My Alpha's Mistress Mistook His Sister for His Pregnant Luna novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Pup

Joanna's POV

They laid him on my chest, wet and furious and small.

He had a wrinkled red face, a fuzz of dark hair, and his fists were clenched at his ears.

The healer rubbed him down with a towel, and he screamed his way through it.

"There," she said. "He's loud. Loud is good."

"He's four pounds," the doctor said, bent over a scale. "Four pounds and two ounces, at thirty weeks. I have never seen a lung like it."

I put my finger against his palm, and his fist opened and closed on it.

His eyes cracked open.

They were gray, like his father's, and they found my face at once.

I waited for him to speak in my head.

He didn't.

His mouth worked, and a thin, rough sound came out of it.

"Mom."

The room stopped.

The healer's towel dropped.

"Did he..." the doctor said.

"Mom," my son said again, out loud, in a voice no bigger than a thread. "You didn't take the step."

I started to cry so hard I couldn't see him.

"No," I said. "I didn't."

"Good."

"Are you okay? Are you hurting?"

"I'm cold," he said. "And hungry. And I smell Dad number two. He's bleeding. Make someone fix him."

Torin, on his knees beside the bed with his shoulder wrapped in a bandage, made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else.

"My shoulder is bandaged," he said, very low. "The doctor is stitching the other one right now."

"Dad number one?"

"Caleb," I said. "He's alive. The knife missed the liver by an inch."

"Good," my son said. "I'm still mad at him. But good."

He closed his eyes and fell asleep with his hand around my finger.

Nobody in that room said a word for a long time.

Six weeks later the doctor said I could get out of bed.

Caleb had gone to a convalescent house in the hills, by his own request, and had asked that no one tell me which one.

The driver sat in a Council cell, and Poppy's pup was growing in a ward down the hall under the protection of two women who did not like Poppy and took good care of the baby anyway.

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