PRETTY LITTLE MISTAKE

CHAPTER FOUR — The Call

Killian's phone rang at seven fourteen on a Tuesday morning and the name on the screen was one he had not expected to see.

He had her number because HR required emergency contacts for all staff, and he had looked at it exactly once, when it appeared in the system notification, and then he had closed the notification and not looked again. This was the professional situation they had agreed to. This was entirely manageable.

He answered on the second ring.

"Sienna."

A pause. Not a hesitant pause — a calibrating one. He was already learning the difference.

"I need to tell you something," she said. "I'm going to tell you directly because I don't know another way to do this and I've decided that doing it badly is still better than not doing it."

He set down his coffee. "All right."

"I'm pregnant."

The word landed in the specific silence of his home office at seven fourteen on a Tuesday morning and he sat with it for exactly the amount of time it took him to understand that every plan he had for the next decade had just been quietly reorganised without his input.

"How far?" he said.

"Confirmed this morning. The timing is —" A breath. "It's yours. I'm not asking you to take my word for it, I understand if you need —"

"I'm not asking you to prove it." His voice came out level. He was grateful for that. Internally he was doing something he would never have described to another living person, which was a complete and total recalculation of everything. "Are you all right?"

Another pause. Longer this time.

"I'm eating toast," she said.

Which was not an answer to the question, and was also, somehow, the most honest thing she could have said. He understood that she was sitting somewhere — the bookshop apartment, third floor above the biography section, he knew this from the HR address form and had told himself he didn't — and she was holding it together by the specific method she always held things together, which was forward motion and the appearance of practicality.

"I'll come to you," he said.

"You don't need to —"

"Sienna."

A beat.

"Okay," she said.

He was in his car in four minutes. This was not a decision. This was simply the next fact in the sequence.

The bookshop was on Alder Street, a narrow Victorian building with green paint that had been there long enough to become part of the architecture. The flat above it had a separate entrance on the side — a green door, chipped at the bottom, with a brass number seven that leaned slightly left.

He knocked.

She opened the door and they looked at each other for a moment in the grey morning light. She was in a dark sweater and her hair was down, which he hadn't seen before. She looked exactly like herself — composed, precise, the particular self-containment of someone who had already processed the emotional fact of the situation and was now purely in logistics mode.

He recognised this. He did it himself.

"Come in," she said. "I don't have much furniture."

This was an understatement. The flat had a sofa, a desk covered in design work, and three stacks of books that were functioning as a makeshift shelving system along the far wall. The kitchen was small and clean. There was a single mug on the counter and a plate with toast crumbs on it.

He sat on the sofa. She sat in the desk chair, turned to face him, knees together, hands in her lap. The posture of someone in a meeting they have prepared for.

"I'm not here to make this harder than it is," he said.

"I know." She looked at him steadily. "I'm not asking you for anything you're not willing to give. I want you to know that upfront. I'm not — this isn't a trap. I didn't plan this."

"I know that."

"You don't know me well enough to know that."

"No," he said. "But I know you well enough to know that if you had planned it, you'd have executed it more efficiently."

Something moved across her face. Not quite a smile. The thing that happened just before one.

"I have options," she said. "I'm considering all of them. I'm not asking you to decide anything today. I just thought you should know because —" She stopped. Started again. "Because it's yours and you deserved to know and I'm not someone who withholds information people are entitled to. That's all."

He looked at her. She looked back. Outside the window the Cascade Falls morning was doing its thing — low cloud, green-grey light, the mountains invisible but present the way they always were, felt rather than seen.

"I'm not going to offer you a contract," he said.

She blinked. "I didn't ask for one."

"I know. I'm telling you what I'm not going to do, because I suspect you've been sitting here preparing for me to arrive with a legal document and a set of terms and I want to remove that from the table before it takes up any more of your mental space."

A pause. "That is exactly what I was preparing for."

"I know." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "What I am going to do is be straightforward with you. This changes things. Not because of obligation — because it is a fact, and I deal in facts, and the fact is that we are in this together whether either of us planned it." He held her gaze. "I'd like to figure out what that looks like. With your input. Not a contract. A conversation."

She was quiet for a long moment.

He waited. He was good at waiting. Most people weren't, and they filled silences with things they hadn't meant to say. Sienna did not do this. She sat in the silence and used it, and when she was done using it she said:

"I don't want to move into your estate."

"That's not what I'm asking."

"I don't want to be managed."

"I'm not offering to manage you."

"You're offering to reorganise my life into something more structurally sound, which is the same thing with better vocabulary."

He almost smiled. "I'm offering to be involved. The degree is negotiable."

Another silence. She looked at her hands, then back at him.

"I'm keeping it," she said. It came out quiet and absolute, both at once, the way things do when someone has been sitting with a decision long enough that saying it out loud is just confirmation of something already settled. "I need you to know that's decided. I'm not looking for your opinion on it."

"I don't have one," he said. "It's not mine to have."

Something shifted in her expression. Fractional. The very slight recalibration of someone who had been braced for a different response.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay," he said.

They sat in the small, furniture-sparse flat above the bookshop while the Cascade Falls morning pressed grey and close against the windows, and neither of them said anything for a while, and it was not an uncomfortable silence. It was the silence of two people who had just established, without ceremony, that they were going to do something very difficult together and had decided, separately and simultaneously, that they were capable of it.

He left forty minutes later. He did not offer grand gestures. He did not make promises he hadn't thought through. He told her he would be in contact, that nothing was required of her today, that she should eat something other than toast.

She said she had a perfectly functional relationship with toast and he had no standing to have opinions about her breakfast.

He said that was fair.

He walked back down the side street to his car and sat in it for a moment before starting the engine. The chipped green door was visible in the wing mirror. The brass number seven, leaning slightly left.

His wolf, which had been quiet since the lobby confrontation, was now doing something he could only describe as settled.

He found this, for the first time in three weeks, not alarming.

He did not examine that too closely.

Not yet.