The Day We Lost Our Pups, We Left Our Alphas novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Pass Road
Rival wives bicker on the way to the pack check, a truck hits them, both husbands call them liars, and both women take off their rings.
Half the pack stood in the lodge yard to watch Roz Lafferty and me climb into the same truck.
The Alpha had ordered it.
"The heirs' mothers ride together," he said, and tucked a blanket around my knees himself. "It's tradition."
We were eight months along and due four days apart.
Nobody had asked either of us if we wanted to share a cab for forty minutes.
The Alpha's daughter-in-law came down the steps with a thermos in each hand.
"Soup," she said softly. "Chicken and barley, no salt, the way the healer likes it. You two need to eat."
She pressed one into my hands.
She was his youngest son's widow, seven months along with his pup, and she still thought to feed us.
"Thank you," I said, and meant it.
Roz grabbed her thermos and unscrewed it before the door was shut.
"Mine will be born first," she said. "She kicks hard enough for border patrol."
"Mine is ahead of schedule," I said. "Conall says she's early on everything."
"You've said that every day for a month."
"Because it's still true."
We had been fighting over first place since we were seven.
She beat me by two points for the top spot at graduation, and I still kept the scorecard.
Then we married the Alpha's two sons.
Four days apart, we found out we were pregnant, and the war started over.
The truck took the first switchback on the pass road.
Roz was still laughing at something I'd said when the lights came around the bend on the wrong side.
It was a pack truck, wide and white, crossing the line.
I heard the driver's door fold in.
Then I was lying against the dash with something warm running down my thighs.
The whole cab was tilted toward the ravine.
"Teagan," Roz said. Her voice was thin. "Teagan, I'm bleeding."
"Me too."
I got my phone out of the footwell with two fingers.
It rang four times.
"Teagan, I'm in the middle of something," Conall said. In the background, someone was coughing and a chair scraped. "Vera collapsed in the garden. I can't talk."
His voice went gentle on the name of Vera, the woman who had put the soup in my hands an hour ago.
"We've been hit. Conall, there's blood, I need the clinic, I need you."
"Your vitals were fine at breakfast. I took them myself."
"I'm telling you it's coming out of me."
There was a pause. I could hear him breathing.
"You've been angry since I said I'd sit with Vera tonight," he said. "Don't use our pup to keep me away from her. Not today."
Beside me, Roz had her own phone against her ear, and her face went white under the freckles.
"I'm not using anything," she said into it. "Devon. Devon, listen to me."
I could hear the tinny shape of his voice answering her.
She listened. Then she lowered the phone, and her hand was shaking.
"He says I'm doing it for attention."
I looked at the dead screen in my own hand.
"Then don't come," I told Conall, and the call had already ended.
The human ambulance reached us before anyone from the pack.
The paramedic cut my seat belt and talked to me the whole way out of the wreck.
They put us in two beds in the same emergency bay, a curtain between us.
I heard the rest through it.
The monitors. The word abruption. Roz saying "Hold on, hold on" to someone, maybe me, maybe her own stomach.
I don't remember the surgery.
I remember waking up, flat and empty, and a surgeon pulling a chair up to my bed.
"Ms. Hartley," she said. "I'm so sorry. Your daughter was too early and too hurt. We couldn't save her."
On the other side of the curtain Roz made a sound I had never heard a person make.
I didn't ask to hold her.
I didn't think to.
A nurse was wheeling a cart past the door, and over her shoulder I saw the hallway desk.
The Alpha's driver was already standing at it, in his good coat, signing papers.
I thought: Orson came fast. He's taking care of all of it, so we don't have to.
I thought it was kind.
The next hour is a smear.
Then I was sitting on the edge of the bed with a plastic bag of clothes in my lap.
Roz stood in the doorway in a hospital gown, her hair stiff with dried blood.
Neither husband had come.
Neither of us had called again.
Roz looked at my hand.
I looked at hers.
The silver band was still on her finger, and mine was still on mine.
"I've been trying to beat you at something for twenty years," Roz said hoarsely. "I don't want to win this one."
"Neither do I."
"Don't you dare leave without me."
"I wouldn't."
I pulled the ring off first.
It left a pale stripe on my skin.
I set it on the metal tray beside the water jug, and Roz dropped hers next to it, and the two bands rolled together and stopped.
My phone buzzed on the blanket.
Conall: Come home and apologize to Vera. She was terrified for you.
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