He Stole My Title, So I Took His True Heir novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Born at Wind Valley

Hanna delivers Mabel in the ranch house with a silver-white lock at her temple. Bram is alone at the gate at dawn.

Wind Valley Ranch was forty minutes east of the gate, and Cade did it in twenty-five.

I held the door handle and counted the gaps between pains.

"Hanna's on her way," he said.

"Hanna Voll is Ironwood's healer."

"She walked out of Ironwood at six this morning with her bag. She called me from the road."

I stared at him.

"She said she'd delivered you, and she wasn't about to let some twenty-year-old in the Alpha's kitchen do it instead," he said.

I laughed, and the next pain folded the laugh in half.

The ranch house had a long kitchen with a wood stove and a scarred table, and two ranch hands cleared it in about a minute.

One of them dragged a mattress in from the back room.

Another put a kettle on, which nobody needed, and then stood in the corner holding the kettle's lid.

Hanna came through the door twenty minutes after us with her canvas bag and her gloves already on.

She is sixty-two and has a grip like a wrench.

"Sit up, Willa. Let me see you."

"I'm not due for a month."

"You were due when you decided to be. Breathe."

I breathed.

She checked me and her mouth went flat. "Four centimetres. You'll have her by dark."

"Her?"

"I've been telling you it was a girl since August."

Cade stood at the doorway with his back against the frame.

"I'll go," he said.

"Stay by the door," Hanna said. "Keep the dogs out. Keep anybody from Ironwood out."

"Yes, ma'am."

It went the way a labor goes.

I won't pretend I was gracious.

I swore at Bram for six hours, and then at the founder, and then at the staff, and I could hear Hanna laughing at me over a basin of hot water.

Around four in the afternoon the pains stopped being pains and became a single long order.

"Now," Hanna said. "Now, Willa."

I pushed, and she caught her.

She was small and furious and she screamed before Hanna even had her up.

Hanna put her on my chest.

She had a head of dark wet hair, and at her left temple there was one lock that dried silver-white against her skin.

I touched it with one finger.

"Hanna," I said.

"I see it," Hanna said. She said it very quietly.

"What is it?"

"It's a streak," Hanna said. "Bram's grandmother had one, same temple, same colour, before her hair went white."

"I only ever knew her with white hair."

"I saw it on her myself, when I was a girl carrying the old healer's bag. It skips a generation. Founder's blood does."

She took the cord scissors out of her bag.

I looked down at my daughter.

She had stopped screaming. She was blinking at the ceiling and working her mouth, and she had my father's chin.

"Mabel," I said.

It was my grandmother's name, and nobody in Ironwood had ever used it for a Luna's child.

"It suits her," Hanna said.

The ranch hands had gone quiet in the doorway.

One of them wiped his eyes with his whole sleeve.

Cade came in last and stopped at the foot of the mattress. He looked at her for a long moment.

He didn't reach for her.

"She's got a good lung on her," he said.

"She gets that from her mother."

He nodded.

"You can sit," I said.

He sat on an overturned crate by my feet, and nobody said anything for a while, and the stove ticked.

I fell asleep with her on my chest.

I woke in the dark to a dog barking in the yard and Hanna's hand on my shoulder.

"Don't get up," she said. "There's a truck at the gate."

I knew the engine.

I had listened to it come up our drive for seven years.

Cade was already at the window with his back to me.

"One man," he said. "Alone. No guards."

"Is it Bram?"

"It's Bram." He didn't turn around. "He says he'd like to see his daughter."

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend