Page 31

A nna walked out of her OB appointment alone save for the little slip of photo paper depicting the sum total of her family. Her not-so-tiny tyke was the size of a bell pepper or maybe a banana. That last one didn’t make much sense, but then again, her brain hadn’t exactly been up for a whole lot of critical analysis lately.

Her time with Dr. Li had been uneventfully standard, and she’d parted with her next appointment scheduled, along with instructions on when to take her glucose drink in relation to her exam. The medical assistant offered Anna a choice of fruit punch or orange flavor for the drink, with far too much enthusiasm given what the situation warranted. But, hey, Anna got it. Pregnancy gave women next to no choices most of the time, so it made sense the staff would get excited over the things they could control that might make the experience more palatable for their patients.

As far as Anna was concerned, palatable went out the window as soon as she entered the waiting room. The fallen look on the receptionist’s face was only the first of several disappointed expressions Anna had to endure throughout her visit once the staff realized she hadn’t brought Iron with her.

It was like being a celebrity by proxy. The still-contractually-valued understudy to the star people had actually paid to see.

Several weeks ago, she could have claimed to have never seen hope flee from a collective group of people so fast. Since then, she’d been regrettably enlightened.

Anna’s phone chirped in her pocket, and she fished the thing out once she got into the elevator.

Rose: Here! I’m parked next to the blue minivan. Let me know when you’re done.

Rose had insisted on at least giving her a ride to and from her OB appointment. Originally, Rose’s offer included going in as Anna’s exam room buddy as well, which Anna had kindly refused, but she wasn’t really in a position to say no to a ride. She didn’t think she could drive herself anyway. Her Subaru still sat parked at her cabin where she’d left it weeks ago.

Iron had been the last one to drive it when he’d taken her out for ice cream on that early spring day, and she couldn’t bear the thought of going in there. Seeing the driver’s seat adjusted to his brawny frame, the mirrors angled into a position that only his barbarian form could access, would gut her all over again.

Anna tapped out a quick on my way and hastened her steps, eager to run from the hollow feeling that had clung to her skin beneath the remorseful stares of the medical staff.

She’d hoped time would make whatever distance that separated her from Iron seem less . . . distant. It did no such fucking thing.

He was gone. Left without a trace, except for a few bleak instructions to his brothers that condensed the entirety of her and Iron’s soul-deep connection into what others, who were very much not him, could provide for her and her baby in the future.

Which was precisely the biggest load of bullshit she’d ever been mired in.

She didn’t need a contingency plan. She needed him and his unsinkable form sitting in that waiting room, holding her hand, and making grown men think twice about commenting on her marital state.

She needed to remember what his fierce intensity looked like etched across his face as he made her fall apart in his arms.

She needed Iron . And he was gone.

The car door closed, and Rose handed over the snack bag of meticulously portioned and obstetrician-approved-within-reason chocolate-covered espresso beans. Anna popped her new favorite indulgence into her mouth, but the treat tasted like ash on her tongue.

Rose pulled out of the parking lot. “What’s the good word?”

Anna set her latest ultrasound photo up on the dashboard. “Baby’s doing exactly what baby should be doing, I’ve gained another five pounds, and my doctor asked whether I had given any thought to a birth plan.”

“Have you?”

“The plan is to give birth. As far as my shitty HMO and I are concerned, my healthcare providers are in charge of the rest.”

Rose’s warm hand gave hers a squeeze. “You know we’re all here for you when you’re ready.”

The last thing Anna needed was guilt mingling with her snack’s bittersweetness, but there it was, nonetheless.

“I know. I’m just . . . not, I guess, because he was supposed to be part of my birth plan. He was supposed to be with me filling out paperwork, making me laugh through the pain, and bringing me extra pairs of those cozy socks with the grippy things on the bottom in case I have to walk around a lot to get my water to break. He was my birth plan, Rose. He was my person, and he’s not here.”

Anna pushed down the familiar pain that burned behind her chest whenever she thought about it lest it turn into another full-blown breakdown. “I miss him, and I don’t know whether he’s okay or not. I don’t know whether he’s even alive, or if he is, whether he’s hurt or upset or regretful or anything. I just don’t know . I hate not knowing, and I feel like if we really had this eternal soul bond connection or whatever, shouldn’t I know something ? Shouldn’t I feel something in here if he wasn’t alive anymore?” Anna tapped her chest but couldn’t bring herself to look Rose in the eye.

Her friend didn’t say anything. What could she say, really? Anna had heard it all before, and it wasn’t like Rose and the others didn’t get it. Oh, they got it, all right, and that was another source of her gnawing grief.

His family had lost one of their own as well, but where Iron’s loss in her life was one of immense emptiness on her part, his disappearance for them was coated in something far more sinister: betrayal, made worse by the fact that his lone parting note asked them not to understand his actions but to look after Anna instead.

