My Mate Defended Her After She Killed Our Pup

The paper in Healer Estella Green's hand shook a little as she read the result, and for one long second I thought she was going to tell me no again.

Then she smiled. That soft, careful healer's smile she had been giving me for three years.

"Congratulations, Luna. You're pregnant."

I didn't move. I had been pregnant in my dreams so many times that my body refused to believe it on command. My hand drifted to my stomach on its own. Flat. Warm. Mine.

"Strong hormone levels," Estella went on, sliding the bloodwork across her immaculate desk. "Everything looks healthy."

My wolf, Sable — quiet for so long I sometimes forgot the shape of her — stirred under my ribs like a creature lifting its head out of deep water.

*A pup.*

Her voice was rough from disuse. I pressed my thumb hard against the inside of my opposite wrist before the tears could come.

---

Jaden was in the training yard when I told him. He had grass on his knees and sweat at his temple, and the cedar-and-rain scent of him hit me harder than usual — the mate bond reaching for what we'd made.

"Pregnant," I said. Just the one word. I'd practiced longer speeches and forgotten all of them.

He stared. Then something in his face softened in a way I hadn't seen since our first months as mates — before the whispers, before *barren*, before three years of failure stacked between us like a wall.

"Maeve." He cupped the back of my neck. "Are you sure?"

"Estella confirmed it."

He pulled me in, and for the length of one breath I let myself believe the Moon Goddess hadn't made a mistake when She tied me to him.

Vivienne, his mother, gave me a thin smile at dinner. Conditional. The kind of smile that said *don't disappoint us again*. I took it anyway. I would have taken less.

That night, in the dark of our quarters, I lay with my hand spread flat over my stomach and whispered to the small spark inside me. *Hold on. Just hold on. I will protect you.*

I meant it the way only a mother can mean a thing.

---

Estella was attentive. She always was.

She came to the pack house herself with neat paper packets of herbs, tied in twine, smelling of raspberry leaf and something bitter underneath I couldn't name. She brewed the first cup with her own hands and watched me drink it.

"For the pup," she said gently, her fingertips resting on the back of my wrist. "We've all waited so long for this, Luna."

*We.* As though she had waited beside me. As though her hand at Jaden's elbow at every pack function had been sisterly concern and nothing else.

I drank the tea.

I drank it every morning, and every evening, and at the small extra dose she added when I mentioned I felt tired. I drank it the day she filed her