Double Trouble, Triple Heat

Chapter 8

Two weeks since I ran barefoot through the forest, wearing nothing but Dominic's shirt. Two weeks since I watched two men I was falling for transform into the monsters from my father's bedtime stories. Two weeks of locked doors and closed curtains and pretending the outside world doesn't exist.

I don't know how I made it back to the cabin that night. One moment I was crashing through branches, lungs burning, terror clawing at my throat. The next I was slamming my door shut, sliding the deadbolt, sinking to the floor in the darkness.

I didn't move until morning. And when the sun finally rose, I decided the best thing I could do was disappear.

The groceries they leave on my porch keep me alive. I hate myself for eating them, but pride doesn't fill an empty stomach, and driving into town means risking an encounter I'm not ready for. So I take the bread and eggs and fresh vegetables, and I tell myself it doesn't mean anything.

I set up my laptop at the kitchen table and force myself to work. Freelance projects I'd been neglecting—logos, mockups, branding packages for clients who don't know their designer is hiding from werewolves. The work is mindless, mechanical. Exactly what I need to keep from losing my mind completely.

They don't stop coming.

Every morning brings evidence of their visits. Firewood stacked on the porch. Fresh bread by the door. Wildflowers in a jar—purple and white, the kind that grow at the edge of the forest.

Notes appear in two different hands.

"Please eat something." Caspian's looping scrawl.

"We're here when you're ready." Dominic's sharp angles.

"We're sorry. We should have told you."

I crumple them all. Can't bring myself to throw them away.

Once, near sunset, I catch Dominic standing at the treeline. Just standing there, hands in his pockets, staring at my cabin for nearly an hour. He doesn't approach. Doesn't knock. Just watches, like he's memorizing every detail before I disappear from his life forever.

Then he turns and walks back into the forest.

The golden thread in my chest aches constantly now. It tugs at me, whispers that I should follow, that I'm incomplete without them. That this separation is slowly killing something inside me.

I ignore it. But the questions won't stop circling.

Everything Miriam said—the wolves, the pack, my mother being a Prime—I dismissed her as a lonely eccentric. Now I've seen it with my own eyes. Now I need to know if the rest of it is true too.

On the third day, I tear through Eleanor's belongings looking for answers.

The attic yields what I'm searching for. A trunk filled with leather-bound journals, newspaper clippings, old photographs. Eleanor's cramped handwriting covers hundreds of pages—decades of observations, research, secrets carefully recorded.

She knew. She knew everything.

The journals become my bible. I learn about pack hierarchy and territory disputes. About alphas who lead and betas who follow. About the mating bond—how it forms between wolves and their chosen partners, how it strengthens over time, how severing it can drive a wolf to madness or death.

I learn about Primes.

My mother's kind. The rarest wolves, born maybe once a generation. They don't just carry power—they amplify it. A Prime can strengthen pack bonds, unite divided bloodlines, and turn a struggling pack into an empire. They were revered in ancient times. Worshipped, almost.

Lena Ashwood was supposed to be great. Instead, she fell in love with a hunter and ran.

The journals end abruptly after she left. No mention of what happened to her. So I dig deeper—old newspaper archives, police reports buried in public databases, anything I can access remotely without leaving my cabin.

And there it is, in black and white.

"Lena Mitchell, 29, died of wounds sustained in an animal attack while hiking in the mountains outside the city. She is survived by her husband Robert and daughter Sera."

Animal attack.

My father told me she was sick. Told me she went to sleep one night and didn't wake up. Told me she was at peace.

He lied. About everything.

Was it wolves who killed her? Pack members punishing a runaway Prime? Or something else—some consequence of severing the bond that Eleanor warned about? I'll probably never know. Right now, I'm too exhausted to care.

My body has started betraying me in strange ways.

The exhaustion came first. Twelve hours of sleep leaving me more drained than when I closed my eyes. I wake up dizzy, disoriented, like my body belongs to someone else. Then came the tenderness in my breasts, so intense that wearing a bra became unbearable. Then the nausea—coffee, eggs, anything with garlic making my stomach lurch the moment I smell it. Yesterday I threw up from the scent of bacon drifting from Miriam's cottage half a mile away.

My senses are sharper too. I hear the mice in my walls, the owls in the trees, conversations from the road I shouldn't be able to catch. I smell rain coming hours before the clouds appear. And sometimes, in a certain light, my eyes flash gold in the mirror before returning to green.

Something is waking up inside me. Something that's been dormant my whole life, triggered by this place. By them. By what we did together.

Stress, I tell myself. Trauma. My body is just processing everything that happened.

Then I miss my period.

I count the days three times. I'm never late. Twenty-eight days, like clockwork since I was thirteen.

It's been thirty-two days since my last cycle. Thirty-two days since that night at the lodge.

I drive to a pharmacy three towns over, hands shaking on the wheel. Sunglasses and a baseball cap like some ridiculous fugitive. The cashier doesn't look twice.

Back at the cabin, I lock myself in the bathroom. The instructions are simple. Pee on the stick. Wait three minutes.

The longest three minutes of my life.

I sit on the edge of the bathtub, test face-down on the counter, trying to remember how to breathe. It's negative. It has to be negative. I can't be pregnant with a child that belongs to one of them. That belongs to wolves.

The timer goes off.

I pick up the test. Flip it over.

Two pink lines.

The bathroom tilts sideways. I sink to the cold tile floor, test clutched in my fist, tears streaming down my face before I realize I'm crying.

Pregnant. I'm pregnant with a werewolf's child.

A sob tears from my throat. Then another. I curl into myself on the bathroom floor and let it all out—the fear, the confusion, the grief for the simple life I thought I was building.

When there's nothing left, I press my hand to my still-flat stomach.

A life is growing inside me. Half wolf, half human, half something I don't understand. A life that ties me to them forever, whether I want it or not.

The golden thread pulses warm, and this time I don't fight it. I let myself feel them out there in the forest. Waiting. Hoping. Terrified that I'll never come back.

They need to know.

I need answers.

And hiding from the truth won't give me either one.

I pull myself off the bathroom floor. Splash water on my face. The woman in the mirror looks like a stranger—red-eyed, pale, but something new in her expression. Something determined.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll face what I've been running from.

But tonight, I grieve. For the girl who came to Silverpine Falls looking for a fresh start. For the simple romance I thought I was stumbling into. For the life I imagined before wolves and bonds and impossible truths shattered everything.

That girl is gone now.

I don't know yet who's taking her place.