Wait I'm Pregnant with My Alpha and His First Love's Triplets? Time to Abort & Run novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Luna Resigns

In the packed hall Linnea refuses to carry another woman's pups and resigns her seat while Verity soothes her, and the elders say a Luna carrying the heir cannot resign.

I did not sleep, and at breakfast I walked into the great hall with my bag on my shoulder.

A hundred and fifty wolves sat at the long tables, eating eggs and talking about triplets.

The talk stopped when I reached the Alpha's table.

Bram sat in his chair at the head with his coffee untouched.

My wedding band lay beside his plate.

"You left this," he said.

"I did."

I put my bag down on the boards where everybody could see it.

"Last night I heard you promise my pups to Verity," I said. "I'm asking you now, in front of the pack, whose they are."

Chairs creaked all down the hall.

Verity sat three seats from Bram, with her hands folded around a teacup.

She didn't look at me.

"Linnea," Bram said. "Not here."

"You picked here. You picked the stone, in front of two hundred wolves, when you let that healer say Greywater's blood is in my belly."

"They're yours."

"Then say they're ours, and that they stay at Blackthorn."

His jaw worked.

I watched him decide.

"I can't promise you that," he said.

The sound that went through the hall was low and ugly.

Addie stood up at the kitchen hatch with a ladle in her fist.

Burke, at the end of Bram's table, put both hands flat on the wood and said nothing.

Verity rose, slowly, and came around the table.

"Linnea, please," she said, and her voice shook. "You're exhausted and you're carrying three. Anyone would feel like this. Sit down with me and have some tea."

A woman at the second table nodded.

"She's right," the woman murmured. "It's the hormones. Poor Verity, trying so hard."

I looked at the hand Verity held out to me.

It was gentle and warm, and it had carried my laundry for three months.

I didn't take it.

"Thank you, Verity," I said. "I'm going to do this myself."

Then I turned to the pack and said the words my mother's generation had written into Blackthorn's law.

"I am Linnea Fairweather. I was named Luna at the stone three years ago. I give the seat back."

The silence was complete.

I took the wedding band off the table and put it in my pocket, because it had been my mother's setting before it was ever his.

"I'm not the Luna, and I'm not carrying a litter that's been given away. I'm leaving."

Bram stood so fast his chair went over.

"Linnea."

"You don't get to say my name like that."

The oldest elder pushed himself up from the second table on his cane.

He was the one who had cheered loudest at the stone.

"Sit down, girl," he said, and he wasn't unkind. "Blackthorn law is older than you or him. A Luna with the heir in her cannot give up the seat. She cannot cross the border and she cannot refuse the Alpha's table until the pups are weaned."

"Weaned," I said. "That's years."

"It is the law."

"Then the law will have to chain me to the table."

Somebody at the back of the hall muttered that it was the Alpha's right.

Somebody else muttered that it was no way to treat a pregnant woman.

I could feel the pack splitting, in the middle of the eggs.

Bram came around the table.

He stopped an arm's length away, and he didn't try to touch me.

His eyes were red at the rims, and his hand with the fresh gauze hung at his side.

"Lin," he said, low enough that only I could hear. "Sit. Eat something. I'm not going to let anybody take you."

"Take me?"

"Nobody takes you from this house."

I stared at him.

I had come in expecting him to say he'd keep me because of Verity.

He had not said Verity.

He had said anybody.

"Who would take me, Bram?"

His mouth closed.

Behind him, Verity set her teacup down on the saucer with a very small click.

"Nobody," Bram said. "Sit down."

I picked up my bag.

Addie met me at the hall door and slid an arm through mine, and nobody in a hundred and fifty wolves tried to stop us.

"Kitchen," she said. "Now. And don't you dare cry in front of them."

"I'm not crying."

"I know," she said. "I'm furious for you."

I let her pull me through the swinging door.

Behind us, I heard Bram order the hall emptied.

I heard the elders arguing.

And under all of it, I heard Verity say, in her softest voice, that she would take me my tonic herself.

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