Reid Kirsten Anno

I signed the rejection papers while my mate kissed another woman on our bed. The pen didn't even shake in my hand. Three years of marriage—and this was how it ended. Not with a fight. Not with tears. Just the quiet scratch of ink on paper while she moaned his name in the next room. I placed the signed documents on the kitchen counter, right next to the breakfast I'd made him—his favorite, eggs Benedict with smoked salmon. The plate was still warm. Then I picked up my bag and walked toward the door. I didn't slam it. I closed it gently, the way I'd done everything in this marriage—quietly, carefully, making sure I never disturbed anyone. The morning air hit my face. Cold. Sharp. January in New York. My wolf stirred inside me, weak but restless. *"We need to tell him,"* she whispered. I pressed my hand against my stomach—still flat, but not for long. Six weeks pregnant. With the child of an Alpha who just rejected me for his childhood sweetheart. No. He didn't need to know. He'd made his choice. And I'd made mine. I pulled out my phone and dialed the only number I had left. "Aunt Harper? It's Elara." "Elara? Oh my God, sweetheart—what's wrong? It's six in the morning." "I need a place to stay. Can I come to you?" A pause. Then, softly: "What did he do?" My throat tightened. I wanted to be strong. I wanted to sound unbothered. But when someone asks you *what happened* with genuine care in their voice—after three years of no one asking at all—something inside you just... breaks. "He chose her," I whispered. "He's been choosing her for months. I just... I didn't want to see it." "I'm booking your train ticket right now. Don't argue." "Okay." "And Elara?" "Yeah?" "You're never going back to that man. Do you hear me?" I ended the call and stood on the sidewalk, watching the city wake up around me. Somewhere behind me, in the penthouse I'd called home for three years, my husband—no, my *ex*-husband—was tangled in sheets with Megan Cross, the woman he told me was "just a colleague." Funny thing was, I'd believed him. Every single time. When she called at midnight, I believed him. When her perfume clung to his collar, I believed him. When she showed up at our anniversary dinner "by coincidence," I smiled and offered her a seat. Because that's what Luna Elara did. She trusted. She forgave. She stayed. But Luna Elara was gone now. My phone buzzed. Aunt Harper had sent the ticket. The train left in two hours. I didn't look back—not once. But my wolf did. And the last thing she felt through the bond, before I shut it down completely, was this: He was laughing. He was laughing with her in our bed—and he hadn't even noticed I was gone.

The day the doctor confirmed I was carrying twins, I drove to Marcus's office to surprise him. Through the glass wall of the conference room, I saw my husband of three years feeding a strawberry to a woman sitting on his lap. She was pregnant. Much further along than me. His mother, Helen, sat across from them, smiling warmly—the same woman who'd told me for three years that I was "the only daughter-in-law she'd ever want." Helen raised her champagne glass. "Once Rosalie's twins are born and the DNA matches, we'll take the babies. The surrogacy contract is airtight. She signed the prenup. She gets nothing." My blood turned to ice. Surrogacy contract? Marcus kissed the woman's forehead—tender, adoring, everything he'd been with me. "Lena, I'm sorry you had to wait. Mother needed Rosalie's eggs because your bloodline wasn't 'pure' enough for the family trust. But our baby will inherit too. I'll make sure of it." Lena pouted. "Three years, Marcus. Three years I've shared you with that clueless little orphan." "It's almost over, love." Helen pulled out a document. "After delivery, we'll declare her mentally unfit. Emergency custody. She won't even get a hearing." My hands went to my stomach, shaking so hard I could barely stand. Three years. Three years of love, of him cradling me at night, whispering that I was his world. Three years of his mother teaching me family recipes and calling me "dear." They were farming me. Like livestock. I stumbled back from the glass. My heel caught the carpet and I grabbed the wall, biting through my lip to keep from screaming. Marcus's voice carried through the crack in the door. "Has Dr. Voss adjusted her prenatal vitamins? I need these twins born healthy. The trust requires genetic verification within 48 hours of birth." "All handled," Helen said. "She takes whatever we give her. She trusts us completely." She trusts us completely. The words hit like a blade to the chest. Because I did. God help me, I did. When I was nineteen, alone, grieving my grandmother, working double shifts at the hospital—Marcus Aldric showed up like sunlight. He didn't throw money at me like the others. He sat with me in the hospital cafeteria at 2 AM, eating cold pasta, listening to me talk about my grandmother's Parkinson's. He drove four hours to find a specialist for her. When she died in my arms, he held me for six hours straight without speaking. And I married him believing I was the luckiest woman alive. Now I understood. Every kindness had been calculated. Every touch had been a transaction. I was never his wife. I was an incubator with a heartbeat. My phone buzzed. A text from Marcus: "Working late tonight, baby. Don't wait up. Love you. ❤️" I stared at the red heart emoji until my vision blurred. Then I did something I'd never done before. I didn't cry. I screenshot the prenup on my phone and sent it to the only lawyer I knew—my grandmother's old neighbor, now a senior partner at a top firm. Then I walked to my car, sat down, and placed both hands on my stomach. "I will get us out of this," I whispered. "Whatever it takes." I started the engine. In the rearview mirror, the Aldric Corp building glittered like a glass cathedral. I was going to burn it to the ground. But first, I needed to find out exactly what they'd put in my vitamins.

