Chapter 298: The Awakening of the Wolf
Easter~
The pain didn’t announce itself. It didn’t build up or give warning. It struck—sudden, ruthless—like a thief slipping through a window in the dead of night.
One moment, I was lying there, dazed and breathless, blinking up at a moon-drenched ceiling that felt both familiar and foreign. My thoughts were a mess—half tangled in the faces I didn’t recognize, half drowning in the surreal joy of seeing my baby for the first time. She was beautiful. Tiny, warm, soft against my chest, as if made of stardust and breath. When I held her, for a second, the world had stopped spinning. Everything had felt... right.
Then it hit me.
A blistering heat shot through my body like lightning trapped in my veins. It was fire, pure and unforgiving—crawling under my skin, setting my nerves ablaze. It wasn’t pain in the normal sense. It was worse. It felt ancient, wrong, like my very soul was being rewritten against its will.
At first, I tried to brush it off. Maybe it’s normal, I told myself. Maybe this is just what happens after giving birth. But no one talks about this kind of aftermath. No one warns you that your bones might feel like they’re breaking from the inside out, or that your heartbeat might sound like war drums in your ears.
I hadn’t even held my daughter for five whole minutes. Just enough to memorize the weight of her. The way she sighed into me like she already knew I was hers. Just enough time to fall in love.
And then my body betrayed me.
My muscles locked. My vision blurred. My back arched violently off the bed as if something inside me wanted out.
"Jacob!" I choked out his name, raw and cracked, like my throat had been scraped with glass.
Through the fog in my mind, I could only recognize him.
How could I forget the man who moved into the house across from mine with that easy smile and those wild, brown eyes? The guy who always smelled like pine trees and distant rain. The one who waved every morning like we shared some inside joke I didn’t remember agreeing to.