Chapter 1

My due date came two full weeks early.

At three in the morning, contractions ripped me out of sleep.

I gripped the bedsheets through the first wave of pain and reached for the communicator.

I called Axel three times. He didn't answer.

The fourth time, it finally connected—but it was his adjutant who picked up.

"Where's the Clan Chief?"

"The Chief is in the Council Hall, meeting with an envoy from the Shadow Clan."

The adjutant's voice was as steady as if he were reading a memo.

"Madam, your due date is still two weeks away—"

"I'm giving birth now."

I bit my lower lip and pushed down the next contraction.

"Tell him."

"Madam, the envoy traveled through the night. The matter concerns a border dispute over territorial boundaries. The Elders' Council has ruled that the Clan Chief must personally handle this—if mishandled, it could trigger inter-clan warfare tonight—"

I hung up.

The contraction surged again. I rolled off the bed entirely, my knees hitting the floor, my vision going dark.

Bloody fluid ran down my thighs.

With the last of my strength, I pulled the door open and shouted into the hallway—my voice so hoarse I barely recognized it.

By the time the Head Healer arrived, I'd crawled to the corner of the corridor, curled on the ground, a dark stain spreading beneath me.

She took one look and her face changed.

"Malpositioned head. Get her to the delivery room."

I was lifted onto a stretcher.

Moonstone ceiling panels slid past overhead, flickering on and off.

The contractions blurred my vision into a wavering haze of light.

The Head Healer was running—her footsteps rapid, the soles of her shoes striking the stone floor: thud, thud, thud.

The delivery room door swung open.

The smell of antiseptic mixed with blood hit me.

The Head Healer pressed down on my shoulder: "Madam, push. The baby can't wait."

"Where's Axel?"

The Head Healer didn't answer.

She was preparing instruments, her fingers fast but trembling slightly.

Footsteps came from outside the door—urgent, the heavy, characteristic stride of an Alpha.

I recognized that rhythm.

He stopped at the door.

It opened.

Axel stood in the doorway, his gray clan robe damp with night dew, brows deeply furrowed. Behind him were three Elders and a Strategist.

He didn't walk in.

He stopped at the threshold, as if held back by some invisible thread.

"Selina."

His voice was tight, his knuckles white as he clenched his fists.

"The Shadow Clan envoy arrived unexpectedly, demanding an immediate face-off over the northern border dispute. The Elders' Council ruled that I had to—"

"My baby is coming."

I stared into his eyes.

"I know."

He took half a step forward, but the Elder behind him pulled him back.

The Chief Elder whispered something in his ear, and Axel's shoulders tightened further.

"The northern garrison's supply line has been cut."

His voice dropped low.

"Shadow Clan warriors are massing beyond the border. If I don't show, it'll be taken as tacit acceptance of their claims—they could push their outpost thirty miles forward."

"Your baby is coming."

I said it again.

He looked at me.

That look was long—long enough for me to see the moonstone light reflected in his pupils, fine and trembling.

His lips moved, as if he were about to say something—then the Strategist's communicator buzzed behind him.

The Strategist answered, listened for a few seconds, and dropped his voice to a whisper: "Confirmed? How many?"

Axel's breath stopped.

"I'll come back," he said.

The door closed.

His footsteps headed toward the Council Hall, growing fainter and fainter, until they were swallowed entirely by the next shrieking wave of contractions.

"Never mind the Clan Chief," the Head Healer said, pressing down on my shoulder. "Push."

I bit down on my wrist.

I tasted blood.

I only found out later that there had never been any "northern border dispute" that night.

The envoy's visit, the severed supply line, the Shadow Clan warriors massing beyond the border—all of it was fabricated through the Shadow Clan's communication channels.

Leila had contacted a Strategist within the clan whom she'd been subverting for six months. She timed it precisely to my labor, drawing Axel away from my delivery room door.

She did all of this just to make him miss this child's birth.

Just to make him, from the very first glance, feel a sense of strangeness and uncertainty toward this child.

Just to make him slowly begin to doubt—under the combined influence of Elders' gossip and Soulsever herb—"Is this child really mine?"

She succeeded.

I gave birth to a daughter.

She was tiny, wrinkled, and her cry was like a kitten's.

Outside the delivery room stood only an elderly woman—a complete stranger, the Omega in the bed across from mine.

She wrapped the swaddling for me and asked: "Where's your husband?"

"He's handling a border dispute," I said.

The old woman gave me a look.

I only understood that look much later—she'd heard similar words in her youth.

Axel returned at daybreak.

The Council Hall's lights had been off for a long time—the so-called "envoy talks" had been confirmed as a false alarm at 4:30 AM. The Shadow Clan hadn't massed at the border; the supposedly severed supply line was an internal communications failure.

Axel had waited all night in the Council Hall, only to hear his Strategist say: "I'm sorry—the source was mistaken."

He pushed open the delivery room door and stood beside the bassinet.

Our daughter was asleep, breathing softly.

He looked at her for a long time, his brow faintly furrowed.

"She doesn't look much like me," he said.

I kept my eyes closed: "All newborns are wrinkled."

"The Elders said the Shadow Clan's actions last night might be connected to a leak of pregnancy-related intelligence. They may have known something."

"Known what?"

He was silent for a long time. He reached out and touched our daughter's fine baby hair.

His fingertip paused on her crown, then withdrew.

"Nothing," he said. "Get some rest."

The door closed.

He left.

I lay in bed staring at the ceiling.

The moonstone light flickered.

Outside the window, the moon was entering an eclipse, its glow slowly dimming.

My daughter slept soundly beside me, knowing nothing.

I looked down at her face—so small, so quiet.

Her breathing was so light, like a thread that could snap at any moment.

I suddenly remembered something from three months ago.

In Axel's dinner, I'd detected an extremely faint herbal scent.

I thought nothing of it at the time—just assumed the cook had tried a new spice.

Now that scent resurfaced in my memory.

Soulsever herb.

A specialty of the Shadow Clan.

Long-term ingestion disrupts an Alpha's sense of smell and judgment.

Someone had been drugging him.

And that someone was living in the west wing of the main hall, in the guest quarters, serving him soup with her own hands every day, under the guise of being his "adoptive sister."

Leila.

A spy sent by the Shadow Clan.

That woman my parents and Axel had raised for ten years under the name of "a friend's daughter."

At this very moment, she was sitting in the room next to the Council Hall, providing "key testimony" about that nonexistent "border crisis."

I had no proof.

But I could smell it.

An Omega's sense of smell briefly sharpens postpartum—perhaps this was the Moon Goddess's last mercy to a mother whose pup was dying.