The Clinic Swapped My Donor, So a Billionaire Alpha Fathered My Baby novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Mother of the Hall

Hedda Strandberg offers Marit a nursery, a household and a name in her own kitchen, and the offer reads as a threat; Anselm tells his mother to leave, and she looks at Marit's belly and says, 'It has already begun.'

Hedda Strandberg did not ask to come in.

She took her coat off in my front hall and hung it on the hook beside my mother's cedar chest.

She walked into my kitchen and sat down at the head of my table.

Nobody had ever sat at the head of my table, because it was a table for two.

"Mother," Anselm said. "How did you know?"

"The clinic called the Hall at noon, dear," she said. "It's an Alpha's vault. They're obliged to tell the household."

"They were obliged to tell me."

"And they did, and you drove across the bridge with your jaw set. I had you followed. You should be glad I did."

She smiled at me.

It was a beautiful smile, well kept and perfectly even.

"Miss Falkner," she said. "May I call you Marit?"

"No," I said.

Wynne made a sound into her sleeve.

Hedda's smile did not change.

"Marit, then," she said. "I'll be brief. I'm sixty-three, and I've waited a long time for this house to have a child in it. I'd like to make you an offer."

"I've heard Anselm's."

"Anselm is a man," she said. "Men offer rooms. I'm offering a household."

She laid her hands on my table.

"A nursery wing at the Hall with its own garden. A pack doctor who has delivered four generations. A staff. A name for the child that no Alpha in the Cascades can question, and a place at the table for its mother."

"And my house?"

"Would be rented to a nice family," Hedda said. "You wouldn't need it."

I looked at my mother's kettle.

"You've done your homework," I said.

"Two hours' worth." She said it gently. "You're thirty-one. You came to this city at nineteen from Montana, in a hurry, and you have never joined a pack or kept a lease past a year until this house. Your mother is dead. You have no hearth. By Moot law that makes you unhearthed, and an unhearthed mother carrying an Alpha's pup is a gift to any Alpha with a hand out."

My stomach turned over.

She had said it very quietly, and all of it was true.

"That's a threat," I said.

"That's the law," Hedda said. "I'm showing you the only door that's locked from the inside."

Anselm had started walking while she spoke.

He crossed the kitchen to the window and back, and again, with his hands clenched behind him.

"Anselm," I said. "Stop pacing."

He stopped.

He stopped mid-stride with one foot lifted, and he put it down very slowly on my linoleum.

He didn't look at me.

Hedda did.

She turned her head and looked at her son, and then at me, and her eyes narrowed by the smallest degree.

I felt it on my skin.

"You have a lot of confidence in my kitchen," I said to her, loudly, to make the feeling go away. "You walk in, you sit down, and you tell me the law is a door you're holding shut. I'm saying no."

"You haven't heard the rest."

"I don't need to."

"There's a pension for your friend," Hedda said, glancing at Wynne's Crocs. "She's an ER nurse. A human who knows about us is a liability, you understand, unless she is provided for."

Wynne's mouth opened.

I stood up.

I had not planned to.

"Get out of my house," I said.

"Marit."

"You can say the word human to me again in your own kitchen, Mrs. Strandberg. In mine, you can leave."

I saw Anselm's head come up.

He looked at his mother for the first time since she'd sat down.

"Mother," he said. "Leave."

"Anselm."

"Now. You were not invited, and you've said what you came to say."

I watched her weigh it.

She had run a pack of two hundred wolves for thirty years.

Nobody in that time had told her no in a plain voice.

She rose.

She put her hands into her coat sleeves one at a time without hurrying.

She took her bag from the cedar chest and checked her pearls in my mother's hall mirror.

"We'll speak at the Hall," she told her son. "When you're thinking."

"I am thinking."

"Of course you are, darling."

She opened the blue door.

The street lamp lit the side of her face, silver hair and a straight, composed mouth.

She turned.

Her eyes went to my stomach, to the small hard curve under my sweater that nobody had noticed yet, and stayed there.

Then they went to her son, standing where I had stopped him in the middle of my kitchen.

"Oh," Hedda Strandberg said, very softly.

It wasn't aimed at either of us.

It was the sound of someone who had waited a long time and been rewarded.

"It has already begun."

She went down the path to her silver car, and neither of us said anything until the engine had gone.

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend