The End of Us novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Before Midnight

Isla walks into the hospital, Maud names Marina keeper of the Luna's cradle and the baby heir before two witnesses, and Quinton says nothing. She gives back her mating cord, and outside a stranger Alpha says her father saved his life.

I reached St. Anne's at ten past eleven.

The Dunstan wing was on the third floor, behind a set of glass doors the pack had paid for.

Two council elders stood outside it in their good coats.

Maud had brought witnesses.

She stood beside them with her hand on the iron ring she always wore, and when she saw me, she did not look surprised.

"Isla," she said. "You left the Hall."

"Quinton told me to stay in my seat," I said. "I'm here to see my mate."

"Your mate is with his brother's wife."

"Then I'll wait with him."

Quinton came out of the delivery room with his shirt sleeves pushed up.

He saw me, and his face went through three expressions before it settled on tired.

"Isla, please," he said. "Not tonight. Go home."

"You said you'd be back before dessert was cleared."

"She's in pain. Her baby is early. Don't make this about us."

"It's been about us for four years," I said. "You just keep leaving the room."

He looked at his mother.

That was all he did.

He looked at his mother, and he waited for her to answer for him.

"If you've abandoned the Luna's seat," Maud said, loud enough for both elders to hear, "then the law is plain. Until the next full moon, I name who holds it."

"Maud," one of the elders began.

"I name Marina Dunstan keeper of the Luna's cradle," Maud said. "And when her son is born, I name him heir to the Hall."

"You can't name a child heir while the Luna is alive," I said.

"You have no seat," Maud said. "You gave it up on the way out of the door."

The elders looked at the floor.

I looked at Quinton.

"Tell them I'm your mate," I said.

He opened his mouth.

A nurse put her head out of the delivery room. "She's crowning."

Quinton turned and went back inside.

I stood in the corridor with the two elders and his mother for the next half hour.

Nobody offered me a chair.

Ginny walked past once with a tray of instruments and squeezed my hand without stopping.

At eleven forty a baby began to cry.

It was a thin, furious sound, and I was not ready for how it would feel.

Two months ago I had been seven weeks along, and I had sat in the pack clinic with my own hands on my own stomach, waiting for someone to come.

Nobody came.

The door opened.

Quinton stood in it with the baby wrapped in a white blanket against his chest.

His face was wet.

"It's a boy," he said, to everyone but me. "He looks like Dorian."

Maud took the baby from him, and she carried him straight to the elders.

"The Dunstan heir," she said. "Born before midnight on Founders' Night. You are my witnesses."

Both elders bowed their heads.

"Witnessed," they said.

Behind them, in the bed, Marina lifted her head from the pillow.

She was pale and sweaty, and she was looking at me.

She smiled.

It was a small smile, with nothing in it that anyone but me would have noticed.

That was when I understood the whole night had been planned, and my empty chair was part of the plan.

I took the braided cord from my left wrist.

Quinton had tied it there at our mating ceremony, with his own fingers, and had not looked away from my eyes the whole time.

"Quinton," I said.

He looked at me for the first time since I'd walked in.

I put the cord in his open hand and closed his fingers around it.

"You can have what you chose."

"Isla, don't."

"You were never going to pick me," I said. "I wanted to see it with my own eyes. Now I have."

I turned around and walked down the corridor.

I made it as far as the stairwell before the bond took hold of me.

It started as a hard pull behind my ribs, and then it was in my knees, my hands, my teeth.

I got down the stairs by holding the rail.

I made it through the lobby, and out through the sliding doors into the cold.

The pain bent me over on the curb.

A truck was idling at the edge of the lot, with its headlights off.

The driver's door opened, and a man got out and walked straight toward me.

He was broad across the shoulders, with black hair and a scar that split his left eyebrow.

I knew him by sight.

He was the Alpha across the river, and he had never once spoken to me.

"Isla Sheridan," he said. "My name is Keith Stroud."

He held out his hand, and I took it, because I could not stand without it.

"Your father pulled me out of a river when I was fourteen years old," he said. "Get in the truck."

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