The forced shift in the priorities of a family that wasn’t hers sat as well with her as the sludge in her coffee pot she’d forgotten to clean out from a few days ago.

“How’s Titan? Did he and the others come up with any solutions yet?”

Rose blew out a breath and clicked on the SUV’s blinker as she maneuvered into a left-only lane. “Stuck and frustrated like usual. He and Brass are back to combing the archives in the den’s library in case there’s something they missed, but Titan can only stay down there for so long before he gets twitchy. He swears the mountain knows Iron’s gone, that the whole place feels different, like the minerals miss him or something. It seems everyone’s developed a much shorter fuse with exponentially longer lighters to wave at each other. I’ve never seen them all fight so much.”

“All of them?”

“Not all. Chrome decided to take it out on his computers. He destroyed half a bay of them one night in frustration before Rhode grabbed him by the neck and forced him to go out on patrol with him. Bronze is working with the lycans to do everything to make sure Iron isn’t still local. They’re organizing lots of hunting parties, but it’s tough with their limitations around metal. Neela’s been trying to tap into her demon charmer side to see whether there are any concentrated pockets of them in the area, but that’s been a head-scratcher, too. It’s like they all up and vanished, which is eerie and unusual. And Tung won’t come out of his room unless he’s dragged out. He’s taking it the hardest, I’d say. Titan says he blames himself for not seeing Iron’s plans ahead of time.”

The SUV rumbled up Anna’s gravel drive, throwing her thoughts into further turmoil. “This wasn’t what he wanted.”

“No,” Rose agreed. “But it’s what we’ve got to deal with right now.”

Anna grabbed her ultrasound photo and headed into the house. After she waved goodbye to Rose and shut the door, she threw the lock and squeezed her eyes shut in frustration at how far apart Iron’s family had been hurled.

They were too far away for even dreams to reach.

Anna had just finished placing her online grocery order when another alert popped up on her phone’s screen. It was a text message from a name she hadn’t seen in months.

Travis: Hey, Anna. Got some news. You free to talk for a few?

Travis, or The Asshole, as she’d renamed him in her contacts, lit up her phone’s background, blocking out the wallpaper she’d just put up of her baby’s latest ultrasound photo.

An alarming concern prickled within her chest.

The last time she’d spoken to him had been when he was backing out of her driveway and she was hollering at him for running his piece of shit cyber truck over the only patch of proper grass her property had that far into the woods.

It had been blessed silence since then, and all of a sudden, he was throwing out a Hey, Anna as if he were checking in with her on what to add to the grocery order?

Should she respond? Ignore it? Pretend that she’d changed her phone number?

But then she realized he could see that she’d read the message.

Shit.

She should ignore him. Take whatever peace she could still find in her quiet cabin and burrow into it where her past couldn’t find her.

Anna had started to turn her phone off when it began ringing, and to her abject horror, her thumb had accidentally accepted the call.

Motherfucker!

“Hey, Anna. Long time, no chat.” Travis’s oily voice slid back into her world like a snake through tall grass.

“What do you want?”

“Ouch. Look, I guess I deserve that.”

Irritation tightened her jaw. “You deserve a lot of things, none of which I’m willing to do hard time for. I’m too pregnant for prison.” At the moment , she amended in her mind.

“That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about. Not the prison thing, though.”

Miracle of miracles, the man can listen when he wants to.

“You’ve got to be, what, six months along now? Seven?”

“Five,” she gritted out, “though I’m not surprised you’re not exactly up to speed with human gestational cycles. You kind of need to act like a human being before you’re considered part of the population.”

He groaned. “Don’t do this.”

“Do what, talk? Correct you on your blatantly offensive disregard for the life I’m carrying? A life that you helped make?”

“ Fight . I don’t want to fight. I just want to talk.”

“You want to talk ,” she said flatly. That had all her Spidey senses on high alert. The only time Travis ever wanted to talk was when there was a microphone involved.

“Yes, talk.” An awkward heaviness thumped between them. “I miss you, okay?”

The confession nearly knocked her out of her chair, not because she couldn’t imagine his stupid mouth ever forming the words but because that was the exact phrase she’d hoped to hear from him right after they’d initially split. Back then, she’d wanted something, anything , to show that she’d made the wrong decision, that she and Travis still had a future that didn’t involve a three-thousand-mile divide. That she and her baby would truly be missed in some way by the man she gave six years of her life to, along with a not-insignificant amount of money.

But now, what all those words did for her was trigger an army of tightly honed defenses.

“You had six years and five months to miss me. Why start now? What’s the catch?” And there most certainly would be a catch. She knew it as surely as the dark chocolate bar in her desk drawer was exactly seventy-two percent cacao.

