"You Rejected Me, Now Beg"

The Sickness

The dizziness hits me in the middle of a conversation with the estate's housekeeper, nothing dramatic, just the room tilting slightly to the left before it corrects itself, but it's enough that I have to grip the edge of the hallway table to steady myself.

She notices immediately. "You should sit down."

"I'm fine."

"You've gone pale twice this week." Her voice carries the particular gentleness of someone who has worked in this house long enough to know when not to push and when to push anyway. "There's a healer who comes through on Thursdays for the staff. It wouldn't hurt to have her look at you."

I wave her off, but the offer stays with me longer than I expect it to. I've been telling myself the exhaustion is stress. The nausea, stress. The strange, sudden aversion to coffee I've had every morning of my adult life, also stress. Married three weeks into a war I didn't know I was fighting, rejected in front of two packs, digging through a dead man's ledger in the middle of the night. Anyone would feel unwell.

Except stress doesn't usually come with a heightened sense of smell so sharp I can identify what's cooking in the kitchen from two floors away.

I find the healer on Thursday anyway, in a small room near the staff quarters that's clearly meant to be discreet, and I tell myself I'm only there to rule things out.

She's older, gray haired, the kind of calm that comes from decades of pack medicine, and she doesn't ask many questions before her hands go still over my stomach in a way that makes my breath catch.

"How long have you been feeling unwell?" Her voice is careful. Too careful.

"A couple weeks. Why?"

She doesn't answer right away, and something about the pause makes my heart start hammering before she says a single word.

"Selene." She meets my eyes, steady, kind, bracing me for something. "You're pregnant."

The room goes very quiet. I hear my own heartbeat, loud and strange in my ears, and underneath it something else, something I don't have a name for yet, not fear exactly, not joy exactly, something that sits right in the space between the two.

"That's not possible," I say, even though some part of me already knew, some instinct that's been sitting quietly in my chest since that first night, the hand pressed flat against my stomach without understanding why.

"It's very possible," she says gently. "Fated bonds move quickly, when the pull is strong enough. I'd guess you're just over three weeks along."

Three weeks. The exact length of this marriage.

I don't cry in front of her, though I want to, though everything in me is suddenly too big for my body to hold. I thank her, ask her to keep this quiet for now, and she agrees without hesitation, the kind of loyalty that comes from serving a family long enough to know when discretion matters more than protocol.

I walk back to my room in a daze, one hand resting against my stomach, and for the first time since that altar I feel something that isn't anger or grief or calculation.

I feel afraid, in a way that has nothing to do with Damian's rejection and everything to do with the world I'm bringing a child into. A world with a debt I don't understand yet, a name in a ledger connected to dangerous people, an uncle willing to build an entire marriage on a lie, and a father to this child who called me nothing in front of everyone we'll ever know.

I'm still sitting with all of it when I hear raised voices from somewhere below, sharp enough to carry up through the floor, and I recognize one of them as Damian's before I recognize the second as Lucian's.

I move to the top of the stairs, careful, quiet, and catch only fragments through the argument.

"...if she keeps pulling at threads that aren't hers to pull..." Lucian's voice, low and controlled even in anger.

"...she's my wife, whatever else she is, and if anything happens to her..." Damian's voice, rougher than I've heard it, something protective underneath the fury that surprises me.

"...consider it a warning, not a threat. Some debts don't forgive curiosity."

I don't hear what Damian says next because footsteps move away from the argument, doors closing somewhere below, and I'm left standing at the top of the stairs with my hand still pressed to my stomach, cold all the way through.

Whatever name is attached to that ledger, whoever Lucian owes, they are dangerous enough that even he is worried about what happens if I keep looking.

And I am no longer only protecting myself.

I press my back against the wall, steady myself, and make a decision standing right there in that hallway.

Whatever comes next, I am not staying in this house long enough to find out how far Lucian is willing to go to protect a debt he built an entire marriage to hide.