chapter 1

Lucy POV

"Luna Lucy, you're pregnant."

The pack doctor's words sounded so unreal, as though they were spoken from a distant dream.

My chest immediately tightened, my fingers trembling as they curled into the edge of the chair. The stark clinical room suddenly felt suffocating, the air too heavy to breathe.

“Pregnant?” The word rolled off my tongue, foreign and weightless. It couldn’t be real at all. It shouldn’t be real atleast, even though have been waiting for this moment like forever.

“Yes,” the doctor confirmed, her voice calm but firm, as though she had uttered the words a hundred times before.

“You’re pregnant, Luna.”

I blinked at her, searching her expression for any sign that she was joking to me.

A cruel mistake? A misdiagnosis? Surely, it wasn’t true. My heart beat wildly in my chest, hammering against my ribcage like it was trying to escape already.

“Are you sure about that?” My voice wavered, my hands gripping the armrests of the chair tightly.

Without hesitation, the doctor handed me the scan results.

The proof stared back at me in black and white.

It was undeniable at this point. The faint outline of life inside me, a miracle.

I was actually pregnant.

For a moment, the room spun, and I felt as though the world had tilted off its axis.

After good five long, agonizing years of waiting to have a baby of my own.

Five years of shame, whispers, and pitying glances. Five years of wondering if I was broken, if I was unworthy of being a Luna of a pack, of being a mother for the Beta.

Now, at last, I had the answer I had been praying for over the years.

“I... I don’t know what to say,” I whispered, tears pooling in my eyes at this point.

A mixture of joy and disbelief flooded my heart at almost same time.

I gently placed a hand on my stomach, the thought that something so precious was growing within me almost too much to bear.

The doctor’s face softened, her voice taking on a soothing tone.

“It’s still early, but everything looks healthy and good. Congratulations, Luna.”

I nodded absently, my mind racing with anxiety.

What would this mean for me? For my mate? For the whole pack?

The joy was quickly tempered by a creeping unease. Not all pregnancies in the pack were celebrated equally though. Not every mate reacted with happiness to such news. I knew the traditions, the unspoken rules that governed our world. Would he be happy? Would he... care?

The thought sent a chill down my spine.

As I stood to leave, my legs felt shaky, as if the weight of the news had rendered them weak. The doctor gave me some parting instructions, but her voice was drowned out by the storm of emotions raging in my head.

I left the clinic, the scan result clutched tightly in my hand. The cold breeze outside did little to cool the flush on my cheeks. I looked down at the paper again, as if to reassure myself that it was real.

Pregnant. I was pregnant.

I should have been ecstatic. I should have been running to tell him. But instead, doubt and fear gnawed at the edges of my joy.

Five years without a child hadn’t just been a test of patience, it had been a test of our mate bond. A bond that had started with love and devotion but had grown strained with every passing year. His words still echoed in my mind.

“If you can’t give me an heir, what’s the point of all this?”

He had said it in anger, during one of our worst fights, but it had cut deeper than any physical wound on me .

I knew he had resented me for years, though he tried to hide it behind a mask of duty.

Would this change things at this point? Would it bring us closer, or drive us further apart?

I hurried back to the packhouse, my heart pounding with every step I made. The halls felt colder than usual, the weight of the secret I carried pressing heavily on my shoulders.

When I reached my room, I closed the door behind me, leaning against it for support. I stared at the scan result again, my emotions swirling in a chaotic storm.

Finally, I allowed myself to smile, a small, hopeful smile. This was my moment, my miracle. No matter what happened next, no one could take this away from me.

But as I turned to place the scan result on the bedside table, my hand froze mid-air. A scent lingered in the room, faint but unmistakable.

It wasn’t mine.

It wasn’t his, either.

My stomach sank, a cold dread replacing the warmth that had filled me just moments ago

. Slowly, I turned my head, scanning the room for any sign of disturbance. My gaze fell on the bed, and my breath caught in my throat.

A single, unfamiliar item lay on the sheets.

A scarf.

It was delicate, feminine, and reeked of a scent I didn’t recognize.

The scan result slipped from my fingers, fluttering to the ground like a dying leaf.

My heart clenched, my mind racing to make sense of what I was seeing. The implications were clear, but I refused to believe them.

No. It couldn’t be. Not now. Not when everything was finally falling into place.

I looked around the whole apartment while trying to get something to understand, what I never wanted to do was to reveal that I was pregnant already.

At this point, I hated myself.

But deep down, I knew.

Something was wrong.

Something was very wrong.