Wait I'm Pregnant with My Alpha and His First Love's Triplets? Time to Abort & Run novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Three Heartbeats
At the moonstone the healer reads three pups carrying Greywater blood, and Linnea hears her Alpha promise them to his first love; she decides to end it and leave, and finds the gate closed.
The healer dipped three fingers in the bowl of my blood and told the whole pack I was carrying triplets.
Two hundred wolves stood in a ring on the ridge, and for a moment nobody made a sound.
Then the cheering started, and it went on until the stones rang.
I laughed and cried at once, with both hands over my stomach.
Three years of bonding, three years of being called the barren Luna in every kitchen and hallway of the pack house.
Now there were three heartbeats.
My best friend shoved through the crowd and crushed me against her chest.
"You absolute legend," she said into my hair. "I'm going to cook for a week."
Bram stood across the bowl in the torchlight.
He didn't cheer.
His left hand was wrapped in a strip of gauze, the way it was after every full moon.
He had come home from the border patrol with a new cut across that palm again, and he still wouldn't let me clean it.
"It's a scrape, Lin," he'd said that morning, buttoning his shirt. "Whatever the stone says tonight, nothing changes between us. Trust me."
I had trusted him for three years.
Verity Ashdane slipped her arm through mine and pressed a flask into my hand.
She had come from Greywater three months ago as the treaty's witness, and she had made herself useful from the first morning.
She carried my laundry and found me crackers when I was sick.
Every day she brought me a warm tonic with honey in it and stood over me until I finished the cup.
"Last of the batch," she said softly. "Drink up, Luna. You're feeding three now."
I drank it.
It was sweet and a little bitter, like it always was.
The healer lifted her hand and the ring went quiet again.
"The stone is not finished," she said. "There is more in the blood."
She held the bowl up to the torches.
"These pups carry the Alpha's line," she said. "They also carry a second line, braided in at the rite three months ago. The blood of Greywater. The blood of Verity Ashdane."
A murmur went through the pack.
"The old founding rite," an elder said loudly. "Blackthorn and Greywater, one blood again. It's what the treaty always wanted."
"Verity's line in the Luna's belly," a woman near me whispered. "That's the right blood at last."
I looked at Bram.
He was looking at the ground.
Nobody had told me the rite would use anyone's blood but ours.
Bram had called it an old blessing, and I had drunk the moon-water and asked nothing.
Verity squeezed my arm.
"Oh, Linnea, I didn't know it would say it out loud," she said. "I'm so sorry. Please don't be upset."
She sounded exactly like a friend.
I smiled at her because two hundred people were watching.
Then I said I needed air, and I walked around the back of the tallest stone.
I only meant to breathe.
Two voices came through the dark on the other side.
"She doesn't know?" Verity said quietly.
"She doesn't need to," Bram said. His voice was rough. "Not yet. Not until it's done."
"Bram. I'm sorry it has to be this way."
"They're Greywater's the day they're born." He stopped, and I heard him swallow. "I gave my word, and I'll keep it."
I held on to the cold stone with both hands.
The first love.
Everyone in the pack knew about her, the girl he was meant to marry at twenty before his father broke the match.
I had never once asked him about her.
I had thought that was kindness.
Inside me, something fluttered, and then fluttered again, three small movements in a row.
Three pups, and my own mate had just promised every one of them to her.
I thought about the whispers, and the way he had never defended me against a single one.
Maybe he had never needed to, if I was only ever the vessel.
I wasn't going to carry another woman's litter for a man who had traded them away behind my back.
So I decided to end it and leave Blackthorn tonight.
I walked back through the crowd with my smile still pinned on and told Addie, my best friend, that I was exhausted.
I packed one bag in our room, with my mother's ring and the stash of herbs from the infirmary cabinet.
I left my wedding band on his pillow.
At midnight I reached the gate in the border fence, where the road ran down to Marrow Creek.
Burke stood in the middle of it with his arms folded.
He was the Beta, and Bram's oldest friend, and he wouldn't look at me.
"I'm sorry, Lin," he said. "Alpha's order. Nobody takes the Luna past the border until the pups are born."
"When did he give it?"
Burke rubbed the back of his neck.
"An hour ago," he said. "Before the reading was even over."
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