Fanning her hair over his chest, Claire pressed her ear to Shepherd’s heart. Tracing the muscles over his ribs, she sighed. “The very idea what you have done, what the people of Thólos have done, might improve the world, makes it a world I don’t want to live in.”

He hushed her and played with her hair, knowing that she meant every word. A moment later Shepherd’s great body shifted, pouring her off of him so that he might ease down above the pouting Omega. Pressing his scarred lips to where his son grew stronger daily, Shepherd inhaled. One large hand came to feel her there, to seek out signs of new life in the subtle swell of her skin.

Eyes almost dangerous, Shepherd spoke in a voice one uses on children, explaining to his baby, “Your mother is speaking nonsense.” The expression he leveled at her even as he traced patterns on her belly would wither grown men. “She thinks I do not know what is in her thoughts—that I have not recognized her avoidance of any mention of you, my son.” The palm of his hand closed over her little belly and he gripped it as if to reassure the life inside. “But I know she would never follow through on her plan. Claire O’Donnell would never harm her child nor would she suicide and abandon you like her mother abandoned her.”

The blood drained from her face, her heart seemed to drop out of her chest, and Claire gaped. He had exposed her; he had upended her lie.

Rearing up, looming his bulging mass over her, Shepherd held her guilty stare and stated harshly, “Because you love him.” Unsure if he moved out of compassion or if he was trying to draw out some type of confession, Shepherd moved back to where he had been and gathered her up so that she might rest on his chest again in her preferred position. “You would never hurt your son.”

It was an underhanded tactic, but underhanded was Shepherd’s specialty. The male was making a point he knew she had yet to address: Thólos, or her baby. It was a complicated position for Claire that only led to denial of the issue. Taking her survival day by day, pretending there was no child, was all she could do without going mad.

Thólos had to be free.

And then what?

Shepherd’s reign might fall and she would be without the Alpha who fathered the small thing inside her. Corday’s resistance might fail, and the remainder of her days would be spent underground in a life unworthy of her child while Thólos still suffered.

Either way, she could not endure.