Chapter 3 THE SECRET IN SEATTLE*

AMARA QUINN*

I didn't go back to Ballard after Aspen.

I couldn't. The apartment smelled like Aunt Rosa's bleach and the laundry downstairs. The walls were thin. And my chest hurt. It wasn't just emotional. The rejection had left an actual wound.

When Ethan said those words - "I reject you" - something inside me tore. I felt it. A golden thread snapping. My wolf, who had only been alive for two weeks, had gone silent. I couldn't feel her at all. I kept putting my hand over my heart on the bus from Aspen to Denver to Seattle, trying to feel her breathing, and there was nothing. Just cold.

Aunt Rosa was working a night shift at Harborview when I got back. She left me a note on the fridge: "Leftover lasagna. Don't wait up. - R"

I threw up the lasagna. Then I threw up again.

That had been happening for three days. Since Aspen. I thought it was the pain. I thought it was grief. I thought it was because I had walked two miles in the snow in a server uniform and gotten frostbite on my toes.

On the fourth day, I was in the bathroom of the tiny apartment, staring at my pale face in the cracked mirror, and I realized my period was late. Two weeks late.

No. No no no.

I did the math. My eighteenth birthday party. Seattle Prep had a bonfire at Golden Gardens for the seniors who turned eighteen. The pack kids brought moonshine that was actually moonshine - brewed for wolves. I had never had my wolf before. That night, my wolf had come out for the first time, wild and shaking and terrified and so, so lonely. I had run into the woods behind the beach.

There was a boy there. I didn't see his face. It was dark. He smelled like pine and snow and expensive cologne and something that made my new wolf whine and press close. Glacier ice. Like Ethan, but not Ethan. Older? I didn't know. He held me when I shifted back, shaking and naked and crying because shifting hurts the first time. He wrapped his jacket around me. He said, "You're okay, little wolf. I've got you."

I don't remember much after that. I remember warmth. I remember wanting to not feel cold and alone. I remember his hands, his mouth on my neck, not biting, just breathing. I remember thinking, for a second, that I wasn't invisible.

I told myself it was a dream. A weird, hazy, wolf-heat dream.

But now my body was telling me it wasn't a dream.

I stole a pregnancy test from the Walgreens on Market Street. I couldn't afford the good one. I took the cheap one with the blue dye.

I sat on the cold tile floor of our bathroom for five minutes, my knees pulled to my chest, staring at the little plastic stick.

Two lines.

Positive.

I am eighteen years old. I live above a laundromat. My mother is dead. My father is a wolf from Montana who sends checks. My aunt works double shifts. I was rejected by my fated mate in front of three hundred rich wolves four days ago. And now I am pregnant by a stranger whose face I don't remember in the woods at Golden Gardens.

I put my hand on my stomach. Still flat. Nothing there yet. But I felt - something. A tiny spark. Like a second heartbeat, so faint I thought I imagined it.

My wolf, who had been silent for four days, suddenly whimpered inside me. Weak, but alive.

_Pup,_ she whispered. Not in words. In feeling. _Protect pup._

I started crying. Not pretty crying. Ugly, loud, shoulders-shaking crying that echoed in the tiny bathroom.

I knew what happened to half-breed girls who got pregnant alone in Seattle. The Cascade Pack had charities, yes, but they also had rules. If a half-breed had a pup with no pack father, the pup was taken. "For its own protection." Raised in the pack orphanage in Bellevue. My mother had told me that story once, drunk, crying. "They almost took you, Amara. They almost took you."

They would take my baby.

I had to leave.

I packed a backpack that night. Two sketchbooks, charcoals, three shirts, my mom's silver locket with her picture inside, the $400 I had saved from catering, and the $600 from the Aspen job that hadn't cleared yet but I took as cash advance from the manager by lying and saying my aunt was sick.

I left a note for Aunt Rosa: "I love you. I have to go find my pack. Don't look for me. I will be okay. - A"

I didn't go to New York. That was too obvious. Victoria Ashford was from New York. The Manhattan pack would be there.

I bought a Greyhound ticket to Portland. From Portland, I would go to Boise. From Boise, to Denver. I was going to disappear.