Travis made a repugnant groan, reminding her more and more of the snake she knew him to be. “Fine. Just so you know, I didn’t want to do it this way.”

“Do what ?”

“I’d like joint custody of the baby.”

The floor nearly fell away beneath her. “Absolutely not. No way.”

“It’s kind of not your decision. Hence the phrase joint custody.”

Oh, Anna was seeing red. Bloody crimson bolts of the stuff. “You walked out on us. You don’t get to walk back in. We’re not a set of car keys you left on the counter, asshole. We had an agreement. It was in the deed you signed over to me. I get the house, you get to live your bro-tastic life in California without a child to pay for.”

“If you remember, all I did was sign over full ownership of the property to you. I never actually signed anything pertaining to my paternity or parental rights.”

There it was. The other shoe hovering above her head, big, bold, and smelly as all hell. “Explain.”

And explain he did, in all the gloating glee he could shove through a cellular connection. “I just landed a very lucrative contract, one that any family court judge couldn’t ignore even if they wanted to. The money would ensure not only my financial stability as a parent but the financial welfare of my child.”

My child. He said the words as though he’d been the one carrying the thing and heaving into a porcelain peehole for months on end.

“My personal empowerment business has recently taken a new interest in the family care sector. My podcast, while successful, didn’t really take off until I began having more guests related to family management and welfare. When I informed my colleagues of your condition, they advised that it would position me in a more profitable light if I could portray myself as a family man. It would make me more approachable with listeners and experts and would give me angles to talk about that would increase the markets I could target.”

“Are you fucking serious right now? You want to be a dad for a goddamn publicity stunt?”

“Not publicity, profit . Longevity. Generational wealth. Legacy. Progeny. Jesus Christ, Anna, I thought you of all people would understand what it would mean for a child to not have to struggle their way through life.”

“You understand nothing about me.”

“Oh no?” She could hardly work up a response before he asked, “How’s your business going these days?”

Shock stole the breath from her lungs. “It’s fine.”

“Then why does your online booking calendar show so many openings? It would be an easy thing to point out to a family court judge, especially when the child’s father expresses concerns for how the mother’s business can perform with so few clients.”

Humiliation scraped daggers down her throat. “You have no right to stalk me like that and snoop through my practice’s website.”

“It’s the Internet, Anna. I’m not looking at anything anyone else wouldn’t.”

New wells of hurt coated her eyes in liquid shame. He knew as well as she did how hard she worked to grow her virtual nutrition practice and all the hurdles she was still jumping through to make it happen. But these kinds of things took time. Trust, positive reviews, and referrals grew over years. She hadn’t become a nutritionist so she could hack the latest search engine optimization practices for her site. It was a long game as much as it was a rewarding one. Anna had always shared that with him, and now he was using it against her? “Why would you do that?”

“Because money talks and bullshit walks. It’s nothing personal.”

“It’s entirely personal.”

“Look, I’ll make sure you’re provided for, too. I wouldn’t abandon you, Anna.”

Except you did. And so did Iron.

“Life doesn’t need to be as hard for our child as it’s been for you. I’ve grown a lot, and I’d like to make sure the baby can reap the benefits of that. If anything, I’m learning so much about parenthood, fatherhood, and family in general. Even if we’re not together, you can’t deny that it would be best for the kid to have financial stability. And you know the courts always do their best to try and keep the parents in the kid’s life, even if the adults are separated. Kind of the best of all worlds, if you ask me. You get some money for a change, and we all get a happy little family. It’s a win-win.”

“Disrespectfully, fuck you.”

Anna hung up on him before she found her phone hurled halfway down the mountain. The threats laced in Travis’s voice shouldn’t have hurt her the way they had, but her skin had grown far thinner in recent weeks, literally and figuratively. When she tried to summon a cone of safety around her shoulders by wrapping herself in her comforter, all she got was the ghost of Iron’s warmth pressing down on her. It was a hollow, empty shell, no longer strong enough to offer the protection she needed, but still taunting in its presence regardless.

He’d left her. The reasons didn’t matter because they wouldn’t change the result. But the pain left behind didn’t give a shit. It was there, hot and heavy, beating her down with its insistence that no, Anna, you cannot do this on your own. See how much it hurts? How foolish you are for thinking you even could.

She didn’t try to sniff her way out of the tears that needed to fall, because what was the fucking point? Instead, she turned off her phone and chucked it into her nightstand drawer. It landed with a thunk , shaking her little reading lamp and the glasses case standing sentinel next to it.

The case, forgotten but not really, housed the new purple glasses Iron had gotten to replace her shoddy pair. She hadn’t brought herself to wear them since the day he left.

Now, she was grateful for the decision. She couldn’t bear the thought of seeing the lie she had become reflected back at her in her paltry bathroom mirror.

The one depicting the version of her that Iron had sworn was more than enough.