The Wolf Queen & The Alpha Brat

( Elena)

The dream starts the same way it always does.

The Pack house, but wrong — the proportions off, the corridors longer than they should be, the kind of architecture that only makes sense while you’re inside it. I’m running. Not from something specific, just the directionless urgency of dream-running, the feeling that something is wrong in a location I can’t locate.

Then I’m in the yard.

And the yard is empty.

Not quiet-empty, not early-morning-empty. Just — gone. No wolves, no sounds, no movement anywhere. The training dummies standing in a row and no one near them. The gate open. The settlement stretching in every direction with all the lights out.

I put my hands on my stomach.

The dream knows, even though the dream never explains anything. My hands go there and I feel — absence. Not physical pain, not a wound, just the specific cold of something missing that should be there, the shape of a loss so total it has no floor to land on.

And then I’m at a grave.

Not Viktor’s. New. Small stone, no name, ground so recently turned the grass hasn’t come back yet.

I wake up with both hands on my stomach.

The room is dark. The fire is coals. I can feel Rhydian beside me before I’m fully awake — his warmth, the particular weight of him, the slow even rhythm of his sleep-breathing that I’ve memorized without meaning to over the past weeks.

I don’t move my hands.

I lie there in the dark and I feel my own heartbeat and underneath it I try to find the other one — smaller, faster, too early to be sure of, but there, Senna said it would be there by now if I paid enough attention. I’ve been paying attention. Lying awake in the small hours doing exactly this, hands flat, checking.

A dream is just a dream.

I know that. I know the difference between premonition and anxiety, between what my wolf senses and what my exhausted brain manufactures. I know that this specific fear — the small stone, the turned earth, the hands finding nothing — is the oldest fear I have, older than Marcus or Shadowpine or any of the immediate threats, rooted in something much earlier.

Losing things I didn’t know I had until they were gone.

My eyes are wet.

I press my lips together. Breathe through my nose. Control it.

The bed shifts.

"Elena."

His voice is rough from sleep, still most of the way under. But his hand finds my arm in the dark immediately — that instinct he has now, that automatic reaching, like his sleeping self has been keeping track of the space between us all night and noticed something changed.

"I’m fine," I say. My voice comes out wrong.

A pause. He’s waking up properly now, I can feel it in the quality of his stillness — the shift from sleep-stillness to awake-stillness, which are different things.

"You’re not," he says.

"Go back to sleep."

He doesn’t go back to sleep.

He moves — rolls toward me, and I feel him register the position of my hands where they’re still pressed flat against my stomach. He doesn’t say anything. I feel him looking in the dark, and the particular quality of Rhydian paying attention has always been identifiable even without seeing his face.

"Hey," he says. Quiet. "Look at me."

I don’t.

"Elena."

I turn my head. It’s dark enough that I can only see the shape of him, the outline, those gold eyes catching the last of the ember light. He’s propped on one elbow, close, and he’s looking at me with the expression I can feel even when I can’t see it fully.

The one that means he already knows most of it and is waiting for me to say the rest.

"Bad dream," I say.

"About what."

A pause. I look at the ceiling.

"About—" I stop. My throat closes around it. "About losing something."

He’s very still.

He moves closer. His arm comes around me — slow, careful, the deliberate gentleness he has that still surprises me, that I don’t think I’ll ever stop being surprised by given where he started. He pulls me in and I let him, which is a thing I don’t always do, letting people pull me, but it’s him and it’s dark and the dream is still sitting in my chest.

My hands are still on my stomach.

He notices. His arm settles around me and I can feel where his attention goes, the specific awareness of someone who has been cataloguing small things for days and is now assembling them in real time.

His breathing changes slightly.

"Tell me," he says. Into my hair. Not demanding — just open, just space, the way he asks things now when he understands that pushing closes doors.

I stare at the ceiling.

I’ve been finding the right time for a week. Waiting for the ground to be solid enough, the situation stable enough, the right moment when I’d have the right words in the right order. I’ve been composing this conversation in my head while running patrols and sitting through inquiries and lying awake at night.

None of it sounds right.

None of it was ever going to sound right, probably.

I close my eyes.

"I’m pregnant," I say.

The words land in the dark between us.

Rhydian goes still.

Not the flinching still or the defensive still or any of the stills I catalogued in the first two weeks. This is something different — a complete, total stillness, like every process in him has paused at the same moment to deal with a single incoming piece of information.

He doesn’t speak.

I wait. My hands press a little flatter against my stomach. My heartbeat is loud in my ears and under it, if I concentrate, the other one — small and fast and absolutely real.

"I found out a week ago," I say, because the silence is stretching and I need to fill it with something true. "I’ve been— I didn’t know how to—" I stop. Start again. "I was trying to find the right time."

Still nothing.

"Rhydian." My voice comes out smaller than I’d like.

He exhales. Long and shaky and completely uncontrolled — the sound of someone releasing something that’s been held too tightly. His arm tightens around me. His face presses into my hair.

"Okay," he says.

The word comes out rough. Almost inaudible.

"Okay?" I turn my head. Try to see his face.

"I just need—" He stops. I can feel his jaw working against my temple. "Give me a second."

I give him a second.

He takes it. Several of them. His breathing is unsteady in a way I’ve only heard a few times — the nightmare in the first week, the crying in the study, the specific texture of Rhydian processing something his body has to catch up to.

His hand moves.

Slowly. Carefully. He reaches across and his fingers cover mine where they’re still pressed against my stomach.

His hand over mine. Both of us over the small impossible fact of it.

He doesn’t say anything.

I look at his hand on mine in the darkness and I feel the thing I’ve been carrying alone for a week expand — it doesn’t get heavier, which is what I expected. It gets lighter. Distributed. Shared in a way that changes the weight of it entirely.

"How long," he says finally.

"Maybe five weeks. Senna will need to confirm properly."

"Are you—" He pauses. "Are you all right."

"Yes." I pause. "The dream—"

"Is a dream," he says. Firm. Like he’s decided. "Just a dream."

"I know."

"Are you scared."

I consider lying. I don’t.

"Yes," I say.

"Me too," he says immediately.

I look at him. He looks back. And there it is — that open face, the one with no armor, the one I’ve been watching emerge since the first night he stopped flinching. There’s fear in it, real fear, but underneath the fear is something else. Something that has been building for weeks in a boy who grew up with nothing worth protecting and has been quietly, steadily, without announcing it, building a world that is.

He looks at me.

He looks at where our hands are.

"Okay," he says again. Quieter this time. Different.

Not I need a moment.

Something that sounds like *I’m here.*

I press my face into his chest.

The coals glow in the grate. The snow sits on the ground outside.

And in the dark of the room that started as mine and became ours, we hold the thing between us that neither of us planned for and both of us already cannot imagine losing.