My whole body convulsed. Every breath came thinner than the last. Somewhere inside me, the faint presence of my wolf, the one Fenris's blood had slowly coaxed awake over centuries, flickered like a candle in a gale and went silent.
Seraphina clapped a hand over her mouth, laughing. "Oh, look at her! No arms, no legs, just that swollen belly. She looks like a turtle pulled into its shell!"
The others doubled over with laughter, clapping and cheering.
I glared at them through a haze of red, my voice raw and shaking. "You will regret this."
Seraphina stepped closer and looked down at me.
"In all the Six Great Packs, no one has ever made me regret a thing."
"But I can certainly teach you what regret feels like."
The moment the words left her lips, she shaped her hand into claws and sliced my belly open.
A fresh wave of agony swallowed me whole.
Through the blur of fading consciousness, I watched Seraphina reach inside me and pull out a blood-soaked infant boy.
He was alive. His tiny fists swung on instinct, batting at Seraphina's arm as if in protest.
Seraphina stared at my son, eyes widening.
"A mongrel born from a human-born, and his life force is this strong?"
"What a pity. You're still nothing but human filth. Leaving you here would only taint the Shadowfang Pack's sacred ground. Today, I'll clean house on the Supreme Alpha's behalf."
Terror flooded every fiber of my being. My voice came out barely above a whisper.
"He is the Supreme Alpha's pup. You must not harm him."
Seraphina's brows twisted together, and she fixed me with a look of pure contempt.
"You wretched human-born. To save this bastard, you'd tell a lie that absurd?"
"The Supreme Alpha's power is beyond measure. A human-born body could never carry his offspring."
The other handmaidens chimed in.
"Exactly. The Supreme Alpha's bloodline is so potent that anyone with a weak wolf constitution would be destroyed just from the bonding alone."
"You're a human-born. You don't even have the constitution to bond with him, let alone bear his pup."
"This bastard is obviously the product of some affair with a low-ranking patrol wolf. And you have the audacity to pass it off as the Supreme Alpha's heir? The nerve."
They weren't entirely wrong. The gap between a human-born and a pureblood wolf was vast beyond reckoning.