me, careful not to crowd.
We walk in silence at first. My wolf listens to every shift of his breath, every change in his scent. She wants to lean. I make her stay upright.
At the corner before my street, he speaks.
“Who else knows?” he asks quietly. “About him.”
“Dr. Alvarez,” I say. “The receptionist. Probably the nurse who pulled my blood. That’s it.”
“No one from the pack?”
“No one,” I say, sharper than I intend. “And it’s going to stay that way.”
He nods, slowly. I can feel him choosing his next words like he’s picking a path through a minefield.
“I’m not asking you to bring him to the forest,” he says. “Not now. Maybe not ever. I just—” His hand flexes helplessly at his side. “I want to be in his life. Even if that means… coffee shop visits. School plays. Standing at the back of a human clinic while you call him yours to every form and I sign whatever you let me sign.”
I stop walking.
The building entrance looms a few doors down. Cheap brick. Rusted mailboxes. A place that doesn’t care who you were before you paid the rent.
“You want to be his father,” I say slowly, “on my terms.”
“Yes.” No hesitation.
“And when the pack pushes? When Morin tries to turn him into a bargaining chip? When the council decides the alpha’s heir belongs in their house?”
His eyes darken. The wolf peers out.
“Then,” he says, and for the first time since the clearing his voice sounds like unshakable stone, “they’ll find out what it looks like when an alpha chooses his family over their fear.”
It’s a good line. It lands somewhere deep inside me that still believes he could be that man.
I don’t tell him that.
Instead I nod once toward the door. “This is me.”
He looks up at the building like it’s some kind of test he’s just barely passed.
“Text me if anything changes,” he says. “Or if you need… anything.”
“I don’t have your number saved.”
He winces, just slightly, and recites it. I type it into my phone, fully intending never to use it.
My thumb hovers over the save button.
Lio kicks—a small flutter, more imagined than real. My wolf nudges my hand.
I save the contact without a name. Just a number.
“You’re still not coming up,” I say.
“I know.”
He steps back, giving me space, but his gaze stays fixed on my face.
“For what it’s worth,” he adds hoarsely, “I am glad you ran. If you’d stayed… I might never have known what I lost.”
“Yeah,” I say, throat thick. “That’s the point.”
I turn, climb the stairs, and don’t look back until I’m at my door.
When I glance down through the grimy stairwell window, he’s still there on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, head tipped back like he’s memorizing the windows.
Claiming nothing.
Learning, finally, what it means to wait.
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