Entangled With My New Alpha Mate

Chapter 5 The Discovery

Amber POV

It had been three weeks since the night in the garden, and I still had not found the courage to ask Kaelan what any of it meant.

Selene had not left. I told myself her staying was none of my concern, that whatever history lived between her and Kaelan belonged to a chapter of his life that had closed long before I ever crossed his border, but I noticed the way she lingered in the halls near his study, the way she found reasons to sit close to him during pack meetings I was only permitted to observe from the edges of the room.

I hated that I noticed, and I hated more that Kaelan had grown quieter with me since her arrival, as though her presence had reminded him of something he had almost let himself forget.

I had been tired for days before I let myself consider why. I told myself it was the stress of living in a place that was not mine, surrounded by wolves who watched me like I might vanish as suddenly as I had appeared. I told myself the nausea that crept up on me some mornings was simply my body still recovering from the injury, though the healer had cleared my shoulder weeks ago. I told myself a great many things, and none of them held up the morning I could not stand the smell of the bread cooling in the kitchen and had to leave the room before I disgraced myself in front of the staff.

The healer, an older woman named Ilsa with sharp eyes and a gentler mouth, found me afterward sitting on the back steps with my head between my knees, and she did not ask what was wrong before she pressed two fingers to my wrist and studied my face with an expression that told me she already suspected something I had not yet let myself think.

"How long have you been feeling this way?" she asked.

"A week. Maybe longer."

"And your cycle?"

I opened my mouth to answer and found I could not remember the last time I had needed to think about it, and the silence stretched long enough that Ilsa did not need me to finish the sentence at all.

She brought me into a small room off the healer's quarters and drew a vial of my blood, and I sat on the edge of the table with my hands pressed flat against my knees to keep them from shaking while I waited, though I already knew, somewhere beneath the panic, exactly what the answer would be.

When Ilsa returned, she did not make me wait for the words. "You are with child, Amber. Roughly three weeks along, by my estimate."

Three weeks. The number landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water, ripples spreading out until they touched every part of me. Three weeks put it squarely on the night in the garden, the only night that could have put it there at all, because I had felt nothing with Damian in years and there had been no one else since him but Kaelan.

"Are you sure," I said, though I already knew there was no version of this where Ilsa was wrong.

"I am certain." She studied me carefully, the way healers do when they are trying to read more than a body's condition. "Do you want me to send for him?"

The question hit me harder than I expected. Send for him. As though it were simple, as though I could walk into Kaelan's study and tell him he was going to be a father and expect anything from him beyond confusion, obligation, perhaps even resentment, from a man who had never once spoken of what that night meant to him beyond the morning after, when he vanished before I woke and Selene appeared at his gate within hours.

"No," I said. "Not yet. Please, Ilsa, I need time."

She did not press me, though I could see she wanted to, and she made me promise to rest and to eat something before the day was through, and then she let me go with the secret sitting heavy and unspoken in my chest.

I walked the halls afterward without any real direction, my mind turning the news over and over, trying to imagine a version of this where telling Kaelan led somewhere good. I pictured his face when I told him, and every version I imagined ended the same way, with his silence, with the distance he had already begun placing between us since Selene's arrival, with a child growing up the way I had watched Ivy grow up, wanted by everyone except the one person whose love should have come without question.

I told myself I only wanted to find him to see his face, to decide in that moment whether the words would come or not, and I followed the sound of voices toward his study with my heart climbing higher in my throat with every step.

The door was open, just as it had been the night I found Damian and Ivy, and something in me went cold at the echo of it even before I reached the doorway and saw what waited inside.

Kaelan stood near the window with Selene close in front of him, her hand resting flat against his chest, her face tilted up toward his the way a woman's face tilts when she is asking, without words, to be kissed. He had not stepped back from her. He had not pushed her hand away. He stood there letting her touch him, his expression unreadable in a way that told me nothing and everything at once.

I did not make a sound. I did not need to, because in that instant I understood, that whatever the night in the garden had meant to me, it had not been enough to keep him from standing here now, letting another woman's hand rest over his heart.

I stepped back from the doorway before either of them noticed me, my hand pressed flat against my stomach where the truth I had come to tell him still lived, unspoken and unseen, and I walked away without a single word, carrying a secret that felt heavier now than it had a moment before, and no longer sure I would ever let him know it existed at all.