Chapter 1
Lila's POV
I asked him to meet me privately because the words sat heavy in my chest and I couldn’t risk anyone else hearing them first.
We were only sixteen. The training camp was only a short drive from the edge of the forest where we usually met, yet it felt like a different world. He had been gone for weeks already, learning the things Alphas were supposed to learn: control, dominance, the weight of a pack.
I had stayed behind in the ordinary human town that had always been mine, counting the days until he came back for one of our stolen afternoons.
Today I had called him. My voice had been steady on the phone, but my hands had shaken the entire time.
“I need to see you,” I said. “Alone.”
He didn’t ask questions. He never did when my voice sounded like that. An hour later I stood under the old oak at the edge of the clearing we claimed as ours, the late-spring air warm against my skin, and waited.
I heard him before I saw him: soft footsteps, the faint shift of leaves. Then he was there, taller than the last time, broader in the shoulders, the same dark eyes that always found me first. The mate bond hummed between us the moment he stepped close, steady and familiar, like a second heartbeat.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, already reaching for my hand.
I pulled away. Not because I didn’t want his touch, but because I was afraid that if he held me I would lose the courage to speak.
“I need to tell you something.” My throat felt tight. “And I need you not to say anything until I’m finished.”
He nodded once. The bond carried his concern, warm and constant, but he stayed quiet.
I looked at the ground, at the scuffed toes of my sneakers, at anything except his face.
“I’m pregnant.”
The words left me in a rush, small and final.
For a long moment there was only the sound of the wind moving through the oak leaves. I kept my eyes down, waiting for the shift I had rehearsed a hundred times in my head: anger, fear, the sudden distance of someone realizing how young we still were.
I had prepared myself for rejection. I had prepared myself for him to step back and say that this changed everything, that the bond couldn’t hold under the weight of a child we had never planned.
Instead, silence.
When I finally lifted my gaze, he was staring at me. Not with shock. Not with dread. Something softer moved across his face, something almost like wonder.
Then he smiled.
It was the same smile he gave me the first night he told me what he was, wolf and human both, heir to a pack I had never seen, bound to me by a force neither of us fully understood. That smile had made me believe the impossible then. It did the same now.
He stepped closer. His hand rose slowly, carefully, and settled against the flat of my stomach. The contact was light, almost reverent. Through the bond I felt the sudden surge of emotion that wasn’t mine: joy, fierce and bright, tangled with a protectiveness so strong it made my breath catch.
“Our pup,” he said, voice low and rough with feeling. His eyes stayed fixed on the place where his palm rested, as if he could already see the life growing there. “We’re going to have a pup.”
The words landed like a promise, and the look on his face undid something inside me. Fascination. Love. Awe. All of it open and unguarded, as if the news had not frightened him at all but had instead given him something he had been waiting for without knowing it.
“We’re children ourselves,” I whispered. The truth of it pressed against my ribs. Sixteen. Still finishing school. Still learning how to be anything at all. “We don’t even know how to take care of ourselves properly. How are we supposed to—”
“That doesn’t change it.” His thumb moved in a slow circle over the fabric of my shirt. When he looked up, his eyes were shining. “You’re my mate. This baby is ours. Nothing about that is complicated. Not to me.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to list every reason the world would give us for why this was impossible. But the bond between us was steady and certain, and his hand on my stomach felt like the only solid thing in a moment that should have been falling apart.
He drew in a breath, as if the future had suddenly opened in front of him, and then the words began to spill out faster than he could organize them.
“I’ll tell my parents myself,” he said. “As soon as I get back. I’ll explain everything. About you. About the pup. I’ll make them understand that this is real, that you’re mine and I’m yours. Then I’ll leave camp early if I have to and come straight home so I can bring you into the family properly. No hiding. No waiting any longer than we have to.”
The mention of his parents stopped me cold.
In the three months we had been together he had never once spoken of them. Not their names. Not what they were like. Not even the simplest detail about the home he returned to when he left me.
Our time had always been about us: the bond, the forest, the way his wolf settled when I was near. I had asked once, carefully, and he had only smiled and changed the subject. I had assumed the silence meant something private, something he was not ready to share.
Now he was speaking of them as if they were simply the next step, as if introducing me to them was the most natural thing in the world.
“Your parents?” The question came out thinner than I intended. “You’ve never… you never talk about them.”
A flicker of something crossed his face, almost like guilt, but it vanished quickly beneath the same steady resolve.
“I know,” he said. “I should have. I will. But right now what matters is that they meet you the right way. As my mate. As the mother of their grandchild. I won’t let anyone make you feel small for this. I promise.”
The certainty in his voice wrapped around me. I could feel how deeply he meant it through the bond, the fierce protectiveness rising in him like a second pulse. It made my eyes burn.
He kept talking then, quieter at first, then gathering speed, as if each new thought unlocked the next before he could stop himself.
“We’ll choose a name together. Or maybe two names. What if it’s a girl? I think I’d like a girl. But if it’s a boy, that’s fine too. Actually, whatever they are, they’ll have your eyes. I hope they have your eyes. And when the pup is born I’ll hold them first, right after you, so they know the sound of both our hearts. The pack will protect what’s ours. I’ll build us a house near the tree line so you can still see the forest every morning. You’ll never have to be alone in this. Not for a single day. My family will know you. They’ll love you the way I do. And I’ll come back for you. I’ll finish what’s left at camp and then I’m coming straight to you. Wait for me.”
He was rambling. I knew he was. He was talking about a house, names, the pack, our future, as if he’d been waiting his entire life for someone to give him permission to imagine it.
The words tumbled out of him with the kind of breathless excitement that belonged only to someone sixteen and suddenly too happy to shut up. Fascination, love, and awe sat open on his face the whole time, unfiltered and real.
I listened, heart aching with how much I wanted to believe every word. Mostly I just felt the warmth of his hand and the steady pulse of the bond and the knowledge that, for this one afternoon, nothing had broken.
When it was time for him to leave, he kissed my forehead, then my mouth, careful and lingering.
“I just need a little time,” he said against my skin. “A few days. Then I’ll come back for you. Wait for me.”
I looked at him, at the boy who had trusted me with the secret of what he was, who had held my hand the first time his wolf rose close enough for me to feel it, who now looked at me like I had given him something precious instead of something terrifying.
“I will,” I said.
I believed him completely.
I watched him walk away through the trees until the shadows took him. The bond stretched between us, still bright, still unbroken.
I pressed my own hand to my stomach and stood there long after he was gone, holding every promise he had just made, believing with everything I had that I would see him again soon.
