Before I Could Hold Her

The first time my baby moved, I was arguing with a loaf of bread.

“You had one job,” I told the collapsed dough.

Something fluttered low in my stomach.

I stopped with flour on both hands. It happened again, a delicate brush beneath my skin.

“Oh,” I whispered.

Mrs. Pike looked up from the oven. “Did it kick?”

I nodded, unable to speak. She left the bread where it was and stood beside me until I could breathe normally again.

After that, the baby became part of everything. I explained the bakery’s customers while washing pans. I read the same three picture books aloud because I could afford them from the charity shelf. I apologized when we had cabbage twice in one week.

At night I sang the song my mother used to sing while undoing my braids.

Sleep, little wanderer, under the pine.

Morning will find you, and you will be mine.

I did not know whether my child could hear me. Singing made the room less empty.

At six months, under a full moon, I woke with warmth moving through my bones.

My wolf lifted her head somewhere inside me.

It was the clearest I had ever felt her. I stumbled to the mirror and saw silver shining around my pupils. For a moment I could smell the river through the closed window and hear Mrs. Pike turning in her bed below.

Then my daughter rolled beneath my palm, and the warmth gathered around her.

I knew she was a girl by then. A discreet healer two towns over had examined me, accepted cash, and written nothing under the Ellis name. She had warned that a pregnancy involving strong bloodlines sometimes overwhelmed scent-masking herbs.

“Take the smallest effective dose,” she said. “Come back if you feel unwell. And find somewhere safe before your last month.”

I had searched for the hotel stranger through public photographs of visiting Alphas. There were too many territories, too many private gatherings, too many men whose names never appeared beneath their pictures. Asking more directly risked leading Julian to me.

I promised myself I would try again when the baby was born.

Once, I went as far as writing a letter to the hotel. I described the night, the top-floor suite, the healer with silver hair. I asked whether they could forward a message to the guest who had helped me.

Then a notice appeared at the regional exchange seeking information about a missing Ellis heiress. It offered a reward payable through Mercer’s office and described me as unwell.

Mrs. Pike found the notice folded beneath my plate.

“Is that the man you left?”

I nodded.

She read it twice, her expression growing harder.

“Then we don’t ask through anyone he can pay.”

“What if the other man is looking?”

“He may be.”

“What if I’m making it impossible?”

She put the notice down.

“You’re trying to keep a child safe with very little information. You can only choose from what you know.”

I did not send the letter. I kept it beneath the baby clothes, addressed to a man whose name I wished I had asked.

I considered names while sewing blue thread around a white blanket. Maisie was the name my mother had once suggested for a daughter I thought lay far in my future.

“Your grandmother would have spoiled you,” I told my stomach. “You would have loved her.”

At thirty-eight weeks, I moved to a room near the healer’s hospital. Mrs. Pike pressed money into my coat pocket and made me promise to call.

“When this is over,” she said, “you come home if you want to.”

I hugged her so hard she complained about her ribs.

For three days I believed I had made it.

On the fourth, I stepped out of a pharmacy and smelled Celeste’s perfume.

Orange blossom. Expensive powder. The scent of every sleepover we had shared as girls.

I saw her reflected in the glass before she saw my face.

“Nora,” she said softly.

I dropped the paper bag and ran.

Pain pulled across my stomach. I could no longer move quickly without holding its weight. A man appeared at the end of the alley, and I turned onto a service road slick with rain.

“Think about the baby,” Celeste called behind me. “You’re going to hurt it.”

Julian stepped from a car ahead.

“Enough. You have cost me nine months.”

I backed away. My wolf pushed against my ribs, desperate and incomplete. I reached for her, for anything, and managed only a flash of silver across my fingers.

Julian grabbed my coat.

I tore free. Fabric ripped, my heel slid, and the stone edge of a loading ramp struck my side.

For a moment the world vanished into white pain.

Then warm liquid soaked my dress.

I curled both arms around my stomach.

“Please,” I whispered to my daughter. “Stay with me.”

A different engine roared into the street. Doors opened. Men shouted, and the pressure of unfamiliar wolves filled the alley.

Someone knelt beside me, a broad man with a gray streak through his dark hair.

“My name is Gareth. I’m going to help you.”

“They’re behind you.”

He looked over his shoulder. Two of his men moved past us. Julian disappeared behind the car; Celeste’s perfume receded.

Gareth took off his coat and tucked it around me.

“Can you tell me your name?”

A contraction broke the answer apart. I managed the name on my borrowed papers.

“Nell.”

He kept talking while they lifted me. About the hospital. About the rain. About the fact that his sister had once broken his hand during labor and still insisted it was his fault.

I held on to his voice until there were lights above me and someone cutting away wet fabric.

“Who should we call?” a nurse asked.

“Mrs. Pike. Bellweather. The bakery.”

I could not remember the number. Fear had rubbed every digit out of my head.

Labor narrowed the world. There was no room for the hotel, the estate, or the men searching for me. There was only the next breath and the terrible need to get my child safely into the world.

“Again,” the midwife said. “You’re doing well, Nell. One more.”

My daughter arrived just before dawn.

She was furious.

The sound of her crying broke something open in my chest. They laid her against me, damp and warm, with a crease between her tiny eyebrows.

“Maisie,” I whispered. “I’m here.”

Her left hand opened against my skin. A pale crescent marked the inside of her wrist, like mine, like my mother’s.

I kissed it.

“That’s your name?” the midwife asked.

“Her name. Please write it down.”

She repeated it carefully. “Maisie.”

Someone said my blood pressure was falling. Another pair of hands reached for the baby.

“No, wait.”

“We need to look after you. She’ll be right here.”

I tried to keep my eyes open. My daughter’s cry grew distant, then disappeared.

When I woke, afternoon light lay across a different room. My belly felt hollow. There was no cradle beside the bed.

I pressed the call button until a nurse came.

“Where is she?”

“Your daughter is in the observation nursery. She’s doing well. The people who brought you in have contacted their Alpha. He’s coming from overseas.”

“I want to see her.”

“I’ll find someone to help you over.”

She left the door ajar.

A moment later, from the corridor, Celeste said, “Her name may be Nell Reed. Her fiancé is very worried.”