Chapter 190 Celeste's News
Celeste POV
I spent two days convinced it's food poisoning. This is a reasonable conclusion. The compound kitchen operates at volume—feeding dozens of wolves means large batches, shared equipment, occasional lapses—and I've been nauseous before from bad timing and improperly stored protein. I drink ginger tea and go to bed early and expect it to resolve. It doesn't resolve.
Cass watches me push a plate away for the third consecutive morning with the patient attention of someone who has already formed an opinion and is waiting for the right moment to share it. "You should see Doc," he says.
"It's food poisoning."
"You're the only one who's sick."
"I have a sensitive system."
"Celeste." He says it quietly, the way he does when he's not arguing, just stating something he needs me to actually hear. "Please see Doc."
I go to see Doc.
He asks me standard questions first—duration, severity, timing, any other symptoms. I answer them. He takes my blood. He's quiet while the results process, which could mean anything with Doc because he's always quiet, and I sit on the examination table and look at the wall and feel a faint unease.
Doc turns from the monitor and looks at me with an expression that I have learned, over months of working alongside him, means he is about to deliver something significant. "You're pregnant," he says. "Early, approximately three weeks."
The room doesn't change. The equipment hums the same way it always does. The light through the high windows is the same afternoon quality it was thirty seconds ago.
You're pregnant.
I'm weeks into watching Jolie's pregnancy—watching her body change, watching her glow shift, watching Ryder go soft around the edges every time their daughter kicks—and somewhere in all of that I had stopped believing this would happen for me. Not dramatically, not in a way I acknowledged to Cass or to Jolie, but quietly, in the part of me that still carries the Council's voice when I'm not careful about whose thoughts I'm thinking.
The damage is permanent. You were made into a weapon. Weapons don't make life. You proved that for months and now you know.
"After everything they did," I say, and my voice comes out strange, like it's trying to fit around something too large for my throat. "After all of it—I can still"
Doc steps forward and puts a hand briefly on my shoulder, gentle and certain. "You can," he says. "You are."
I find Cass in the garage. He's working on a carburetor with the focused expression he gets when his hands need to be doing something, and he looks up when he hears my footsteps and reads my face before I say a word—because Cass has been reading my face for months, learning the new language of it, the Celeste-who-can-feel as distinct from the Celeste-who-couldn't.
His eyes fill before I get the words out.
"I'm pregnant," I say.
He sets down the carburetor with the precise care of someone making sure they handle the next few seconds correctly, and then he closes the distance between us and takes my face in both his oil-smudged hands and looks at me the way he looks at me when he wants to make sure I actually understand what he's about to say.
"You're not broken," he says. His voice is rough. "You were never broken. They told you that and they were wrong, they were wrong about everything."
I have heard that before, from Jolie, from Doc, from Cass himself across months of careful, patient reassurance. But there's a difference between being told something and having your body prove it, and right now my body has just provided evidence more persuasive than any words.
He pulls me against his chest. I let him, and I press my face to his shoulder, and I cry—not grief this time, not the heavy, excavating grief of healed wolves processing stolen years. Something cleaner. Something that feels, for the first time in a long time, like relief.
"She's going to have everything they took from us," he says quietly. "Every good thing. All of it."
"He," I say, muffled against his jacket. "Or she."
"Whichever." His arms tighten. "Everything."
I tell Jolie before I tell anyone else. She's in the healing center reviewing notes, and she looks up when I come in, already reading my expression, already leaning forward slightly. I hold up the small confirmation printout Doc gave me.
She stares at it for a moment and then she makes a sound I've never heard from her before—somewhere between laughter and a sob—and she's on her feet faster than someone thirty-three weeks pregnant should be capable of moving, and she's across the room and her arms are around me, and we stand in the healing center holding each other with both our bellies between us and cry.
"Your daughter is going to grow up knowing her mother is a survivor," she says when she can talk again.
I pull back enough to look at her. "Our daughters," I say. "They'll grow up together. Free." I think about that word. What it means for children who will never have known what we came from, who will have pack bonds and pack safety and pack love as their baseline. "They won't even know what they have. Because it'll just be normal for them."
"That's the whole point," Jolie says.
We stand with our hands linked over our bellies—hers heavy and luminous with six weeks to go, mine flat and impossible and real—and the afternoon light comes through the high windows and the flowers near the door that follow Jolie everywhere have opened wider, and I feel something I still don't always have the right word for.
The pack finds out by evening because Cass lasts approximately four hours before the information has to come out.
There's noise, immediate and genuine, and Knox says something that isn't intelligible but is clearly celebratory, and Mara's expression does the thing where she's moved and won't show it but she reaches out and grips my arm for exactly one second before releasing, and Phoenix says something about compound security needing to account for two infants now and everyone tells him to stop.
Jolie and I end up side by side at the edge of the celebration, watching our pack exist around us, and she bumps my shoulder with hers. "How do you feel?" she asks.
I consider the question. Before, that question would have required a performance—a search through available responses for the one that fit the social context, delivered with calibrated accuracy. Now it's just a question, and I have an actual answer. "Like I beat them," I say. "Like I took back everything they tried to take." I pause. "Is that too much?"
"That's exactly right," Jolie says.
Later, alone in the cabin, I sit on the edge of the bed in the quiet.I put my hand on my flat stomach—nothing yet, nothing visible, just the knowledge of what's there—and I said it out loud to the empty room, the way I once watched Jolie say it to herself in a medical bay months ago. "I'm going to be a mother."