Chapter 60 Escape
The question wouldn’t leave her alone.
‘Was she pregnant?’
Grace sat on the edge of the bed with her knees pressed together and her hands folded in her lap, staring at the worn patch of carpet between her feet. The room around her felt too quiet—not the peaceful kind of quiet but the suffocating kind, the kind that pressed against her eardrums and made every thought louder than it needed to be.
She pressed her palm flat against her stomach and held it there.
No. She was being ridiculous. She had to be. Everyone knew you couldn’t feel pregnancy symptoms three days after sleeping with someone.
That wasn’t how bodies worked. That wasn’t how any of this worked. She was probably just stressed, overwhelmed, running on too little sleep and too much fear, and her mind was doing what it always did when she had too much time to sit still, it was running away with itself, catastrophising, spinning something small into something enormous.
But then the thought crept in slowly.
‘It hadn’t been three days.’
She did the math quietly, pressing her lips together. It had been weeks since she first slept with Enzo. Weeks since everything had unravelled and spiralled so far past the point of her control that she’d stopped recognising the shape of her own life. And then there was Maddox. Her chest tightened at the thought of him. The time she’d spent with Maddox had been different.
Her heat and everything about those hours had been intense in a way that still frightened her in memory, it was desperate and consuming and completely beyond anything she could explain with ordinary words.
A shiver ran up her spine so suddenly and sharply that she hugged her arms around herself, pulling her elbows in tight as though she could physically hold herself together if she just pressed hard enough.
She was scared.
That was the plain, stripped-down truth underneath everything else. And the worst part was that she was completely alone and scared.
There was no one she could call or sit down next to and say ‘I think something is happening to me’ and ‘I don’t know what to do’. She’d never felt the absence of that more sharply than she did right now, in this quiet room with her hand against her stomach and the evening light going grey outside the window.
Enzo didn’t care about her. Not truly, not seriously. She’d been pretending otherwise for longer than she should have, holding onto small moments and reading into them, the way people do when they want something to be real badly enough that they start manufacturing evidence for it. But she’d seen enough by now to stop pretending. Whatever she’d hoped might grow between them, it hadn’t. Maybe it never could have.
And Maddox had simply run.
No explanation. No goodbye. No note, no message, nothing. Just an empty space where he had been, and the ghost of everything she’d felt in those hours when her heat had stripped away every defence she had. She still didn’t fully understand what had passed between them. She wasn’t sure she trusted her own memory of it, or how much had been real feeling and how much had been biology, need, or even instinct.
And now she had no way to find him. She had no connection to this pack—not like they seemed to be fans of Maddox anyway—no allies she could trust, no thread she could pull to figure out where he’d disappeared to. She thought briefly about asking Enzo and almost laughed. The idea of walking up to him and saying Maddox might be the father of my child, could you help me track him down was so absurd it bordered on funny.
Enzo would look at her with that cold, measured expression he wore like armour and she’d feel foolish for having opened her mouth at all.
She pressed her fingers to her temple and exhaled.
She’d had a plan once. Before all of this, before the marking or kidnapping, before she’d walked into that house and found Maddox and Enzo facing each other down. She had a real, concrete plan.
She was going to find her mother, the woman she had never once met, whose face she didn’t know.
If only there were a trail she could follow, something concrete she could use to go toward the truth of where she’d come from and why she’d been left behind. But sadly, she’d broken the necklace.
And she needed to handle this first. Whatever this was.
Her hand drifted back to her stomach without her consciously choosing to put it there, her fingers settling lightly against the fabric of her shirt.
“Wait,” she murmured, her voice barely above a whisper in the empty room. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is just another side effect of the marking.”
She held onto that possibility carefully, the way you hold something fragile you’re afraid of dropping. It made sense, didn’t it? The marking changed things. She’d felt the shift in her body after it happened, the heightened senses, the pull, the awareness of things she hadn’t been aware of before. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that her body was still adjusting, still recalibrating, and that what she was feeling was just part of that process.
She needed it to be that.
Because the alternative made something in her chest go very still and very quiet, and it was not going still and quiet in a peaceful way.
If there was a child, if there truly was a child, then it was innocent. It was the most innocent thing involved in any of this. It hadn’t chosen her or Maddox or Enzo or the disaster of circumstances Grace had wandered into. It would deserve better than what she currently had to offer, and the thought of hurting it, of making any decision that hurt something that blameless, made her feel sick in a way that had nothing to do with morning sickness and everything to do with the kind of person she wanted to be.
She spread her palm wider against her stomach and sat very still.
Her thoughts drifted to her own parents. The ones she’d never met. She had nothing from them, not a name, not a letter nor a single photograph. Just the fact of their absence. She had no idea what they’d told themselves when they gave her away. Whether it had been hard or easy, whether they’d felt anything at all.
‘I would never do that to my own child.’ She mumbled. ‘No. I would be a good mother…’
The thought came quietly but with an absolute certainty she hadn’t expected from herself.
She didn’t care what it cost her, she would never be the reason an innocent baby grew up wondering why they weren’t enough to be kept.
But she couldn’t pretend the other option wasn’t hovering at the edge of her thoughts, either. She made herself look at it honestly, the way she’d been trying to make herself look at hard things lately instead of flinching away.
She wasn’t ready, she was still in high school, though she didn’t remember when she last went. She was eighteen years old with no stable home, no family she could lean on, no ground under her feet that didn’t shift.
If only there was a way to turn back time, ‘maybe I should’ve just gotten married to Vance after all.’
She didn’t even know who the father was, and that alone felt both heavy and shameful, even though she told herself it wasn’t her fault, even though she knew it was more complicated than that.
If anyone found out, when they found out, because people always did, they would tear her apart. The pack members who already watched her with barely concealed disdain would have something real to point at. A teenage human girl, unmated, pregnant, with no answers about whose child she was carrying.
She didn’t want to imagine what they’d say or what they’d do.
And she wasn’t sure she could handle the scrutiny.
“I can’t make this decision alone,” she said quietly, and her own voice surprised her, it was younger than she expected, smaller than she wanted it to be. “I can’t.”
But she was alone. And waiting for that to change wasn’t an option anymore.
She needed to move. That was the only thing she could actually control. She needed to get out of this pack, away from Enzo and the suffocating weight of everything unresolved. She needed to follow the thread she’d dropped when all of this started—find her mother or father, search for Maddox, figure the rest out as she went.
It wasn’t a plan she was particularly proud of. It had too many gaps and too much uncertainty and it relied heavily on things falling into place that had absolutely no obligation to do so, but it was hers.
She’d leave at nightfall, she’ll wait until things quieted down, and slip out without anyone noticing.
“Piece of cake,” she said dryly, the sarcasm plain.
She reached over and switched on the television just to fill the silence. She wasn’t looking for anything in particular, she just needed some white noise, needed the reminder that the world outside this room was still moving, still indifferent, and still turning without waiting for her to figure her life out.
She tucked her legs beneath her on the bed and stared at the screen without really watching it, letting the colours and voices blur into something ambient and dull. Her mind kept circling back to the possible pregnancy, her mother, Maddox’s absence, and grandmama who was gone and could no longer give her any more pieces of the story.