Page 14 of The Alpha's Pregnant Mate

It worried her as the weeks went on and construction began on the first few buildings of their new settlement. Rhietta had always had strong feelings, emotions that poured through her as rapidly and ever-changing as water. But she was used to being able to name them, to understanding exactly what it was she was feeling—always the first step to figuring out why. But this troubling feeling that something was wrong…try as she might, she couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. But it seemed to be growing. And the more it grew, the more confusing she found it. It wasn’t that something was wrong, exactly. It was that something had changed. Something was different…something that she hadn’t noticed yet, something very, very important that was patiently waiting to catch her attention.

It was exactly six weeks after they’d left the other pack’s village that Rhietta sat bolt upright in bed, her whole body seized by an abrupt and overwhelming realization.

By the time she spoke with the pack’s healer the following day, her suspicion had solidified so completely into certainty that she felt nothing but a faint impatience when Dasha finally said it out loud. Of course she was pregnant. She’d known that all day. Some part of her had known for weeks, in fact. Dasha’s pale silver eyes were trained on her face, the old woman’s wrinkled face deliberately neutral, and Rhietta realized she was waiting to see whether this was good news or not before she continued with their consultation. Before she could so much as open her mouth to speak, she was laughing, a giddy, exultant laugh that seemed to bubble up from the deepest part of her. Dasha’s quiet face broke into a warm smile, and Rhietta pulled her impulsively into a hug.

“How long?” she gasped as soon as she’d regained her breath. “How long until—"

“You may have a better idea than I do,” Dasha said, her eyes twinkling. “Nine months, as I’m sure you know, minus however long it’s been since…well, I won’t ask any prying questions, but—”

“Six weeks,” Rhietta breathed, forgetting for a moment that only her closest friends knew the full story of what had happened between her and Laurent the night before they’d come here, to their new home. She knew better than to try and hide the truth from Dasha; no doubt the old woman had already pieced the story together, though she knew she could trust her discretion absolutely. Dasha was a sealed vault when it came to the privacy of her patients. Unless Rhietta gave her explicit permission to do so, she wouldn’t reveal the news to another soul, even if she delivered the baby herself.

The baby, Rhietta thought as she wandered out into the blinding morning sun, feeling like her whole world had been blown apart in the best imaginable way. Not just the baby—her baby. Already here, already quietly working on the business of growing strong enough to come out and join them in the sunshine. A wild burst of impatience rushed through her as she passed a hand over the flesh of her stomach. It seemed utterly impossible to wait another second to meet the child, let alone seven months or so…and then she sensed the curious eyes of a few nearby wolves, and was plunged abruptly back into reality.

Rhietta hastened away, knowing she needed privacy for the serious thinking she had to do. She was going to be a mother. That was just about the best news she could possibly have imagined. Even so, the circumstances were less than ideal. She’d spent the last six weeks doing everything in her power not to think about the man who’d broken her heart almost the instant she’d handed it to him, and now the best thing that had ever happened to her was tangled up inextricably with the worst. Not that she was going to hold her baby’s parentage against them. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter one jot to her who the father was.

But it would matter, at least a little bit, to her pack. And she had a feeling it might matter to Laurent. Because as much as she might have liked to turn her back on him completely, deep in her heart she knew that she had to tell him what had happened.

If not for his benefit, then for the benefit of the child who would be here in just a few short months.

Chapter 10 - Laurent

There was something deeply wrong with him. After the utter debacle that had been the night he’d spent with Rhietta, Laurent had taken swift and decisive action to clear all memory of her from his life. He’d scrubbed his room clean of every last trace of her scent, laundering the bedclothes she’d shared multiple times before simply giving up and burning them. He’d had the door she’d broken down replaced, cleared out all remaining traces of the families who’d resided briefly in his downstairs storage rooms—he’d even seen to it that the flattened grass where the pack had made their camp in the town center was uprooted, replaced with garden beds. He’d been meaning to make more efficient use of that space, after all, and it never hurt to have some additional food supplies.

