NORA

They came for me at first light just like he said they would.

I had not slept. I had sat on the edge of that hospital bed through the entire night with my hands folded in my lap and my eyes fixed on the wall in front of me and my mind going over and over everything that had happened until the words and the faces and the memory of Lena walking out with my baby blurred together into one long continuous ache that never once let up.

When the door opened and two guards stepped in I did not even flinch. I had been expecting them. I stood up slowly, with one hand pressed against my abdomen, and I followed them out without a word, there was nothing left to say to anyone in this place.

They walked me through the hospital corridors and every nurse, every maid and every pack member we passed along the way looked at me and then looked away. Not one of them held my gaze.

Not one of them said anything. They all just turned their faces and found something else to look at and let me walk past them like I was already gone.

We came out through the main hospital doors and the morning air hit me cold and sharp and I pulled what little I had around me and kept walking.

I could see the pack gates ahead.

And I could see that it was not just the guards waiting there.

The entire pack had gathered.

I stopped walking for just a second when I saw them all standing there, dozens of faces spread out across the grounds near the gate, and then one of the guards pressed a hand against my back and kept me moving forward and I understood then that this had been arranged.

That Kael had made sure there would be an audience for this. That walking me out quietly through a side entrance in the early morning would not have been enough for him. He needed everyone to see it.

I kept my head up. I do not know where I found the strength to do that but I did.

I walked toward those gates with both guards beside me and the faces of my pack watching from every side and I kept my eyes forward and my chin level and I breathed through every step.

Then Lena's voice cut through the morning air like a blade.

"There she is."

She was standing near the front of the crowd with Kael beside her and her voice was loud and clear and designed to carry. Every head that had been turned in my direction turned further.

"She tried to take the baby," Lena announced, her voice ringing out across the grounds.

"After everything that was done for her. After being taken in and given a roof and a place in this pack. She tried to steal the alpha's child."

Murmuring moved through the crowd like a wave.

"That is not true," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected it to. "That baby came out of my body. You cannot steal what already belongs to you."

"She is lying," Lena said simply, turning to the crowd the way someone turns to an audience they have already won over. "She was found trying to leave the pack with the child in the early hours. The alpha's heir. She had to be stopped."

"I never touched that baby." My voice rose now and I could not stop it. "I was never even allowed to hold him. I woke up and he was already gone and you know that. Every person standing here who was at that hospital last night knows that."

Nobody spoke up.

I looked out at all those faces. People I had lived among for years. People I had seen every day in those halls and at those meals and at those ceremonies. And not one of them opened their mouth.

Kael stepped forward then. He did not raise his voice. He never needed to.

"You are being removed from this pack effective immediately," he said, looking at me with that same flat unbothered calm he had shown me in the hospital room. "Not just for the attempted abduction. For being a threat to the stability of this pack and to the safety of its members."

"You are doing this because you are afraid," I said, and I looked straight at him when I said it. "You are afraid of what I know and what I saw and what I could tell people if I stayed."

Something moved in his eyes. Just for a second.

"Take her out," he said to the guards.

They grabbed my arms and I pulled against them on instinct, I desperately wanted to grab my child , maybe touch the child.

"I gave birth to that child!" My voice broke open completely now and I did not care anymore who heard it or what they thought of it.

"I carried him and I delivered him and you took him from me while I was unconscious and you are standing here calling me a thief in front of people who know exactly what you did!"I yelled, with tears streaming down my eyes.

"All I wanted was to be with my child, why are you being so cruel? I am your mate"

" Ex mate"Lena corrected.

Her eyes burned with rage, as she signaled the guards to drag me off.

The guards dragged me forward and my feet scraped against the ground and the faces of the pack blurred past me on both sides and through it all not one person moved. Not one person took a single step in my direction.

The gates opened.

They pushed me through and the cold outside hit me all at once and I stumbled and caught myself and turned back around just as the gates began to close.

Kael was watching from where he stood. Lena had her hand through his arm and she was smiling the way someone smiles when they have gotten exactly what they wanted and taken their time enjoying every second of it.

