Chapter 7: The Ultimatum
The rain had softened to a drizzle by dawn, a mere sigh against the canvas.Inside the tent, the air was thick with sleep and the musk of their earlier passion. Leonid lay on his back, one arm curled around Jennie, his breathing deep and even. The pale gray light seeped in, outlining the hard plane of his shoulder, the dip of his throat where her bite stood out in stark relief.Jennie’s eyes snapped open.
She didn’t stir, didn’t blink. She stared at the shadowed ceiling of the tent, a single, corrosive thought eating through the pleasant haze of the night before. It started as an itch, then a pulse, then a drumming certainty that tightened her chest until she couldn’t breathe.
Mine.More.Forever.She sat up abruptly, the furs pooling at her waist. The movement was so sharp it jostled Leonid. He grunted, his brows knitting, but didn’t wake.“Leonid.” Her voice was a rasp in the quiet.
He sighed, turning his face into the pillow.“Mmm. Sleep.”
“No.” She shook his shoulder, her fingers digging in.“Wake up. I need you to wake up right now.”
His eyes opened then, dark and heavy-lidded with sleep. He looked at her face, and whatever he saw there—the wild, unblinking intensity—made the last of the drowsiness evaporate. He pushed himself up on his elbows.“What is it? What’s wrong?”
She knelt before him, her hands planted on his bare chest.Her nails were short but they pressed into his skin. “I need you to get me pregnant.”
He stared.A slow blink. “What?”
“You heard me.I need it.Now.Today.” Her words tumbled out, low and fervent. “I need to be full of you.I need everyone to see it. Karina, Kai, everyone.I need it to be permanent.”
Leonid’s face shifted from confusion to concern. He caught one of her wrists, his thumb stroking over her frantic pulse.“Jennie. Slow down.It’s dawn. We’re both tired.”
“I’m not tired!” she insisted, her voice pitching higher.“I’ve never been more awake. Don’t you get it?Last night… she was in our space.She touched you. Words aren’t enough.I need… I need something she can never touch.Something that can never be taken away. I need your pup.”
He sat up fully now, the covers falling away. “Baby, listen to yourself.This isn’t about a baby.This is about what happened with Karina. That’s done.She’s nothing.”
“It’s not done!” she hissed. “It’s in my head now.It’s in the air. The only way to get it out is to fill everything else with you. Completely.” Her eyes searched his, desperate for immediate agreement.“Do it.Just… take me.Don’t pull out this time. Ever again. Just give it to me.”
He looked hurt, a little startled by her manic bluntness.“Jennie, we don’t just… decide this in a panic at sunrise. A pup is a lifelong thing. It’s not a bandage for a fucking idiot’s mistake.”
“So you don’t want to give me one?” Her voice dropped, turned dangerously soft. “You don’t want me to carry your child?”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” he said, running a hand through his sleep-mussed black curls. “I’m saying we should want it for the right reasons.When we’re calm. When we’re ready. Not because you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared,” she spat, but her trembling hands betrayed her. The cold, calculating part of her mind was watching, and it saw his hesitation as rejection.A new, icy clarity washed over the panic.“I see. You’re not ready.Fine.”
She pulled her hands back from his chest as if burned.
“If you won’t give me what I need,” she said, each word a chip of ice, “then maybe I’ll find an alpha who will.”
The silence that followed was absolute. The damp, hushed world outside ceased to exist.Leonid’s face went bone-white. All the nonchalant grace drained from him, leaving something raw and stunned. His dark eyes widened, not with anger at first, but with a profound, gutting disbelief. “What did you just say?”
She saw the wound she’d made, and it thrilled the dark part of her even as it made her soul shrivel.She lifted her chin.“You heard me.”
He moved then. In one fluid, silent motion, he was out of the furs and on his feet. He didn’t look at her. He yanked his trousers from where they were crumpled on the ground and stepped into them, his movements sharp, mechanical.
“Leonid—” The ice in her voice cracked.He buttoned the fly, his jaw a hard line. Still, he didn’t speak. The air in the tent vibrated with the words she’d thrown, now hanging between them like shards of glass.
“Say something,” she whispered, the manic energy collapsing into a hollow dread.Finally, he looked at her. The hurt in his eyes had crystallized into something colder, more distant than she’d ever seen.There was no rage, no shouting. That would have been better.This was a quiet, terrible fracture.
Without a word, he grabbed a shirt, didn’t put it on, just clenched it in his fist. He turned and pushed through the tent flap, disappearing into the gray, drizzling dawn.
The canvas fell shut behind him, swaying.
Jennie sat alone in the nest of warm furs that still smelled of him, of them.The silence was deafening. A drop of rain found its way through the seam overhead and landed with a cold, precise tap on the back of her hand.She looked down at it. Then she looked at the empty space where he had slept.A choked sound escaped her throat. She brought her hands to her face, but no tears came. Only a vast, howling vacuum where the certainty of his love had been just moments before. She had pushed, and for the first time, he had not simply absorbed it.He had walked away.
Outside, through the canvas, she heard the soft, sucking sound of his bare feet in the wet earth, moving farther and farther away until the rain swallowed the sound completely.