Chose Your SIL's Pup Over Ours and Left Me to Freeze, Now Meet the Luna Who Erased Your All novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Floor

Rhea delivers alone on the cell floor and names her son Ewan before the tea Lenore gave her takes her legs. She wakes empty-armed with Garrick in the doorway saying he didn't make it.

The first hour, I screamed for the guards.

Nobody came.

The horn had sounded for Lenore, and the whole pack had run to her door.

I crawled to the iron door and hit it with both fists.

"Open it! I'm in labour!"

The stairs stayed empty.

I crawled back to the wall because the next pain was already building, and I couldn't fight it standing.

I tried to call my wolf.

She rose in me, then stopped, held down by the cold exactly as the elders had promised.

My own body wouldn't let me shift.

So I stayed on two legs and breathed through it, and every pain was longer than the last.

Some time after midnight, a shadow crossed the slit window.

I looked up, and Garrick's face was there, framed in the stone.

He was breathing hard from running, with Lenore's house three streets away.

"Garrick," I said. "Open the door."

He didn't move.

"It's coming now. It's coming tonight. Get Hester."

"Hester's with Lenore," he said.

"Then get someone else!"

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he stepped back out of the window, and the slit went dark.

I heard his boots on the stairs, going up.

I said his name once more, to nobody.

After that, I stopped calling for anyone.

I took Lenore's coat and spread it on the floor under me.

I braced my back against the wall, and I did it myself.

I won't tell all of it.

It was long, and the cold was in my blood, and my legs began to shake in a way that had nothing to do with pushing.

Somewhere near the end my tongue went thick in my mouth.

I thought, That's the cold.

I thought, Don't let it take your hands.

I kept my hands.

The last push came when the slit window had gone from black to the colour of ash.

He slid out into my palms, slick and hot, and for one terrible moment he made no sound.

I rubbed his back with the lining of Lenore's coat.

"Come on," I whispered. "Come on, little one."

He coughed.

Then he screamed, loud and furious, and the sound filled the whole stone room.

I laughed, and I was crying, and I didn't care that my face was wet.

I bit through the cord, because there was nothing else, and tied it off with a strip I tore from my own hem.

He was a boy.

He had a thatch of dark hair and a red, angry face and a grip that closed hard on my finger and held it.

I took the braided cord from my pocket.

It took three tries to knot it around his wrist, because my fingers wouldn't close.

The red hair looked very bright on his small skin.

"Ewan," I said.

I had picked the name a month ago and never said it aloud to anyone.

"Your name is Ewan."

He stopped crying and looked at me.

His eyes weren't any colour yet.

I wrapped him inside both our coats and held him against my skin, and he began to root.

"Nobody takes you out of my arms," I told him. "Not the Alpha. Not the elders. Nobody."

I felt the weight of him on my chest.

I felt, for the first time since the dais, warm.

My arms had gone heavy.

My head had gone heavy.

The tea.

The word came to me slowly.

There had been something bitter under the honey, and I'd put it down to the cold.

I tried to lift my head.

The door was a long way off.

Ewan was breathing against my collarbone, small and fast.

"Stay with me," I said, and I didn't know if I was saying it to him or to myself.

The stairs creaked.

I thought I heard a woman's voice, close and low.

"Quick. Before the sun is up."

I tried to hold on.

I tried to close both arms.

The grey in the window went white, and then it went out.

When I opened my eyes, the slit window was full of daylight.

My arms were empty.

I lay on the stone floor with both coats pulled over me and a blanket I didn't remember.

My belly was flat and sore.

"Ewan," I said.

My voice cracked on it.

I pushed up on one elbow and looked at the corners, at the stairs, at my own hands.

He was gone.

The iron door stood open.

Garrick was in the doorway in a dry coat with his hair combed.

Behind him stood Hester Quill, with her eyes on the floor.

"Where is he?" I said.

"Ewan," I said again, to Hester, because she was the one who would answer.

She didn't lift her eyes.

Garrick's mouth moved before any sound came out.

"The cold took him in the night," he said. "He never took a breath."

"He cried," I said. "He screamed. I heard him."

"You were out of your head with the cold."

"I tied his cord myself!"

"Rhea." His voice broke on it, and I hated that it broke.

"He didn't make it."

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