Slowly,I watched them close the gates.

The sound of them shutting was the loudest thing I had ever heard in my life.

I stood there on the outside of everything I had ever known with nothing in my hands and nowhere to go and the cold wrapping itself around me like it already knew I was alone.

I turned away from those gates because looking at them was not going to open them back up.

NORA

I turned to walked out of the pack as I said,

"My baby, I'll come back to get you!"

That was the only thought I had when those gates closed behind me and the sound of them shutting echoed through the cold morning air and faded into nothing. I did not have a plan. Neither did I have a direction.

I did not have anything except the clothes on my back and a body that had given birth less than two days ago and had no business being out in this kind of cold.

The snow started coming down not long after I left the border. Slow at first, light flakes that melted the moment they touched my skin, and then heavier, thicker.

My feet were already numb inside my thin shoes and the cold was climbing up my legs and settling into my joints and making every step harder than the one before it.

My abdomen was still throbbing. That deep interior ache that came from being cut open and stitched back together was still very much present and the walking was not helping it.

Every time my foot hit the ground a jolt of pain moved through my lower body and I breathed through it and kept going because stopping meant sitting down in the snow and sitting down in the snow meant not getting back up.

I thought about my baby with every step.

I don't even know his name. I don't know if Kael had named him already or if Lena had or if they had done it together over his small head while I was lying unconscious in that hospital room.

I don't know what he looked like beyond the brief and blurry impression I had gotten in the chaos of the delivery room. I don't know if he was sleeping well or eating well or if anyone was holding him the way a baby needs to be held.

That not knowing was its own kind of pain that had nothing to do with the cold or the wound in my abdomen or the exhaustion pulling at every part of me.

I wiped the snow from my face and kept walking.

The trees grew denser the further I moved from the pack border. The path I had been following gradually disappeared under the snow and I was moving through open forest now, bare branches above me and thick white ground below and silence everywhere except for the sound of my own breathing and my own footsteps and the occasional crack of a branch somewhere in the dark of the trees.

I don't know whose territory I was moving into.

That thought occurred to me somewhere in the back of my mind but I pushed it aside because the alternative was turning back and turning back was not something I was capable of.

There was nothing behind me anymore. Whatever was ahead of me, no matter how uncertain or how dangerous, was the only direction that existed now.

One moment I was moving through the trees alone and the next something slammed into me from the left with enough force to knock me sideways into the snow. I hit the ground hard on my side and the impact tore through my abdomen like fire and I cried out before I could stop myself.

I rolled and pushed myself up and they were already circling me.

Three of them. Large wolves, grey and brown, their eyes fixed on me with the focused intensity of animals defending something they considered theirs.

Border wolves.

I understood immediately what had happened. I had crossed into their alpha's territory without permission and they had been sent to handle exactly this kind of intrusion.

"I am not a threat," I said, which was almost laughable given the state I was in. "I am just passing through. I have nowhere to go."

They did not respond to words. Neither,did they slow their circling.

The first one came at me and I dropped to one side and felt its teeth graze my arm as it passed.

The second came right behind it and I threw myself backward.I landed in the snow again and the pain in my abdomen exploded so violently that my vision went white at the edges.

I got back up.

I do not know how. My body had nothing left to give and the rational part of my mind was fully aware of that fact.

The thought of dying and not seeing my child pushed me back onto my feet and kept me there.

The same thing that had kept me walking through the snow for hours. The same thing that had made me hold my head up while walking through that crowd at the pack gates.

The same thoughts,that refused to go down quietly even when going down quietly would have been so much easier.

The third wolf circled wide and came from behind and I turned just in time and caught it with enough force to make it stumble and it fell back snarling.

They regrouped and came at me together this time.

I went down.

This time,I could not get back up.

My arms gave out when I tried and my abdomen was screaming and the snow beneath me was warm in the places where the wound had opened back up and I lay there with my cheek pressed against the cold ground and my breathing coming in short ragged pulls and I looked up at the three of them standing over me and I thought about my baby one more time.