He worked with a grim, feverish focus that drew more than a few worried looks from his pack. Camus and Reade even came to him a few times, speaking with deliberately casual tones, trying to give him the opportunity to explain…but, he noted with satisfaction, neither of them were quite brave enough to actually ask him about it. None of them were, in fact. As the days went slowly by, he realized that nobody was actually going to confront him about why Rhietta’s pack had left so abruptly. He was certain they were talking about it behind his back—wolf packs were legendary for the speed at which gossip could travel—but they were frightened enough of him that nobody was going to bring it up to his face.

And that realization was when he first began to suspect that something was wrong with him. Usually, he’d have felt nothing but a quiet satisfaction at the confirmation that his pack regarded him with a healthy mixture of respect and caution. But when he saw Camus and Reade talking in low voices in his office one day before abruptly falling silent when he came in, it wasn’t satisfaction he felt, but a strange and sudden pang of a feeling it took him a few minutes to identify as loneliness.

Loneliness was not a feeling he’d ever associated with leadership before.

And that wouldn’t be the last of it. The days turned into weeks, and he did his best to forget that Rhietta and her pack had ever been there. Certainly, his pack played along, falling back into their old rhythms—the strict routine of patrols, the grueling daily training sessions to keep them in top fighting shape, the ongoing rationing of supplies to ensure that they were well stocked in the event of an emergency. It should have been more than enough to absorb him, to take his mind off the brief aberration that had been Rhietta’s visit. But the more he tried to take his mind off her, the more he found it straying back to her. Tiny little glimpses of memory, at first; a shadow would fall across his doorway, and he’d imagine it was her before he looked up to see that, of course, it wasn’t. But as time passed, she haunted him more and more. He’d see her out of the corner of his eye as he walked the streets of the village, turning with shock to see that nobody was there. Or worst of all, he’d wake in the night to the unmistakable scent of her hair, convinced that he could feel the weight of her head pillowed against his chest. Even though he knew it was irrational, that there was no way her scent could be lingering on bedsheets she’d never even touched, he burned two more sets, just to be sure.

Sleep, too, was a serious problem. As someone who had rarely, if ever, dreamed much, he hadn’t been ready for the sudden and overwhelming onslaught that seemed to meet him the moment he closed his eyes. Often, these visions didn’t even do him the courtesy of waiting until he fell asleep—no sooner had he settled into bed than he’d be running over and over that final conversation they’d had. Given how hard he’d tried to block out everything she’d said, his mind certainly had a cruel knack for remembering; he heard every word she said with utter clarity, and every time it cut his heart as deeply as it had that first time. Just thinking about how badly he’d hurt her was more than he could stand. Little wonder, then, that he did whatever he could to delay sleep. He took on more and more of the late-night patrols, heading out into the darkness despite his exhaustion.

He sensed his pack’s worry growing as the weeks went by. He could see why, on the odd occasions when he let himself glance into the mirror. He looked, in a word, wretched. There were deep shadows under his eyes and new lines creasing the skin of his forehead and around his mouth. The gray in his hair had spread. He was losing weight—not exactly his body’s most abundant resource—and his hollow cheeks and jutting cheekbones were starting to make him look like a skeleton.

When he let himself wonder why he was in such a poor state, the word that kept circling his mind was 'guilt.' But every time he tried to confront it, he found himself turning away, furious. What did he have to feel guilty for? It had been clear from the start that her pack couldn’t stay there forever. As for the night they’d spent together…well, she was the one who’d thrown herself at him. He hadn’t asked her to get her blasted feelings involved. Even inside his own head, these were weak excuses—he knew that. But so what? There was nobody else to answer to. Except his own conscience, of course, and that was a personal problem, not something he needed to burden his pack with. Especially not when he had a feeling they were up to something. He had no concrete proof, just a hunch based on a few suspicious conversations he’d half-overheard from returning patrols. Once, he might have taken that as a dire insult, stopped at nothing to find out what was behind it. Now, he couldn’t bring himself to care. Let them keep their secrets. So long as they toed the line and kept following orders, he didn’t care how they felt about it, what secrets they whispered about him behind his back.

Who cared about a few hurt feelings? Especially if they were his own.

