"Thank you." she replied. "Max?"

"Yeah?" God, he wanted to have her right there next to him. Seeing the ultrasound had made the idea of the baby oddly real. He wanted to put his arms around her, to lay his hands protectively over her stomach. Did a baby move when it was just a tadpole-looking thing? Would he be able to feel it?

Bella's voice trembled when she spoke. "I love you. You are the only one I love."

Or have loved, was the unspoken part of her statement, Max knew. She was still worried he thought he wasn't the father.

Well, was he? It seemed impossible, but there it had been, photographic proof. And Bella had said before that wolves were different when it came to sex. Even the most sexually active werewolf wouldn't have more than one partner in an entire lifetime. It probably wasn't as if she'd been banging some human guy in the busy month they'd been separated. She'd told Max as much, and as unbelievable as the whole situation seemed, he believed it.

"Yeah, I know. Don't you worry about that." He hoped that was enough. "And I love you."

After along silence, he realized she was sleeping again.

"Max, wake up!"

The room was pitch-dark. Someone had come in—day or night? he'd lost all sense of time—and turned off the overhead fluorescents.

"Max! Did they drug you or something?"

"Probably," he rasped. That voice was so familiar.

"Open your eyes, you dork."

He did. Anne, the eternally teenaged receptionist from Movement headquarters, stood over him, her porcelain-doll face etched with worry.

Max sighed in relief. "Oh, good. Can you go tell them I'm Movement so they'll let me up? Or feed me?" Then he blinked, crucial details rising to the surface of his groggy mind. "Wait, you're dead."

"Um, obviously I'm not, 'cause I'm standing right here." She leaned over him, squinting in annoyance at his restraints. "We've got to get you out of here."

"What?" He raised his head as far as he could from the pillow. "They're Movement."

"They're not Movement." She slipped a bobby pin from her hair, which she'd pulled back in a tight configuration of dark coils. A thin black feather floated down from the marabou trim of her leather coat to tickle his nose as she leaned close. "Hold still."

Max watched with grim amusement as she slipped the pin into the small brass padlock that secured the restraints around his left arm. Within seconds, his hand was free and she'd set to work on the other one.

"Okay, Velma, if they're not Movement, who are they?" When his right arm came free, he rubbed his wrists with a grimace. Leather would never sound sexy again.

"They're the Soul Eater's people." She grinned in triumph as she freed his right leg. "You have no idea what I've had to do to get in here."