The Luna He Erased Chapter 08

The Luna He Erased Chapter 08

Tdrove myself to the hospital. Of course I did. There was no one else.

Thornhaven General was quiet at 3 a.m. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead as I walked through the sliding doors, one hand braced under my belly, the other gripping the bag I’d packed weeks ago, because I am a woman who plans for emergencies even when the emergency is her own life.

They strapped monitors to me. Two heartbeats filled the room – rapid, strong, furious at being rushed.

“You’re four centimeters,” Dr. Okafor said, calm but focused. “We’ll try to slow it down, but with twins this early, prepare

yourself.”

I was a healer. I knew everything that could go wrong. Underdeveloped lungs. NICU. Ventilators. Knowing everything

made it worse.

For two hours, the medication held. I lay in the dark counting the seconds between heartbeats – thump-thump,

thump-thump – two lives, entirely dependent on me, entirely mine.

At 5 a.m., the contractions returned with savage force, and both monitors began to scream.

“We’re going to the OR,” Dr. Okafor said. “Emergency cesarean. Both babies are in distress.”

The ceiling tiles blurred as they wheeled me down the corridor. I gripped the gurney rails, knuckles white.

No mate holding my hand. No mother – she was on a train, still three hours away. No one.

“Healer Whitlock,” a nurse said, leaning over me. “Is there anyone we should call?”

I looked up at her. The fluorescent light haloed her head like a cruel imitation of something holy.

“No, I said. “There’s no one.”

They put me under. The last thing I heard was two heartbeats.

The last thing I felt, as the anesthesia pulled me down, was the old healer’s warning circling like a hawk: the day they’re born, every wolf for a hundred miles will feel it.

I woke to brightness. My mother was in the chair beside the bed, her face streaked with dried tears.

“Mom?”

“They’re alive,” she said instantly, grabbing my hand. “Both of them. They’re small, but they’re fighters. They’re in the NICU.”

I made a sound I didn’t recognize half laugh, half sob

A boy and a girl,” she whispered, breaking. “Sage, they’re perfect.”

They wheeled me to the NICU window. Two impossibly tiny bodies in clear incubators, wires taped to paper-thin skin. The boy had dark hair and came out roaring, the nurses said – a cry so fierce it set off two car alarms in the parking lot. The girl opened her eyes once, briefly: gray-blue, like a sky deciding whether to storm.

I named him Leo. I named her Iris.

I pressed my hand against the glass. “I’m here,” I whispered. “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.”

A nurse brought me a clipboard. Birth certificates.

Name of Father:

My pen hovered over the blank line.

I wrote: Unknown.

And I didn’t feel guilty. Not for a second.

Then my mother’s phone rang. She stepped into the hallway. Through the door, I watched her face change – watched it

go from tired to alert to afraid.

She came back in slowly.

“That was Maeve,” she said. “Sage… did you feel anything? When they were born?”

“I was under anesthesia. Why?”

She sat down on the edge of my bed and took both my hands.

“Because everyone else felt it. The moment Leo took his first breath, a wave of Alpha power rolled out of this hospital like silent thunder. Wolves felt it in three territories. The witches downtown fell it. Maeve felt it from four hundred miles away.”

My blood turned to ice water.

“Mom-”

“He felt it too, baby.” Her grip tightened. “Kane left Silvercrest forty minutes ago. He’s driving here. Right now.”