Page 40 of Taken By The Wolves
For a long moment, the entire forest seems to hush around us, the air tightening as though nature is drawing itself taller.
The child smells like clean earth, milk, and the first wild bloom of spring. She smells like Aura, Gregory’s mate and an unfamiliar wolf scent. Over a year ago, Gregory’s mate from the neighboring territory was brutally attacked, her body broken and her spirit shattered. Sharp-edged whispers ran through the pack like wildfire. Gregory did nothing to avenge the attack, and Aura was kept out of sight.
The cub is her child. It makes sense, but it also rips mythroat out.
To leave the cub behind in such circumstances isn’t unusual. The wounds, the danger, the shame… the cruelty of pack politics demand it. This miracle child was left behind, tucked away in the woods, a sin too unbearable to claim.
But all I can do is stare.
Scarlet presses her lips to the baby’s temple, her face pale with a kind of awe that hooks into my heart. She holds the child not like a stranger, but like a mother, like someone who has already decided the shape of love and wrapped it around this baby like armor.
“We have to take her to the police,” she says, and though her voice trembles, there’s quiet steel through every syllable. “We can’t leave a baby out here. Not alone.”
“Scarlet, she—” My voice falters under the weight of that single syllable.She.It feels foreign on my tongue, almost sacrilegious. I’ve never said it in this context. Never had to.
She looks at me with wide eyes, waiting for me to make sense of the world that’s upended itself in her arms.
“She’s not human,” I manage to say, though the words taste like ash. “She’s... a wolf baby.”
Scarlet’s gaze flares. “Then why’s she human now?”
The baby lets out a soft sigh, a contented little sound that guts me clean through.
I don’t answer, because thereisno answer. Scarlet knows nothing of our kind, of the shifting and the bloodlines and the rules older than memory. But she’s seen what she’s seen. She held a wolf cub in her hands and watched it become a child. And that kind of truth has carved something new into her understanding of what’s possible.
And maybe mine, too.
I have to say something. But the words lodge in my throat.
“There… there are rules,” I manage. “This isn’t our problem.”
Scarlet fixes me with a narrowed stare. “Rules don’t apply to a baby.”
Her tiny limbs moving like sapling branches in the wind, her breath quick and fragile. The sheer vulnerability of her scent threads into the space between us. She belongs nowhere and everywhere.
And goddess help me, she looksrightin Scarlet’s arms. There’s something uncanny about the resemblance in the matching shade of their hair, the delicate tilt of their eyes, the softness of their mouths. It’s as if fate, or whatever force governs these cruel turns of life, has decided that Scarlet should find her.
Behind us, the forest rustles, alive. I inhale sharply, scenting the air for a friend or foe. Are we being watched? The only wolf scent belongs to the tiny cub in Scarlet’s arms.
No one else is here.
I glance at Scarlet as she brushes the baby’s hair back from her face, her fingers trembling only slightly. Her expression is one I’ll never forget; open and fierce, like she’s already made a promise to this child, whether or not the rest of us will help her keep it.
I should call Nixon. I should let him decide. But out here in the silence, there’s no signal. No voice of reason to anchor me. No one to tell me what the hell I’m supposed to do.
As I observe Scarlet swaying with the baby in her arms, I realize I don’t have a choice.
“We need to bring her somewhere safe. To the yard.Nixon will figure out what to do.”
My chest tightens. Protecting her means angering him. But this baby is human now, and Scarlet won’t leave her.
“Okay.” Her voice is quiet, but it matches mine: resolute and unwavering. “To the yard.”
The baby coos in response, as if agreeing. Heat blooms in my chest.
I reach out to take her, to give Scarlet a chance to steady herself and grab her crutch, but she tightens her hold and shakes her head. She’s not letting go.
So I retrieve the crutch, tuck it beneath her arm, and together we begin the slow, uneven walk back through the trees toward the truck.
