Page 157 of Broken Bonds

“Todd I love you please stop talking,” I snap almost as one long word, regretting my tone, but I’m literally not in control of it.

Shawn busts out laughing and looks at Jax. “Is that what I sound like at the end of a heat?”

Jax smiles. “Damn, it’s like you’re twins.” He turns to Todd. “Yeah, that’s right, you’ve only ever played with fun-heat Shawn, not dealt with bitchy post-heat Shawn.”

Shawn leans in, sotto voce, and says to me, “Don’t worry, they’re very trainable. You just gotta be patient with them.”

“Hey!” Jax playfully protests while Todd snickers.

“Actually,” Shawn continues, to me, “yours might be more easily trainable than mine since he’s a beta, not an Alpha.”

“Hey!” Todd says while Jax bursts out laughing and slaps him on the back.

Doctor Williams, a human woman married to an Alpha wolf, seems really nice. I immediately like her. After she swears to maintain secrecy, Jax and Shawn, with some input from Todd, walk her through what happened, including everything that led up to it, and the whys.

She nods. “I would like a copy of those formulas you used,” she tells Shawn. “Obviously whatever you did worked, although I personally wouldn’t have added the cannabis and kratom in the first round.”

“Normally I wouldn’t have, either,” Shawn says. “But given the serious nature of this entire situation, and the truncated timeframe, and that it was his first heat, I wanted to stack the deck.”

She smiles. “Well, looks like you succeeded. We could open an apothecary.”

“Thanks doc, but I already have enough work.” He pulls out his phone and she recites her personal email address so he can forward everything to her.

She proceeds to get basic vital signs on both of us. When she finishes she kindly smiles at me.

“This is rare,” she says. “As in, I’ve never heard of a different species beta getting an omega pregnant on the very first heat ever. But I’m willing to bet the chance of you being pregnant is 100%, because pregnancy’s the only thing that short-circuits an omega wolf’s mating heat.”

“And death,” I mumble.

She laughs. “Well, yeah, but I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that’s not what this is.”

“You sure?” I look up at her. “Maybe I died and I’m in…” What would this be? I don’t want to say hell, because that’s not right.

Todd sits next to me on the sofa and drapes an arm around my shoulders, pulling me close. “I know, baby,” he says, nuzzling the top of my head. “This wasn’t the plan. And…” He makes a low, unhappy noise, not quite a sigh. “If you don’t want to?—”

“I’m keeping this baby no matter what!” I snap, sensing where he was heading with that. “Even if I have to leave, I’m keeping it.”

He holds me tighter. “It’s okay, baby. No one’s going anywhere.”

“No,” Jax says from where he’s standing on the other side of the living room. “No one is going anywhere.” He wears a dark, thunderous expression. “You’re pack, and that’s it. Full stop.”

“He does smell like pack,” she says to Jax. “So kudos, that part of the plan went, eh, according to plan. Congrats.”

“I thought you were a human?” I ask.

Another smile. “I was born into the pack. I’m lucky my metabolism is slower, like a shifter, both from my lineage and my Alpha mate. I was born with excellent senses of hearing, sight, and smell. My mom’s a non-shifting wolf, born into the pack. My dad’s a beta wolf shifter also born into the pack, but one of his grandfathers was human.” She shrugs. “Genetics are funny, huh?”

A thought hits me. “Will it be healthy? I mean, if it’ll be born horribly suffering and without any chance to live…” I swallow hard. “How will we know it’s okay?”

“First, we’ll confirm you caught with a blood test,” she says. “From there I’ll run the tests I normally run. The closest analog I have is human or nearly human women who mate with male shifters from other species.”

“Like Mom,” Todd says.

“Yes, exactly. Just like your mom. And I’ve delivered your siblings,” she adds. “Women in those cases have had babies who are born perfectly healthy. As have women from shifter lines who can’t shift and who mate with male shifters from different species. I’ve never heard of a baby born to a parental combo like that being a shifter. I’ve also never seen it happen with both male parents being shifters from completely different species. Not saying it’s never happened, because maybe it has but it’s so rare I haven’t heard of it. My gut instinct says we’re looking at a best-case scenario—a healthy nearly human baby who can’t shift.”

“And the worst-case?” I ask, tearing up at the thought.

Her smile fades. “We’ll closely monitor you. Bloodwork, scans, everything. I don’t have the machine needed to do a high-level scan once you’re farther along, but my cousin runs a radiology clinic in Brooksville. She’ll take us in after hours and run the scans for me off the books. That way we’ll know immediately if there’s…”