The pregnancy test was still warm in my hand when I heard them through the bedroom door. "She's just a surrogate, Marlee." My husband's voice—low, tender, the way he used to speak to me before our wedding became a transaction. "Once she delivers the heir, I'll file the annulment. You and I can finally stop pretending." "But she's so clingy, Dominic." A woman's laugh, soft and poisonous. "She actually thinks you love her." My fingers closed around the plastic stick so hard it cracked. Two pink lines. Positive. I'd been trying to tell him for three days. The door was slightly ajar. Through the gap, I could see them on our bed—our bed—Dominic's hand tangled in Marlee Ashford's copper hair, his lips brushing her temple with a gentleness that made my stomach heave. Not because of the morning sickness. Because he'd never once touched me like that. My wolf stirred inside me—weak, suppressed, barely a whisper. She'd been fading since the day I married Dominic Cross, Alpha of the Ironveil Pack, in a contract ceremony that smelled like old paper and obligation. No mating mark. No bond. Just a signature and a promise that I'd carry his bloodline heir in exchange for my dying mother's medical treatment. The treatment had been paid for. My mother had died anyway, three months ago. And now I was pregnant with his child, standing outside his bedroom, listening to him plan my disposal. I should have walked away. Should have gone downstairs, packed my bag, disappeared into the night like the nobody he'd always treated me as. That's what the old Ivy would have done—the orphan, the packless wolf, the girl who'd learned to survive by making herself small. Instead, I pushed the door open. Dominic's head snapped toward me. For one fraction of a second, something flickered across his face—guilt, maybe, or just annoyance at being caught. Then his expression hardened into the cold, aristocratic mask I knew so well. "Ivy." He didn't move away from Marlee. Didn't even have the decency to pretend. "How long have you been standing there?" "Long enough." My voice came out steadier than I expected. I held up the pregnancy test. "I came to tell you something." His eyes dropped to the test. I watched his pupils dilate—wolf instinct, recognizing his offspring before his human brain could process the information. "Is that—" "Positive." I set it on the dresser with a click. "Congratulations, Alpha Cross. Your contract is fulfilled." Marlee sat up in the bed, the sheet pooling around her waist, and I noticed she wasn't even trying to cover herself. She looked at me with an expression of such calculated pity that my wolf—dormant, dying, barely there—growled for the first time in months. "Oh, Ivy," Marlee sighed. "This must be so hard for you." "Get out," Dominic said to me. Not to her. To me. "We'll discuss this in the morning." "No." The word surprised all three of us. "We'll discuss it now. Specifically, we'll discuss paragraph fourteen of our contract—the clause that guarantees me full custody rights and a settlement upon confirmed pregnancy." Dominic's jaw tightened. "You're not in a position to make demands." "I'm in exactly that position." I pressed two fingers to my wrist—an old habit, counting my own pulse to stay grounded. "I'm carrying your heir. And according to Lycan contract law, that makes me the most powerful person in this room." The silence that followed was delicious. Then Marlee whispered something in Dominic's ear, and the look on his face changed to something that made my blood run cold. "Actually," he said slowly, "there's been an amendment to the contract." "What amendment?" He reached into the nightstand drawer and pulled out a document I'd never seen before. "The one," he said, "that removes your custody rights entirely."

