Page 1 of Lustling

PROLOGUE

The baby doesn’t cry.

She is warm and soft in my mate’s arms, her tiny fingers curled against his chest, completely unaware that this is the last time we will ever hold her.

I should be grateful for the silence. Instead, it breaks me.

My heart clenches as I reach for her, pressing a trembling kiss to her forehead. Her skin is impossibly smooth. Still slightly damp with birth. She smells like me. Like us. Like something old and sacred and wrong.

A mother’s final act of love.

My mate leans down, his lips brushing her delicate skin, lingering far too long—like he could anchor her soul to memory, burn her shape into the sinew of his grief. His breath stutters when he pulls back. I feel him unraveling.

But neither of us speaks. There are no words for this kind of sorrow. Only the hollow scream I keep locked in my chest.

I turn to the bassinet beside us. Another child sleeps inside, swaddled in sterile linens. Clean. Quiet. Innocent.

Human. The wrong baby.

My stomach knots. My arms tighten around our true daughter as instinct wars with reason. My body—my blood—knows her. It roars to keep her. To run. To burn the world down if anyone dares come for her.

This isn’t right. This isn’t fair. But life rarely is.

My fingers tremble as I shift her from my mate’s arms, placing her in the bassinet like a corpse into a grave. She barely stirs. Her breathing is steady.

Peaceful. Too peaceful.

She will never know us.

My mate exhales, low and raw. Then he turns—quick, brutal, like if he moves fast enough, it won’t hurt. Like if he looks back, he’ll shatter.

I should follow. But I don’t. I can’t. Not yet.

My hands linger on her small form as if love could undo fate. As if I could rewrite what has already been decided. A thousand visions scream behind my eyes—keeping her. Fleeing with her. Tearing limb from limb anyone who dared stop me.

She is mine. And I am leaving her.

The sound that tears from my throat isn’t human. It’s grief made flesh. The kind of sound a mother should never be forced to make.

“Now,” my mate urges, voice tight with grief. “Before it’s too late.”

I don’t want to. But I do. Because I have to.

I reach down and lift the human baby in her place, and bile rises in my throat. She’s warm. Breathing. Helpless.

But not mine.

The weight of her is wrong. Her scent is wrong. Everything about her—too soft, too human—rakes against my instincts.

She nestles into me. I almost drop her.

We slip through the hospital’s rear exit, swallowed by the night.

The alley is damp and silent, mist curling like ghost fingers around our feet. Somewhere nearby, a trash bin leaks rot andchemical waste. The human baby shifts in my arms. I realize I’m holding her too tightly, her tiny ribs pressed too hard beneath my palm.

“We waited too long,” I whisper. The weight of her keeps growing. Too warm. Too real.

My mate doesn’t look back. “We had no choice.”