I thought about holding him. Just once. Just long enough to let him know that I had wanted him. That none of what happened was because I had not wanted him.

My eyes were closing on their own.

The wolves went still.

Then they stepped back.

All three of them at once, and silence fell over the forest that was completely different from the silence that had been there before. It was Heavier. I could feel it,even through the fog of pain and exhaustion that was pulling me under.

Then a scent reached me before anything else did.It was Warm and deep and layered with something that cut straight through the cold and the pain and the fear and reached into the most hidden part of me and pulled.

I forced my eyes open one last time.

He was standing at the edge of the trees looking down at me with dark eyes that caught what little light existed in that grey morning and held it.

And then the word came. Rising up from somewhere so deep inside me I had not known it was there until this moment.

"Mate."

His lips parted.

"Mate."

And then the darkness took me completely.

RAPHAEL

I turned to one of my men and asked if they had found out anything about what had gone down with her in that forest. He shook his head slowly. A long breath left me.

"Get out of my sight. And before you do, dig into everything there is to know about her. I want to know how she ended up in that forest and who gave the order to have her killed." I said sternl, without looking away from the woman lying broken and still on that hospital bed.

My mother had pushed me past my limit again that evening.

The same argument that never went anywhere. She wanted me to pick a chosen mate. She said the moon goddess had not given me one and the pack could not keep waiting.

I had sat through every word of it and walked out the moment she was done because there was nothing left for me to say that I had not already said a hundred times before.

The forest was where I always went when the walls started closing in. Shifting and hunting was the only thing that had ever been able to reach into the noise inside my head and pull it out by the root.

After that conversation with my mother I needed it more than I usually did. I shifted and I ran and I let the trees swallow everything up around me.

Her scent found me before I found her.

It stopped me where I stood.It was so deep and immediate that my whole body responded to it before my mind could even catch up with what was happening.

My mate. She was somewhere close. Much closer than I had expected. And beneath that scent was something else threading through it, her fear, it was alive and urgent and it was pressing into me through the bond that had not even fully formed yet.

I tore through the trees in the direction the scent was pulling me, feeling the bond tighten with every step, her breathing reaching me through it like I had always been meant to hear. It was ragged and desperate and coming apart at the edges.

What I saw when I broke through the trees made my blood go cold and then immediately hot.

A man had her. He was throwing her into a tree and she hit it and crumpled and he was already moving over her again even as she lay there barely able to lift her head.

His mouth was going and his hands were reaching and he had not even slowed down.

My wolf lunged inside me with so much force that I took everything I had to hold him back long enough to stay upright.

Nobody comes into my territory and touches what belongs to me. Not a stranger.

Definitely,not someone who woke up this morning thinking they could walk into my land and put their hands on my mate and walk back out again.

"How dare you come into my territory and lay your hands on what is mine." I let the horror words leave my mouth as I moved through every one of them like a current.

The man who had been standing over her went down to the floor in a second , both hands pressed together in front of him with my whole body trembling.

"We had no intention of crossing your border. It was not planned. Please forgive us." He could barely hold the words together. He was shaking so hard.

His people dropped behind him doing the same thing.

"Damn it." I growled low, my eyes moving to her on the ground, taking in the state of her, the fear still sitting on her face even now as she looked up at me.

I had thought about making it slow. The sight of her down there took that thought away from me.

"Give my regards to whoever is waiting for you when you get there. And when you come back in your next life keep your hands off women." I sent them down one after the other after my last word and I did not stop until every one of them was flat on the ground and the only sound left in that forest was her breathing.

I growled at what they had done. At the state they had reduced her to.

She was completely powerless on that ground, her body barely holding on, and then I watched her lips part and what came out of them reached into something inside me that I had not known was there.

"Mate." It was barely a whisper. I said it back at the same moment and she closed her eyes and everything in her went still.