The night I flatlined on Dr. Adrian Blackwell's operating table, he wasn't even in the room. He was three floors up, in his private office, having dinner with his ex-girlfriend. I know this because the security footage leaked six months later. Timestamped. Undeniable. At 9:47 PM, while a junior resident was screaming for the attending surgeon and my heart monitor was shrieking a single flat tone, my husband was pouring Château Margaux for Vanessa Hale and laughing at something she said. His hand was on her knee. My blood was on someone else's floor. We had been married for two years. Secretly. No announcement, no ring on his finger in public, no photo on his desk. He said it was to protect me from the media, from the pressure of being tied to the Blackwell name. The Blackwells owned half the private hospitals on the East Coast. Adrian was the golden son. Chief of surgery at thirty-one. Magazine covers. Charity galas. The kind of face that made nurses walk into walls. And me? I was the ghost who lived in his penthouse and never got introduced to anyone who mattered. But I loved him. God, I loved him so much it made me stupid. I had first fallen for Adrian when I was seventeen and he was the young surgeon who operated on my mother's heart. He didn't save her. But he sat with me in the hallway afterward, still in his scrubs, and held my hand while I cried. "I'm sorry," he'd said, his voice low and steady. "I'll carry this. You don't have to carry it alone." I built my entire life around that sentence. I went to nursing school because of him. I transferred to his hospital because of him. When he proposed, clinical and brief, more like a contract negotiation than a love confession, I said yes before he finished the sentence. For two years, I arranged my existence around Adrian Blackwell like furniture arranged around a fireplace. Everything pointed toward him. Everything existed to keep him warm. And then I died on his table, and he wasn't there to bring me back. The junior resident saved me. Dr. Caleb Blackwell. Adrian's younger half-brother. The one the family treated like a stain on their legacy because his mother had been a nobody. Caleb had been passing through the surgical wing when he heard the code. He sprinted in, took over, and spent forty-seven minutes pulling me back from the other side. When I opened my eyes in the ICU at 4 AM, the first face I saw was Caleb's. He was sitting in the chair beside my bed, still in bloodstained scrubs, his head bowed, his hands clasped between his knees. He looked like he'd been in a war. "Welcome back," he said quietly, without looking up. "You scared the hell out of me." "Where's Adrian?" My voice was a wreck. It hurt to breathe. Caleb finally lifted his head. His jaw tightened. Something dark and furious moved behind his eyes, and then he locked it away. "He's not here, Sophie." Three words. And I understood everything. I turned my face to the wall and closed my eyes. The heart monitor beeped on. Steady and mechanical and completely indifferent to the fact that the woman it was tracking had just realized her entire marriage was a lie. Adrian showed up at 7 AM the next morning, carrying flowers. White lilies. My favorite. He knew that. He walked in looking immaculate. Fresh suit, fresh shave, not a single crease anywhere. Like nothing had happened. Like his wife hadn't coded on a table eight hours ago while he was three floors away feeding wine to another woman. "Sophie." He set the flowers on the nightstand and reached for my hand. "I came as soon as I heard. I was caught in an emergency consult. I couldn't get away." A lie. Delivered with the same steady hands that performed surgery. Precise. Practiced. No tremor. I looked at his face. This face I had loved for over a decade. And for the first time, I felt nothing. "Adrian," I said. "Who is Vanessa Hale?" The air in the room stopped moving.

