The Clinic Swapped My Donor, So a Billionaire Alpha Fathered My Baby novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: First Night

Marit's POV

At sixteen weeks I could no longer pretend I was only eating a lot of bread.

The belly had arrived on a Tuesday, a small hard curve under my scrubs.

By Friday three nurses at the hospice had asked me when I was due.

I came home to Medina at six in the morning after a night with a dying man who wanted to talk about his dog.

Anselm was at the end of my corridor again, on his side of the line, in a grey sweater with his hands in his pockets.

"I know the rules," he said. "I'm not crossing. I'd like to tell you where I was Tuesday night."

"I know where you were."

"You do?"

"Your Beta tells Wynne everything. Wynne tells me." I leaned on the doorframe, because my back had started in. "You went to the Hall without me."

"Yes."

"You went behind my back."

"Yes," he said. "I'd do it again. I wanted to hear her say it before I asked you to hear it from me."

He told me.

All of it, standing in the corridor with his hands in his pockets, in the same level voice he had used on the clinic director.

He left nothing out, not even the part where he had believed her.

I waited for the lie to show.

It never did.

"She wants the pup under her roof," he said. "She wants you under it too, and I think she wants what you have, whatever she can do with it."

"What I have," I said.

"I won't let her near it," he said.

"You can't stop your mother," I said.

"I stopped her in your kitchen. I'll stop her again."

I looked at him for a long time.

He had stood in my corridor for an hour at dawn to say this.

He hadn't asked me for one thing, not forgiveness, not a hand on his arm.

"Come in," I said.

He crossed the line.

I watched him do it, one slow step, and then I shut the door behind us and leaned on it.

"Before you say anything," I said, "I have to tell you something, and then I have to say something, and you can't say a word until I finish."

"All right."

"At nineteen I lived in a pack in the Montana hills. My father died in the spring, and by summer the Alpha filed a hearth-claim on my mother and me. She was forty. He was sixty-one. He needed a girl to give his line pups."

His face did not move.

"My mother got me out of the window the night before the hearing," I said. "I never saw her again. She died three years after, and I didn't hear it for another year. That's what a hearth-claim is, Anselm. It's a word for what happened to me."

"Marit," he said.

"I'm not done. Gunnar has seven women. I looked it up."

"I know," he said. "My mother has a list."

"I'm not afraid of you," I said. "I want you to understand that. I'm afraid of anyone who has a word that works on me, and then I'm standing in your hall with a word that works on you, and I've been awake for two weeks trying to find the place where I'm not the thing I ran from."

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