My Alpha Found a New Love novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Two Heartbeats

I opened my mouth to answer her.

Nothing came out.

I tried to count backward, and I couldn't make the weeks line up.

The anniversary.

The run.

The ceremony.

The packless ache under my ribs, and then the bond, and then the fog of the last seven days, so loud I hadn't heard anything else.

"I don't know," I said.

Solveig's eyes got very bright.

"Healer," she said, without turning around. "Here. Now."

The Kingsfall healer was still on the steps, wiping her hands after Haakon.

She came down into the gravel and looked at Solveig's face, and then at mine, and didn't ask anything.

She took my wrist.

Then she leaned in close, right there in the yard with half the pack around us, and put her ear flat against my stomach through the coat.

The crowd went quiet around us in a ring.

I stood there in the fog with blood drying on my shoulder and an old woman holding my arm and a stranger's ear on my belly.

It took a long time.

Long enough that I stopped breathing.

Then the healer straightened up.

"Two," she said.

"Two what?"

"Heartbeats. Yours, and a little fast one under it."

She smiled, all of a sudden, a wide crooked smile I'd never seen on her.

"Three weeks, give or take. A good strong one. It didn't care at all that you fought in the circle this morning, which is a miracle, and you're not doing it again."

I couldn't feel my legs.

"I can't," I said. "I'm... five years. Five years, and nothing. Everybody said."

"Everybody was wrong." The healer shrugged. "There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with your den. There never was."

She jerked her chin at the gate, where the gravel road was empty now.

"I'd look at the other half of that den, if I cared. I don't."

Solveig let go of my arm and clapped her hands together once, hard.

"I knew it," she said. "I smelled it on you at the challenge. I thought, that's not fear, that's milk."

"You did not."

"I did. I'm taking full credit."

Espen came shoving through the crowd.

"What? What happened? Why is everybody looking at... Kari, why are you crying?"

"I'm not crying."

"You're crying a lot."

Solveig told him.

My little brother stood still in the gravel for one second with his mouth open.

Then he threw his head back and howled.

A real wolf howl, out of a human throat, up into the fog.

And then every young wolf in that yard was howling with him, and then all of Kingsfall was, until the cliff rang with it, and I stood in the middle of it with my hands over my face, laughing so hard I couldn't breathe.

He was supposed to be asleep when I went up.

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