The little girl called me Mommy on my first day. I froze in the doorway of the nursery, my bag still on my shoulder, my contract not yet signed. She was four years old, blonde curls, big gray eyes that looked like storm clouds. She ran to me and wrapped her arms around my legs. "Mommy, you came back." I looked up at the man who hired me. Damien Cross stood in the hallway, his jaw locked so tight I could see the muscle twitching beneath his skin. His eyes—the same gray as his daughter's—were fixed on me with an expression I couldn't read. It wasn't warmth. It wasn't welcome. It was hunger. "She does that," he said flatly. "Ignore it." He turned and walked away, his footsteps echoing down the marble corridor of the largest house I had ever set foot in. I knelt down and gently untangled the child's arms. "Hey, sweetheart. My name is Wren. I'm your new nanny." "No," she said, her little face deadly serious. "You're my mommy. You just forgot." A chill crawled up the back of my neck. I had answered a job listing online. Live-in nanny for a widower's child. Remote estate in the Hudson Valley. No prior experience required. Salary: $15,000 per month. The money was absurd. The kind of money that should have made me suspicious. But I was drowning in medical debt from an accident I couldn't remember, living in a shelter in Portland, and I had no identification older than eleven months. My name was Wren Castillo. At least, that's what the documents said. Eleven months ago, I woke up in a hospital in Maine with no memory. No name. No history. Just a scar on the back of my neck and a leather notebook on the bedside table that said: Your name is Wren. You are safe. Do not look back. I didn't look back. There was nothing to look back at. So when the agency matched me with this job—when the background check cleared a woman who technically didn't exist before last year—I packed my one suitcase and drove six hours south. Now I was standing in a dead woman's house, holding her daughter, and the man who hired me was looking at me like I was a resurrection. That night, after I put Lily to bed, I found the photograph. It was in the hallway, in a silver frame, half-hidden behind a vase of dried flowers. A wedding portrait. Damien Cross in a black suit. And beside him— Me. Not me. But a woman with my face. My exact face. Same cheekbones. Same dark hair. Same small scar above the left eyebrow that I had always assumed came from my accident. The nameplate on the frame read: Damien & Sera Cross. Forever. My hands were shaking. I heard footsteps behind me. "You see it now," Damien said. I turned around. He was leaning against the wall, a glass of whiskey in his hand, watching me with those predator-gray eyes. "Who is she?" I whispered. "My wife," he said. "She died two years ago." "I'm not her." He took a slow sip of his drink. "No," he agreed. "She's dead. I identified the body myself." He stepped closer. Close enough that I could smell the whiskey and cedar on his skin. "But you have her face, Wren. And my daughter thinks her mother came home." He reached out and touched the scar above my eyebrow. His thumb traced it with terrifying precision, like he had done it a thousand times before. "So here's what's going to happen," he said softly. "You're going to stay. You're going to take care of Lily. And you're not going to ask questions about my dead wife." "And if I do ask questions?" His eyes went flat. Dead. The warmth vanished like a candle being snuffed. "Then I'll have to decide what to do with a woman who looks exactly like a ghost." He walked away. I stood in the hallway, my reflection staring back at me from the glass of the photograph—two identical women, separated by a name and a grave. One of us was lying. I just didn't know which one.

The house smelled like vanilla frosting and roses. I'd spent three days planning Emma's fourth birthday party — the unicorn cake, the balloon arch, the little tulle dresses for all her friends. Everything had to be perfect. Everything always had to be perfect when you were married to Marcus Whitfield. Thirty guests. Two caterers. A magician who charged five hundred dollars an hour. Marcus's mother, Diane, had inspected every detail that morning, her lips pressed thin, finding fault with the napkin color. "Blush, Serena? I said dusty rose. These are blush." I changed them without a word. I always changed them without a word. The party was in full swing when I noticed Marcus was gone. He'd been at the bar twenty minutes ago, laughing with his business partner, his hand around a whiskey glass. Now his chair was empty. I checked the kitchen. The patio. The study. Then I heard it. A sound from upstairs. From Emma's room. My heels clicked on the marble staircase. The hallway was quiet, the noise from the party muffled below. Emma's door — the one with the hand-painted unicorn — was closed. I opened it. Marcus was on my daughter's bed. On the pink sheets I'd picked out. On the stuffed animals Emma slept with every night. And beneath him was Jade. Our nanny. The girl I'd hired eight months ago because she had a degree in early childhood education and Emma loved her. Emma loved her. For one long, horrifying second, nobody moved. Then Jade saw me. Her eyes went wide and she shoved at Marcus's chest. He turned his head. Looked at me. And his expression didn't change. Not shame. Not panic. Nothing. "Close the door, Serena," he said, his voice flat. "You're embarrassing yourself." The scream that came out of me didn't sound human. It was raw, animal, pulled from somewhere deep in my gut. I lunged forward — I don't even know what I intended to do — but a hand caught my arm from behind and yanked me backward. Diane. Marcus's mother. She'd followed me up. "Stop it," she hissed, her nails digging into my skin. "There are guests downstairs. There are children downstairs. Your daughter is downstairs. If you make a scene, you will be the one who ruined her birthday. Not him. You." I stared at her. At this woman who had watched her son walk upstairs with the nanny and said nothing. Who had followed me not to help, but to silence me. "Your son—" I started. "My son is a man," she cut me off, her voice like ice. "And men have needs. If you were satisfying them, he wouldn't need to look elsewhere. Now fix your face, go downstairs, and cut the cake." She released my arm. There were red crescents from her nails in my skin. I walked downstairs on legs that didn't feel like mine. I cut the cake. I smiled for photographs. I sang Happy Birthday to my daughter while my husband's mistress's perfume clung to the air of her bedroom. That night, after the guests were gone and Emma was asleep in the guest room because I couldn't put her in that bed, I sat on the bathroom floor and stared at the wall. Marcus didn't come home until 2 AM. He didn't come to our bedroom. I heard the guest suite door open and close. Jade's soft laugh through the walls. I pressed my hands over my ears and made myself a promise: I would survive this. For Emma. I didn't know yet that surviving would cost me everything.