At the bus station, at 2:17 AM, my phone buzzed. Unknown number.

I almost didn't answer.

"Amara Quinn?" A deep voice. Cold. Familiar. "This is Richard Blackwood. We need to talk about what happened in Aspen."

I hung up. Turned off my phone. Threw the SIM card in the trash can at the station.

And got on the bus.

I didn't know that the stranger from Golden Gardens had been watching the buses leave Seattle that night. Or that he had just found out his one-night stand was pregnant with his pup.

*ETHAN BLACKWOOD*

She was gone.

Marcus checked the apartment in Ballard. Empty. Backpack gone. Aunt gone to work, said Amara left a note. The girl at Walgreens said she saw Amara crying in the bathroom aisle. The bus station camera showed her getting on the 2:30 AM to Portland, wearing a hoodie three sizes too big, her backpack clutched like a life preserver.

I watched the footage on my father's laptop in his Seattle office on the 48th floor of the Blackwood Tower. Downtown Seattle was glittering below us. My father's timber and tech empire.

"Let her go," my father said again. "It's better this way, Ethan. You did the right thing in Aspen. A half-breed cannot be Luna. Victoria's father called this morning. He is still willing to move forward with the merger if you apologize publicly for the... disturbance. If you mate with Victoria at the next full moon, the alliance is secure."

I didn't hear him. I was staring at the screen. At Amara's small face on the grainy CCTV. She looked pale. Sick.

She had been sick for four days, Marcus said. Throwing up. The caterer said she asked for extra crackers.

My wolf, who had been silent since I rejected her, suddenly lifted his head.

_Pup._

The word came from nowhere. From everywhere. From the bond that I had supposedly severed.

Rejecting a mate doesn't break the bond. It just wounds it. My grandfather told me that once, drunk, after my grandmother died. "You can say the words, boy. But the Moon Goddess doesn't listen to boys. She listens to souls."

I had torn Amara's soul. And now I felt - something else. A second heartbeat. Faint, far away, but there. Connected to her. Connected to me through her.

No.

It wasn't possible. I had only touched her once - in the hallway. No, we never -

Unless -

The bonfire at Golden Gardens. The senior party. I wasn't there. I was in Aspen with my father. But my cousin, Jace Blackwood, was there. Jace, who is twenty-two, who looks exactly like me when I was younger, who has the same glacier eyes because we share blood. Jace, who was sent to Seattle Prep to watch over me and who had a habit of picking up drunk eighteen-year-old girls in the woods.

I stood up so fast my chair fell over.

"Where is Jace?" I asked Marcus. My voice was an Alpha growl.

Marcus went pale. "He - he left Seattle last week. Said he got transferred to the New York pack. Sir, I -"

I was already dialing. My hands were shaking.

Jace picked up on the third ring, laughing, music in the background. "Yo, cuz -"

"Golden Gardens. The bonfire. Two weeks ago. Did you fuck a half-breed girl with curly hair?" I said, no preamble.

Silence on the other end. Then: "Jesus, Ethan. How did you -"

The line went dead in my hand. I had crushed my phone.

My father stared at me. "Ethan, what is going on?"

I couldn't breathe. The second heartbeat was louder now. It wasn't in my head. It was real.

Amara was pregnant. And it wasn't mine. It was my cousin's. My bloodline.

Which meant the pup was still a Blackwood. Still an Alpha bloodline pup. Growing inside my rejected mate, alone on a bus to Portland with $1000 and a backpack.

My wolf howled, no longer hollow. Furious. Possessive. _Get her. Get them. Now._

I grabbed Marcus by his shirt. "Find that bus. I don't care if you have to buy the fucking Greyhound company. Find it, stop it, and bring her back to Seattle. Now. And if Jace sets foot in Washington State, you shoot him on sight."

For the first time since I was fifteen, I didn't care about the merger. I didn't care about Victoria. I didn't care about being a good Alpha.

I cared about the girl in the snow. And the pup she didn't know was mine by blood.

Even if she hated me forever, she was not disappearing with my family's future in her belly.