The Rejected Mate novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Pup

Dinah lay on the healer's table with her knees drawn up and her good hand twisted in the sheet.

Her gold hair was dark with sweat.

There was blood on her skirt, and blood down the bandage on her right hand, and she was moaning in a long, thin, steady note.

"It's coming," she whispered. "It's too early. Please. Please, Willa."

Willa stood at the foot of the table with her arms folded.

Caelen was in the doorway behind her, silent, with his shirt buttoned wrong.

The Stormvale healer was an old woman with a face like a walnut.

She had been pressing her fingers over Dinah's belly for a long minute with her eyes half closed.

She straightened and wiped her hands on her apron.

"Well," she said.

"Is she all right?" Willa asked. She was surprised at how steady it came out.

"The pup's fine. It's sleeping. It's nowhere near coming, and it won't be for four months."

Dinah's moaning stopped in the middle of a breath.

"And that blood," said the healer, picking up the unwound bandage between two fingers, "is from her hand. The burn split when she scratched it open. She's smeared it where it'd show."

Nobody said anything.

Dinah lay quite still with her eyes shut.

"Well, it worked once," she said at last, flatly.

She sat up, tucking her hair behind her ear. The pain had gone out of her face.

She looked at Willa, and her eyes were dry.

"I walked for three days," Dinah said. "I had to do something. You wouldn't have opened the gate."

"I'd have opened the gate," said Willa. "You didn't have to bleed on it."

Dinah almost laughed.

"That's the thing about you. You'd have opened it."

She looked at the floor, and at the walls.

She looked at Caelen in the doorway, who looked back at her as he would at a closed door.

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