The panic that hit me was immediate,it's causes shivers to run down my spine as I went down beside her and got her into my arms and I came out of that forest running like I had never run in my life.

I couldn't believe what was happening, I finally found my mate after a long time and she was in a critical condition.

I had spent so long waiting.

And now she was in my arms and she was leaving at the same time and the idea of losing her before I could even get to keep her was something I couldn't handle .

Definitely not when , my pack depends on this .

"Daniel" I called his name through the mindlink with everything I had.

"Alpha, something is wrong, your breathing is all over the place, what has happened?" He responded immediately, already catching the state I was in.

"Have the hospital ready before I get there. Emergency patient coming in right now. Every piece of equipment you have, get it out." I used my alpha tone and he cut the link and moved.

I ran until the hospital came into view and Daniel came rushing out through the doors and lifted her from my arms and had her on the bed before I had fully stopped moving.

The look on his face when he saw her was not one that settled anything in me. He worked fast, syringes going in, wounds being cleaned, moving through her injuries with a speed and focus that told me everything about how serious it was without him opening his mouth once.

I was in a state of confusion,when my eyes found the wound on her lower abdomen.

It was deep and it was still bleeding and my wolf made a sound inside me that I never want to hear again.

Daniel stepped back when he was done and she lay there against the bed with old tears dried on her face and fresh ones finding their way out from beneath her closed eyes even while she slept.

"My baby. Give me my pup. I gave birth to him." These words broke out of her in pieces, it came from somewhere so deep inside her that I couldn't help, but wonder what she must have gone through to be in this state and what happened to her.

"My alpha, whatever she has been through has left her subconscious in a state of deep pain and hurts. The fear and the pain she is carrying are going to stay with her for a long time." Daniel spoke, carefully and I felt my heart drop inside my chest when he said these words.

"Is she going to pull through this?"I asked , as I tried to surge in my anger while glaring sympathetically at her.

"She will be fine provided the environment around her does not pile onto what she is already dealing with." Daniel gave me one last look and walked out.

I stayed and watched her wrestle with whatever was happening inside her own head and I felt every second of it myself.

****

I could not stop moving.

I paced through my study room with the anger in me refusing to settle no matter how many times I walked the same stretch of floor.

The questions kept turning over.

Who were those people? How did they end up in my forest? What had already been done to her before she ever reached my border and who the fuck gave an order hurt her?

That wound on her abdomen did not come from running through trees. It was a raw wound, and it's from a deep cut .

"We still have nothing on her. Nothing on her pack either." Damon,my beta came through the door and paused, his voice caused me to pause on my thoughts.

"They put their hands on her. They were going to take her life. Who does something like that and thinks there will be no answer for it." I rounded on him and he let out a long breath.

"She will tell you everything herself once she opens her eyes. You need to stop letting this eat you alive. She is going to come through this." He moved closer and looked at me steadily in the way that had always had an effect on me even when I did not want it to.

"There is also another thing." He paused for a moment. "The council. They are pushing for an urgent meeting. The chosen mate situation again."

"I already found her." I cut across him before he could get any further and he gave a slow nod.

"Pass the word along. There will be no chosen mate. Their Luna is already inside this pack right now and she will be presented to them when she is back on her feet."I commanded, without a single trace of remorse.

"You need to rest. You look like you have been running since you carried her in and wearing a path on this floor is not going to bring her around any sooner." He stated,choosing his words carefully.

"My mate is not dying." I turned on him the instant that word came out.

"Nobody used that word. I said rest." He did not move back. "She wakes up, we sit with her, we get every answer we need. But tearing yourself apart before any of that happens is not doing her any good."He advised, his words somehow surges deep into me .

"If you had not put every one of those men in the ground we would have our answers already." Damon said,under his breath and sighed.

"They tortured her. They were going to violate her." I held his gaze. "They got exactly what they deserved and I would do it again."

Damon kept his mouth closed after that.

Then the door opened and Daniel was standing in it and the expression on his face was not the same one he had been wearing all evening.

"My alpha." He took a breath. "She is awake."