I was on my knees scrubbing his bathroom floor when his fiancée walked in wearing my dead mother's necklace. The diamond pendant—a tiny, imperfect stone on a thin gold chain—dangled between Victoria's surgically perfect collarbones like a trophy. "Oh, this old thing?" Victoria caught me staring and touched the pendant with a manicured finger. "Ethan gave it to me. Said it was junk from some storage box. But I think it's cute in a vintage-poverty kind of way." My mother's last gift. The necklace she pressed into my palm the night before the car accident, whispering, Keep this close, Lily. It's the only proof of who you really are. I had reported it missing three weeks ago. Ethan told me I probably lost it. He said I was careless. He said a lot of things. "Get back to work," Victoria said, stepping over me to admire herself in the mirror. "And use the other bleach this time. The bathroom smells like a homeless shelter." I scrubbed. My name is Lily Chen. I was twenty-three years old, orphaned at seventeen, and for the past two years, I had been the live-in nanny to Ethan Blackwell's five-year-old daughter, Sophie. I was also the woman Ethan Blackwell had been sleeping with for eleven months before he proposed to Victoria Lane—heiress, socialite, and the cruelest human being I had ever met. He told me I was special. He told me, in the dark of his bedroom, with Sophie asleep down the hall, that he had never felt this way about anyone. Then Victoria's father offered him a forty-million-dollar investment in his tech startup, and suddenly I was just the nanny again. No—worse than the nanny. I was the dirty secret he needed to bury before the wedding. I heard them that morning. I was bringing Sophie her breakfast when Ethan's voice drifted through his office door. "She's nobody, Vic. A nanny. She doesn't have family, connections, or money. She won't be a problem." "She looks at you like a lost puppy," Victoria replied. "It's pathetic. Fire her." "After the wedding. I need her for Sophie until then. The kid won't stop crying for her." "Fine. But keep her in her place." Her place. My place. On my knees, scrubbing bleach into imported Italian tile, while the woman who stole my mother's necklace called me a homeless shelter. I should have left that day. But Sophie. God, Sophie. She was five, motherless since birth, and she had nightmares every single night. She called me Mama Lily. She drew pictures of us together—stick figures holding hands under a yellow sun. I was the only constant in her life, and I couldn't abandon her the way everyone had abandoned me. So I stayed. I stayed and I endured. Until the night I discovered what Victoria was really doing to Sophie when I wasn't looking. It was 2 AM. Sophie's screams woke me—not the usual nightmare screams, but a sharp, terrified shriek that made my blood freeze. I ran down the hallway barefoot. Sophie's door was open. The nightlight was unplugged. And Sophie was huddled in the corner of her bed, shaking so hard her teeth chattered. "She said the monsters would eat me if I told," Sophie whispered, clutching my shirt. "She said Mama Lily would go away forever." "Who said that, baby?" "Miss Victoria." Red bruises, four of them, the exact width of adult fingers, circled Sophie's tiny arm. Something broke inside me. Not the fragile, cracked-glass breaking of a woman losing hope. This was the sound of a detonation. I photographed the bruises. I recorded Sophie's whispered confession on my phone. And I packed our bags. At 3 AM, I carried Sophie down the back stairs. Ethan was asleep. Victoria was in the guest wing. I made it to the front door. The hallway light snapped on. "Going somewhere?" Ethan stood at the top of the stairs in his robe, arms crossed. "She's hurting Sophie," I said, my voice shaking. "Victoria is hurting your daughter." He walked down the stairs slowly. He took my phone from my hand. He looked at the photos. He looked at the recording. Then he deleted everything. "Victoria is going to be Sophie's