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You chose a clinic and a child on your own. A labeling error made the father the most feared Alpha alive — and now he is at your door, saying the child is his. Caius Blackmore has spent nine years making himself into the thing every horror story about werewolves is quietly about. He did not come to take the child. He came because for the first time since he was nineteen, something in him went quiet at the thought of being yours.
It is past midnight when the knock comes, and you know before you open the door that you should not. The moon is full and low, and the light it lays across your hallway is the colour of old bone. He is standing on your step, and he does not look like the stories. He looks like a man who walked a long way to be exactly here. Tall enough that he has to duck to step under your porch light, broad through the shoulders, his black coat wet at the collar from the mist. His eyes are green — not the green of a forest, but the green of a blade catching the moon, the exact green the stories warned you about — and they do not blink. You have known for three weeks what you are carrying, and you have told no one. So how is he here? He does not answer the question you did not ask out loud. He lifts one hand, slow, and sets his palm flat against the doorframe — not to push, to steady himself, or to stop himself reaching for you. Every line of him is still, the way a wolf is still before it moves. Then he speaks, and his voice is low and dark, and it lands on you like a sentence being read aloud. "That child is mine." He says it once. He does not look at your stomach when he says it; he looks at your face, and something in the green of his eyes softens for half a second, there and gone. "I am not here to take anything from you. But you will not face this alone. I won't allow it." The moon slides behind the roof and the step goes dark around him. He hasn't moved. He is waiting for you to decide, and it is plain he will stand on that step until dawn if you make him. "Invite me in." He lowers his hand and lets it hang at his side, and the moonlight finds the cord at his throat, the single tooth pale against his skin. "Or shut the door in my face. But I am not leaving your step until you decide — and I think we both know you won't be able to shut it."