Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 77952 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 390(@200wpm)___ 312(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77952 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 390(@200wpm)___ 312(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
“I’m sorry. I was scared to wait in the car.” He steps out of the shade, and we make our way to a point between us. I’m about to apologize again when a soft whimper cuts through the air. It’s so pitiful that I stop mid-step.
“What’s that?” I ask, already stepping in the direction. Finn puts his arm out as if to stop me, but I’m close enough to see a small writhing shape under a looming, wide-trunked tree.
It’s furry and gray with a pointed muzzle. A lot like the wolf creature that came into the cabin last night. Does this baby belong to him?
“Is it a wolf?” I ask, as Finn moves level with me.
“Yes.”
When I glance at him, his jaw tightens in a way that’s more like Nixon than I’ve seen.
He kneels, and the creature looks up, its nose rising, scenting the air. Finn places a hand gently beside it, but he doesn’t touch it, and I don’t understand why.
My chest constricts. I limp forward, crutch abandoned, compelled by instinct. I bend and scoop it into my arms. It’s tiny, trembling, its body is cool, and its fur is matted and wet. It’s clearly in distress. Why is it alone?
“Finn—please,” I whisper, pressing it tight against my chest, feeling the chill through its damp coat. Its whining breaks my heart.
He stares at me, his face pale and stunned. “Scarlet… don’t… You shouldn’t have…”
But I’m already holding it like a newborn, rocking it gently. “It’s so cold.”
The whimper becomes a twitch, then a shudder, and under my fingers, something shifts. Fur ripples into soft skin, paws shrink into tiny fists. A gasp escapes me as the cub arches its back, and suddenly, it’s not a cub. It’s a baby.
A human, pink-cheeked, red-haired, tiny and bewildered, putting a thumb to her sweet pink lips, blinking up at me with eyes that search my face.
Finn stands, arms flaring out like he’s ready to catch but also ready to recoil.
I press the girl closer, wrapping her in the folds of my shirt. Her hair is damp and scented with a powdery baby smell that ripples through me like an ache I can’t explain.
“What…”
Finn shakes his head, as disbelieving as I am.
“What the hell is going on?” I continue, voice shaking.
Around us, forest sounds press in, but all I can hear is the baby’s quiet inhale, and the sharp intake of breath from the man who seems as shocked as I am at the transformation that happened before our eyes.
Or is he?
19
FINN
My breath catches somewhere between disbelief and wonder as Scarlet cradles the trembling bundle against her chest, revealing the delicate curve of a baby’s cheek and a mop of red hair matted against damp skin.
A girl. A female shifter.
A miracle no one in our pack has ever seen. So rare, I stare, unable to comprehend.
For a long moment, the entire forest seems to hush around us, the air tightening as though nature is drawing itself taller.
The child smells like clean earth, milk, and the first wild bloom of spring. She smells like Aura, Gregory’s mate and an unfamiliar wolf scent. Over a year ago, Gregory’s mate from the neighboring territory was brutally attacked, her body broken and her spirit shattered. Sharp-edged whispers ran through the pack like wildfire. Gregory did nothing to avenge the attack, and Aura was kept out of sight.
The cub is her child. It makes sense, but it also rips my throat out.
To leave the cub behind in such circumstances isn’t unusual. The wounds, the danger, the shame… the cruelty of pack politics demand it. This miracle child was left behind, tucked away in the woods, a sin too unbearable to claim.
But all I can do is stare.
Scarlet presses her lips to the baby’s temple, her face pale with a kind of awe that hooks into my heart. She holds the child not like a stranger, but like a mother, like someone who has already decided the shape of love and wrapped it around this baby like armor.
“We have to take her to the police,” she says, and though her voice trembles, there’s quiet steel through every syllable. “We can’t leave a baby out here. Not alone.”
“Scarlet, she—” My voice falters under the weight of that single syllable. She. It feels foreign on my tongue, almost sacrilegious. I’ve never said it in this context. Never had to.
She looks at me with wide eyes, waiting for me to make sense of the world that’s upended itself in her arms.
“She’s not human,” I manage to say, though the words taste like ash. “She’s... a wolf baby.”
Scarlet’s gaze flares. “Then why’s she human now?”
The baby lets out a soft sigh, a contented little sound that guts me clean through.
I don’t answer, because there is no answer. Scarlet knows nothing of our kind, of the shifting and the bloodlines and the rules older than memory. But she’s seen what she’s seen. She held a wolf cub in her hands and watched it become a child. And that kind of truth has carved something new into her understanding of what’s possible.