“Are you sure I can’t get you anything?” Ezra asked from a safe distance across the room. Smart man. The last time he’d asked, I’d thrown a book at him. Though he wasn’t smart enough to stop asking.

I started to whip out a smart-ass reply, but my stomach twisted and I snagged the bucket sitting between my feet and vomited into it.

How was there anything still left in my stomach? I’d barely been able to get down chicken soup in the last twenty-four hours. It had been hard to talk Jonah into going to work today, but he and Pax had a lot of digging to do and apparently the office was a safer place to do the kind of hacking the sensitive nature of this case required.

I wiped my mouth with the clean rag Ezra handed me. “It’s just a stomach bug, man. Maybe the flu. You really shouldn’t be here. You’ve got a whole pile of kids, and you do not want them catching what I’ve got.”

Ezra held out a bowl and I dropped the cloth into it. “He’s worried about leaving you on your own, and with a bad egg from the FBI looking for you, I don’t blame him.”

I leaned back against the couch and closed my eyes. The lack of pinching pain in my abdomen would have been almost euphoric if I didn’t feel like a rag wrung dry and limp. “I can handle myself. He should just focus on his work.”

“Hey, you can handle yourself just fine right now. What would you do if someone came after you? Vomit on them?”

“This place is a fortress.”

“You know better than that, Matthew. Nothing is impenetrable.”

I didn’t respond, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging he was right. I just hated looking weak in front of anyone. Jonah was an exception. I really just wanted to shift and curl up into a tight ball beside him. Normally, that would mitigate the strength of whatever illness I had, but this time, the nausea followed me through the shift.

And let me tell you, vomiting as a wolf was no better than vomiting as a human, and that sensitive tongue could taste every damn thing I'd eaten and then some.

So the whole wolf thing was out for right now.

Ezra handed me a cup of orange juice next, and I swished it around in my mouth before spitting it out. Excellent for cleaning out the taste of bile. Terrible to actually drink after burning your throat with stomach acid. Ask me how I know.

"I don’t think I want to know. Sorry, dude. But, you do sure seem to know a lot about taking care of sick people," I said grudgingly.

"A history as a medic and dealing with Cain's one bout of morning sickness helps," Ezra said.

I was too tired to even nod.

"Do you think that might be it?" Ezra asked. “I hate to say it, but now that I’m looking for it, I think your scent has changed. Normally, I’d be able to say right off if an omega was pregnant but the intense eau de puke in here is clouding it enough that I can’t be certain.”

"What?" I must have dozed and missed what he was referencing.

"Morning sickness."

Oh hell no. I was wide awake now. Weak, but definitely awake. "Are you shitting me?"

Ezra shrugged. “It's kinda been the deal for all of us. We find our mates, we get it on, we get pregnant. Unless you're a hundred percent certain that you and Jonah were triple stacked on birth control…"

Shit, I hadn't even thought of it. I'd been on the suppressants so long, I hadn't even thought… and Jonah hadn't mentioned…

My stomach churned and I pressed my lips together, pressing the roiling back for a moment. This time it obeyed me. When I felt it was safe, I opened my mouth. "But this shit came on sudden and has lasted all night and day. That doesn't sound like morning sickness to me."

Ezra chuckled. "A quick Google search will find you a million women and omegas complaining about that name. It hits whenever it wants. So… do you want to wait until Jonah comes home, and deal with it with him, or…"

"Is there another option?" The sarcasm I was feeling didn't come through in my words. I just sounded tired.

"I can message Cain and have him pick up a couple tests and bring them over."

Let me think, live with the question that I might be pregnant for the next who-knew-how-long until Jonah got home from work, or find out ASAP and not even bother him with it if it was negative?

I nodded. "Let's do that."

Cain arrived an hour later with an entire bag of pharmacy goodies. "Pregnant or not, ginger candies always help me when my stomach is upset," he said, handing me a plain white box that promised 99.7% accuracy. Was I supposed to just get up and take it to the bathroom and… pee into a cup? How did these things work, anyway?

"What's he going to do with all this if it's just a twenty-four-hour flu?" Ezra asked, peering into the bag. Cain shot him a dangerous look, snatching the bag away from his mate's pawing hands.

And then I knew why he looked so familiar.

"You used to work with the cartel," I said, leaning forward, adrenaline restoring some of my energy.

Cain's eyes shifted from annoyance to wariness. "I wondered if we might have run into each other," he said.

"You were basically an assassin for hire, weren't you? Adopted son of the jefe? And yet… you're also Jonah's brother?"

Cain shook his head. "I'm not really that guy. It was an act."

I nodded and leaned back. "I get it. So what's the story, then? Was Jonah in too, and I just never saw him?"

"No, well, kinda. So back when we were little, our parents were real gems. We bounced around between them and some family members, but the whole family—well, Jonah got me out of there. That wasn't a good situation either, two kids living on the streets, but it was better, sadly. Jonah was really smart. Is really smart. I'm sure you've figured that out. And somehow he got his hands on a computer and started picking up jobs. Some legit little web design things, but the jobs that paid the best were a little less legal. And so yeah, he worked for the cartel for a little while, and he did my best to keep me out of their sight. The short story after that is that they nabbed me, told me he was dead, told him some equally bullshit story, and then…" Cain spread his hands. "We finally found each other again when the team kidnapped me, thinking I was exactly who I portrayed myself as."

"That's some heavy shit," I said.

"Yeah, normally that's the kind of conversation that comes out over a couple beers, but…" He nodded at the pregnancy test still in my hands.

"I don't think I could stomach a beer right now anyway, even if this proves false."

"You wanna give it a shot now?" Ezra asked.

I was suddenly nervous. "I think I need a little bit more liquid in me. Any more of that broth left? I think I can keep it down long enough."

I was still sitting there, drinking broth, holding the pregnancy test when Jonah came back. Cain and I were in the middle of sharing two sides of a story we'd both apparently been present for when some low-level decided it was a good idea to get high as a fucking kite and then re-enact Romeo and Juliet with a mop as his lady fair.

I was shaking with laughter as I said, "His balcony was a bucket, and he kept falling off the damn thing."

"And to top it all off," Cain added, wiping away tears as I set my mug down and waved Jonah over to sit next to me, "somehow, the bucket was still half-full of nasty, used bleach mop water. It was like that cup magic trick with the paper holding the liquid in, but on a concrete floor, and the last time he fell, he flipped the damn thing over in such a way that it just surged over him like a tidal wave."

"And the whole time, he's waving the damn mop around, trying to save it" —I lifted the box in my hand as an example— "yelling, 'Fear not, my love! I will save you!'" Jonah's eyes followed my hand with rapt attention.

"Until he got bleach in his eye. And then he beat the shit out of his lady fair and turned her into a pile of kindling and mop strings."

Jonah was the only one not laughing, and I leaned in to give him a kiss. "Sorry you missed the start of that story."

Instead of kissing me back, Jonah grabbed my hand holding the pregnancy box and pulled it toward him for closer inspection. His eyes were sparkling and wide as he looked back at me, and for the first time, I felt not just completely shocked about the possibility of a baby, but excited.

"Are you?" he whispered.

"I guess we'll see," I said with a smile.