Chapter 17
It was late, and Lana should have been tired, but she wasn’t. She was too busy panicking about what kind of a mother she was going to be, and if her child was even going to survive infancy. She stared at the ceiling while chewing her lip nervously. There was so much racing through her mind and she couldn’t get it to stop, so she got up and wandered to her own suite for a while. She puttered around her apartment for a while, frustrated that nobody had warned her that pregnancy often came along with insomnia and restless legs.
Her back hurt so much from all this new pressure that she decided it might be a good idea to go out to the forest for a run. Shifting into her tiger form would take some of the pressure off her back for a while, and the run would tire her out so that hopefully she could get some sleep.
Lana grabbed some paper and wrote a note for the men, telling them where she went and that she’d be back so that if any of them woke up and discovered her gone, they wouldn’t worry too much about her. They were all always so preoccupied with keeping her safe that she figured they might need it.
Shifting turned out to be exactly what she needed. As she made her transition, the weight of the baby was pulled away from her back, hanging freely and comfortably beneath her.
What an incredible relief.
Trees whipped past her as she ran through the forest, and it seemed like all of her stress was being wiped away by each branch that hung low enough to brush along her back. The wet smell of the forest and all of its moss was like a holistic aromatherapy. Every horrible thing she’d imagined happening to her baby melted away from her mind as she let her instinct take over.
I’ll be able to figure it all out. Women have been doing this for thousands of years without instruction manuals, and I can, too.
There was a lot for her to worry about, but it didn’t do her any good to sit and think of all the ‘what-ifs’.
Lana ran until her muscled burned, until she could barely breathe from the sheer force of the wind whipping past her face, and then she ran some more. This moment, this communication with her own self, her psyche, was a therapy she had needed for so long. As she ran, she imagined that she was tearing through all the pain and anger that she had felt, that she was sprinting away from her past and all the things that had ever gone wrong in her life.
The reality had set in for her today that she was having a child, an actual baby, a kitten of her own. And over the last few months, especially now that she was visibly pregnant, it became obvious to her that despite how their relationship began, despite the fact that in the beginning it was a real struggle for her to accept her role as Alpha Mate, they were all now a family.
It had been so long since she’d felt that way—if she ever had at all. Her parents were her family by blood, and that was unavoidable. She and Ian had come together because her father had wanted it. But with Roman, Jackson, and Drake, she felt like they just belonged by her side.
She didn’t seek independence from him the way that she had from her parents, the way that she had from past boyfriends, or even, if she were to admit it, Ian. There was joy in spending time together, in experiencing this pregnancy together. It seemed right.
Lana slowed as she reached the clearing where she and Jackson had first played, and rolled in the bed of now fallen leaves that coated the forest floor, purring despite herself. She was happy. For the first time in her life, she wasn’t being pressured into something she didn’t want to do.
No. She had stumbled upon peace. She was enjoying her time and the idea finally crossed her mind that she might be in love, not with one of her mates, but with all three. And that was exquisite to her. She pawed at the sky and stretched out, delighting in the fact that her spine wasn’t twisting forcibly and that, for a few blissful moments, there weren’t tiny feet pushing her ribs into her shoulders.
But then, her head whipped around as she heart a twig break somewhere not too far off and she jumped up onto her feet as quickly as she could. As she stalked back toward the tree line, a faint popping sound caught her attention and she started running. Unfortunately, not soon enough. A shock of pain shot through her leg as a tranquilizer dart sank into her haunch.
Within moments, she was no longer able to run, and as two camouflage-clad men began to pick up her lame body from the ground, the world around her faded and she lost consciousness.
* * *
Jackson awoke with a start, darting upright in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. It had been a long time since he’d woken up like that. Shortly after Lana had accepted him as one of her mates, his nightmares had stopped. He was more at ease about everything as long as he was able to help take care of her.
He let out a long sigh and lay back down, reaching to put his arm around Lana, only to find that she wasn’t there. Anxiety trickled through his body, but he shoved it back down.
Surely she was with one of the other men.
He fought his worry for several minutes.
Oh, hell. It wouldn’t hurt to check.
He jumped out of bed, looking for any sign of what might have happened to her. Nothing.
So he headed down to her suite in the basement of the hotel. She wasn’t there, either. He was so distraught, so frantic, that he nearly missed the note she’d left on the coffee table, and upon reading it, he tried to calm himself down.
But he couldn’t.
Instead, he called his streak-mates.
* * *
The darkness in her suite was closing in around him as he paced around from room to room, his arms crossed tightly over his chest as he waited for Drake and Roman.
He kept re-reading the note. There was something bothering him. He didn’t believe that she was safe, and he didn’t believe that she’d be coming home. He paused to stare at the crib they had already assembled in her room, as they had in every suite. He studied the pastel colors they had blanketed it with and praying that Lana was okay. Her note said not to worry but that was next to impossible, he was sure that something horrible had happened and he wasn’t there to stop it.
Flashes of Lana’s lifeless body lying in some ditch, broken and helpless somewhere, were flashing through his mind. He could almost see the glint of the hunters’ scopes in the moonlight as they took aim and shot at the mother of his child.
Our child, he thought as the other two men arrived and he outlined his concerns.
Jackson sat at the table finally, trying to put it out of his mind with a tumbler and three fingers of whiskey Roman had given him. Meanwhile, Drake drummed against the table with his thumb. None of the three of them could stay still, as if they absolutely could not shake the feeling that something terrible was happening to Lana.
Grinding his teeth and bouncing his knee wasn’t enough to ease Jackson’s tension. He needed to get out there.
Roman needed to make sure that she was alive, that she hadn’t been killed in the middle of the night by some poachers. Why couldn’t she have listened to him when he told her not to go anywhere alone?
Finally, without a word, Drake grabbed his jacket and ran out the door. As he hit the exit, he turned back. “Are you two coming?”
They went to where he knew Lana would have gone to hunt. Surely they would at least find evidence that she’d been there. The little pile of clothes that she would have stashed somewhere before shifting and running off, maybe. Or at the least they could follow her scent.
They drove to the parking lot in silence. Once they got there, it didn’t seem like they could run fast enough—but nothing could have prepared them for what they saw upon rounding the corner to the parking lot in the conservation area.
Two darkly clad and face painted hunters were loading Lana’s slack body into a cage in the back of their pickup truck, talking loudly about how they’d finally found some game worth the trouble of coming out there.
Poachers. This was one of their worst-case scenarios. The three of them got as close to the culprits as possible, catching their scent and then piling back into the pickup to follow them, albeit at a distance.
One of their own was in danger, and she was the mother of their unborn child. Clearly this was a time for drastic measures.
It was all they could do wait until they had the advantage.
“Not long,” Roman whispered. “We’ll show them what it means to take our mate.”