mother," he said, his voice ice. "And you are going to forget this conversation, or I will make sure no family in this city ever hires you again. I will destroy you, Lily. You have no money. No degree. No family. You are nothing." He took Sophie from my arms. She screamed for me, reaching her little hands over his shoulder. "MAMA LILY! MAMA LILY, DON'T GO!" He shut the door in my face. I stood on the porch in the January cold, barefoot, with nothing but the clothes on my back. But I wasn't crying. I was memorizing. His face. His words. The sound of Sophie screaming. Ethan Blackwell thought he destroyed a nobody. He had no idea that the necklace Victoria was wearing around her neck contained a micro-engraved serial number linking me to the biggest tech fortune in the country. My mother wasn't a nobody. And neither was I.

The day I gave birth to his twins, my husband married my sister. I was hemorrhaging on the operating table, screaming for Dominic, when the nurse showed me the photo on her phone with trembling hands. "I'm so sorry, Mrs. Ashford. I thought you should know before... before they come here." The screen showed Dominic in a black tuxedo, sliding a ring onto my sister Vivian's finger. A courthouse wedding. Timestamped forty-seven minutes ago — while I was being cut open to deliver his children. "He said you signed the divorce papers," the nurse whispered. "He told the whole staff you agreed." I never signed anything. The anesthesia was wearing off. I felt every stitch, every staple, every shredding fiber of my ruined body. But none of it compared to the pain of seeing his hand on her waist, his mouth on her cheek. I had been Dominic Ashford's surrogate — that's how we met. A clinical transaction. But he pursued me. He seduced me. He swore before God and my dying mother that he loved me. "The babies," I gasped. "Where are my babies?" The nurse looked away. "Mr. Ashford's security team took them to the nursery. He left instructions that... that only Mrs. Ashford is authorized for access." Mrs. Ashford. That was Vivian now. My sister — who had introduced me to the surrogacy agency. Who had comforted me when I felt like a vessel instead of a wife. Who had held my hand at every ultrasound while stealing my husband with the other. The door opened. Dominic walked in. He was still wearing the tuxedo. There was champagne on his breath. He looked at me the way you look at a task you forgot to finish. "You're awake," he said. "Good. We need to talk about the transition." "Transition?" "Vivian will be the children's mother on all legal documents. You were the surrogate. That was always the arrangement." "I am your WIFE!" "Were," he corrected. "The marriage was annulled this morning. Judge Harrison owed me a favor." He adjusted his cufflink. "You'll receive the standard surrogacy compensation. Two hundred thousand. It's generous, Elena." He used my name like a line item on a spreadsheet. "You can't take my babies." "They're Ashford heirs. They belong to the family." He leaned down, his cologne — bergamot and betrayal — filling my lungs. "Be smart about this. Vivian loves those children already. She'll be a wonderful mother." "She's my SISTER." "Exactly. So you know they're in good hands." He straightened up, buttoned his jacket, and walked out. I lay there, torn open in every possible way, listening to his footsteps fade down the hall. The nurse was crying. I wasn't. Something inside me had gone quiet. Not broken — forged. I pressed the call button. "I need a phone," I said. "And I need you to call one number for me." "Who?" "Rhys Calloway." The nurse's eyes went wide. Everyone knew that name. The man who built a tech empire from nothing. The man the press called "The Ghost" because no one could touch him. The man who had once told me: If Ashford ever hurts you, I will burn his world to the ground. I had refused his help when I still believed in my marriage. I wasn't refusing anymore. "Tell him Elena is ready," I said. "He'll know what it means."