What would he say now that she had Changed, knowing that he’d robbed his own Cause of her blood? What punishment that knowledge would be. What agony. She wanted to weep.
It was all too late.
The rain had lessened, falling in a light mist that matched Cassidy’s listlessness. Too spent to do more than crawl, she lay still where she was among the saturated bracken and grass. She willed the escape of sleep, but even that had deserted her. Her senses felt raw, as if every nerve in her body were pierced with cactus thorns. Her eyes stung with unshed tears.
This was what it felt like to be completely alone. Even at the ranch, it had never been like this. Anger and hatred were vicious, fickle companions. Love was no better. Belonging was an illusion. Braden had given her something precious, and then pitilessly taken it away. Better never to have had it at all, to have never known even the possibility of real happiness.
If she was to be alone forever, without love, she had to become strong again—not the strength of ignorance, but of survival. A wolf’s strength. A woman’s strength. She withdrew far inside herself, shut off her senses, and made her mind a gray place of nothingness.
But something was waiting for her in that place. Someone. A presence, a spark of light, part of her body and yet not. She wrapped her arms around her belly as the knowledge seeped into her.
She wasn’t alone. Another soul shared this space with her. Another… person. Unformed, indistinct, but there. Resting in her womb.
She was going to have a baby.
Cassidy pressed her face to the sodden grass and laughed until only dry sobs emerged from her throat. She was loup-garou. She was going to have a baby—Braden’s child. Braden had been wrong about both things, and it was too late.
Braden’s child.
She hugged herself, cradling the precious burden she could not yet feel with her outward senses. Isabelle said the sickness came with being with child. She would gladly have gone through it a hundred times to keep this gift.
Braden hadn’t left her with nothing of himself. She had what he would not willingly give up, if he knew. But he wouldn’t know. She wouldn’t surrender her baby to a man who couldn’t love. A ruthless, coldhearted, bitter man who would only regard their child as another token in the Cause.
No. She shouted inner defiance toward Greyburn. This baby is mine. It will be loved, and wanted for itself, and it will never be alone. Do you hear me, Braden Forster? It will be loved.
She bent low, rocking on her knees, until the tears stopped. Gradually she heard what she’d ignored before: the clop of horse’s hooves, drawing ever nearer. Not the violent drumming of a galloping steed, but the steady pace of a draft horse.
She hadn’t realized how close to the road she had come to rest, or on whose land. She peered over the screen of bracken.
It was a wagon, well made but modest, carrying a driver and three passengers. She almost sank down into hiding again before she recognized the man who held the reins.
Telford was no longer dressed in his usual spotless, formal attire. He wore a tweed coat, practical trousers and boots, and a cap on his head. The simple clothing made him seem very ordinary.
In the end, Telford had been a friend to her, even if he’d been wrong about Braden. The wish to speak to him once more engulfed her with yearning. She’d deliberately kept him ignorant of the plans to help Rowena escape, but of course he’d learned immediately afterward. She knew he had not judged her for her act, that he worried about her even though they never discussed Rowena’s disappearance.
And he was the only part of Greyburn she’d ever see again.
But she had no clothes, and no explanations she was willing to give. She stayed where she was, and the wagon was nearly past when she saw the face of one of the men in the back of the wagon.
That face was very different from the last time she’d seen it. In Greyburn’s Great Hall, it had been frozen in terror and bereft of hope. Now John Dodd the footman—human, traitor, and pawn of the Russian werewolves—was sitting comfortably beside an older woman, smiling as if he hadn’t a care in the world.