How to Get Away With a Murder

[Nell’s POV]

The bathroom mirror has a crack that splits my face in two. I set the pregnancy test on the edge of the sink and count to three because the box says three minutes, but I've never been patient when I'm terrified.

Two pink lines. Three years of Callum calling me barren, three years of his mother's pressed lips and his father's gaze finding my stomach flat, and my body picks tonight to prove every last one of them wrong.

My hand finds my stomach—flat, unremarkable, hiding the most dangerous secret in the Adler pack. Nothing says loving family like knowing a positive pregnancy test is a loaded gun.

The front door slams hard enough to rattle the medicine cabinet. Whiskey, rage, and underneath both the sharp copper tang of humiliation—Callum's scent punches through the bathroom door before he's taken three steps inside.

My hands move on autopilot. Test behind the sink, shirt smoothed, face arranged into the practiced blankness that says I am not a threat, I am furniture, please break something else.

He's pacing the kitchen when I come out, jacket still on, slamming every cabinet he passes. Not searching for anything—just making noise, marking territory with destruction the way he does when the world outside this flat forgets to adore him on cue.

"What happened?" Low voice, open palms at my sides. The choreography I learned in year one of this marriage—make yourself small, ask the question, hand him the stage.

"Your fucking father-in-law." He rips a cabinet door hard enough that the hinge shrieks and the wood splinters. "Stood up in front of every elder in the hall and suggested maybe I should get myself checked."

My nails dig crescents into my palms but my face stays perfectly empty. Harlan—the great Adler Alpha himself—said that in public, in front of wolves who've worshipped his golden firstborn for the better part of three decades.

"He said maybe the problem isn't only with you." Callum turns toward me, and what shifts behind his eyes isn't entirely human. "Only—like he's giving you partial credit for ruining my life."

"I'm sorry." First tool in the kit—agree, absorb, apologize. "That sounds awful. Did anyone push back, or—"

"Don't." He stops pacing and his jaw sets like concrete. "Don't do that. Don't manage me with the soft voice and the open hands like I'm a dog you're trying not to startle."

"I'm not managing you." My back finds the counter behind me and presses flat against it. "I'm asking what happened so I can help."

"Help?" He closes the distance by half, and the kitchen shrinks with every step. "You can't help. Three years of your useless body and now my father thinks the defect is mine."

"That is not fair." My voice comes out steadier than my hands. "I didn't make him say anything, Callum."

"Fair." The word comes out like something he's chewing on and spitting back. "I've spent three years covering for you. Telling the elders you're trying, telling my mother to be patient, shielding you from every whisper while you sit here and knit."

"That's not—" I start, but his fist comes down on the counter close enough that the vibration travels through my hip and kills the sentence in my throat. The mug I left by the stove jumps and shatters on the tile.

"Three years, Nell." He leans in, and every muscle in his neck is corded tight. "And your body won't do the one thing it was designed for."

"I'm sorry." The words come out automatic, worn smooth from use, the same two syllables I've fed into this machine a thousand times. "I know this is hard for you."

"Hard for me." He straightens up, and his laugh is short and airless. "You don't know a goddamn thing about what's hard for me."

The table goes first. He flips it one-handed and everything on it shatters against the floor—plates, a mug, the butter dish I bought at the market. Then a chair follows it through the wall, plaster erupting in a white cloud.

The sound from his throat isn't language anymore. His wolf is pushing forward, muscles rippling under skin, and I know this map—I've memorized every route his violence takes the way sailors read weather. Every route has a ceiling where the storm peaks and passes.

Tonight there is no ceiling. I feel its absence like a trapdoor swinging open beneath me, and the animal part of my brain—the part that has kept me alive for three years by reading his moods like weather—screams one word: run.

"Callum, look at me." I flatten myself against the counter so hard my shoulder blades ache. "You don't want to do this."

"Don't tell me what I want." He growls, kicks through wreckage, closing what's left of the distance between us. "You don't get to tell me anything ever again."

"Just stop for one second." My hands come up, palms out, the universal posture of surrender. "We can talk about this if you—"

"Talk?" He laughs and the sound scrapes bone. "You have never said one honest thing to me. Not a single word in three years that wasn't designed to manage me into calming down."