There were demon attacks, too—those helped keep his mind off things. In the throng of battle, it was hard to wonder whether the shadow behind him was Rhietta, whether he might see a flash of her face when he leapt between a demon and one of his wolves. It was getting harder to keep track of time as the days blurred together, especially with his increasingly late nights, but his advisors kept talking in worried voices about the increasing frequency of the attacks, and he tried to push aside the worry he felt that he’d been wrong to send Rhietta and her pack away. No, he reminded himself over and over. He’d been right to send them away, even if one of the justifications he’d used had been incorrect. His pack would see that, in time—even if they had to fight twice as hard to keep their town protected.

The night the fire started, Laurent had been sitting in his office, gazing vacantly out of the window for longer than he cared to think about. There wasn’t much peace these days, so he always took full advantage when he felt his mind drift off across the treetops like this—it was almost as good as a solid night’s sleep. But something was wrong. The window was open an inch or so, enough to let some of the night’s cool air in without tempting too many insects to join it, and he became aware of a scent he rarely associated with his office. It made him think of the recent evening he’d stolen out into his own backyard like a criminal with a bundle of bedsheets in his arms, knowing it was irrational but needing to burn them regardless.

But the scent in his nostrils wasn’t Rhietta’s hair. It was the smell of smoke—the smell that had risen up from the sheets and clung to his clothing and hair for hours after the sheets had burned to ash. And when he moved to the window, he saw a terrible light where no light ought to have been.

His pack were already assembled on the easternmost edge of town, staring in collective horror at the flames that were approaching. He stared with them, and for the first time in a long time he felt his mind truly focus on the present moment, sharpened to absolute clarity by the urgency of the situation. The flames crackled and roared, impossibly bright, the heat overwhelming even in the damp, humid air. Laurent stared into the flames with his pack for what felt like hours, uncomprehending. It had rained that very afternoon, and heavily, too—he remembered seeing the bedraggled patrols wringing out their clothing. It wasn’t possible that so much of the jungle could be ablaze.

But that logic was no help against the flames. Coming back to himself abruptly, realizing that his pack needed him now more than ever, he called for every pair of hands in the village to take hold of the largest container they could carry. The night quickly dissolved into the desperate, panicky back-and-forth rhythm, running to the bank of the stream with his empty pail, scooping up what water he could, then running back to the edge of the village to throw the water onto the inferno.

To his pack’s undying credit, not one wolf gave up—not even when it became clear just how futile their efforts were. Every bucket of water that was hurled into its heart would go up in steam with a terrific hiss, but within seconds, there would be no sign that the fire’s progress had even been slowed. And though they fought bravely, never once stopping or even slowing down, when the sun rose the next morning, it rose on half a dozen fewer buildings than had been there the day before.

And still, the fire advanced. They slept in short shifts, falling back to whichever buildings were furthest from the front, doing their best to carry their belongings with them as home after home fell to the flames. By the third night, the largest building left standing was Laurent’s two-story home on the edge of town. It felt like a deliberate cruelty, somehow. As though he was being mocked for his hubris, his pride. Maybe half a dozen cottages remained, too, but he’d pulled his wolves back from those long ago. It wasn’t safe there any longer.

Because it wasn’t just the wildfire they had to contend with. Because almost at the same time as the first building had fallen to the fire, demons had begun to creep out of the trees, as if to join the assault.

He hadn’t believed it at first. Fire had always been a weapon wolves had wielded against demons; the one comfort he’d taken, even as the first cottage began to burn, was that at least the flames would keep their old enemy at bay. But whether the demons had overcome their natural aversion to fire, or because of some particular quality of these flames, it rapidly became clear that the fire was more an ally to demonkind than an enemy. One small mercy, at least—the demons didn’t seem especially interested in doing his wolves any harm. Instead, they were altogether too distracted by the destruction the fire brought in its wake. They would lurch and caper close to the fire, seeming almost drunk on their delight as they watched the flames tear down cottage after cottage. Once or twice, he even saw a demon stagger into the flames and emerge wreathed in fire and howling with unmistakable delight.

Finally, the fire took his house. Laurent and his pack stood helplessly a few dozen paces from their settlement’s last remaining building, lined up along the banks of the stream that ran through what had once been a town. He thought back to the first night that Rhietta had come to his office, weary and haggard, asking him for shelter. He thought of the scornful way he’d reacted when she’d described the fires that had destroyed her pack’s homes, how easily he’d put the disaster down to a failure of leadership on her part.

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