Part 3
The cub did not breathe when Elise cleared its mouth. She dried its face, rubbed along the ribs with a warmed towel, and felt no response beneath her fingers. Behind her, Mara’s monitor marked the seconds with tones too thin and far apart.
“Come on,” Tori said, close enough to be useful and not close enough to crowd Elise’s hands.
Elise adjusted the tiny airway and gave another careful breath. The cub’s chest rose. For a moment it fell and stayed empty; then the body jerked, the mouth opened, and a hoarse cry cut through the operating room. Jonah lowered his forehead to the glass.
Tori carried the cub to the first warmed basket while Elise turned back. Marcus had already reached the second. This one came free quickly and objected to the world before its hind legs cleared the incision. The sound was small and furious.
“Better,” Marcus said.
The third cub was breathing but weak. Elise spent several minutes warming and stimulating it until its tongue pinked and its paws began to flex. By then the first cub had found enough strength to crawl against the rolled towel around its basket, blind head swinging in search of a body that was not there.
Three cubs. All alive.
Elise should have felt relief. Instead she watched Marcus.
The bruising along Mara’s uterus extended beyond the obstruction. A short tear had begun where hours of pressure had thinned the tissue, and bleeding welled faster each time Marcus tried to repair it. Mara’s blood pressure fell again.
“I can’t preserve this safely,” he said.
Elise looked at Mara’s face beneath the anesthesia circuit. At the menagerie, she had produced litter after litter in a pen too small for the cubs to escape her tail. Red Willow had never intended to breed her. The question before them was not whether she would carry cubs again. It was whether she would wake for the ones already breathing.
“Remove it,” Elise said.
Marcus nodded. “Tori, more warmed fluid. Tell me when pressure changes, not after.”
The room settled into precise work. Tori called readings. Elise checked each cub, moving the weaker third one closer to the heat. Through the window, Jonah spoke into his radio, then looked toward the far end of the hall.
Rook appeared beyond the second pane of glass in the secure outdoor holding yard beside recovery. He had followed Jonah’s target through two connected lanes after the trailer left, receiving no food until each gate had closed behind him. Now he stood under the narrow shelter with rain dripping from his mane and his head turned toward the clinic wall.
He could not see Mara. The ventilation carried her scent, along with disinfectant, blood, wet fur, and the unfamiliar cries of newborns. He paced once across the yard, returned to the wall, and lay down facing it. Elise looked away before she could assign him an understanding no one could prove.
Mara’s pressure steadied by degrees. Marcus tied off the last bleeding vessel and began checking the surgical field before closing. The worst of the urgency had narrowed into concentration.
“Three was an estimate,” Elise said, more to herself than to him.
Late-pregnancy ultrasound in a lioness could show heartbeats and position, but overlapping bodies made an exact count unreliable. The team had treated three as likely, never certain. Still, every preparation in the room had taken the number and hardened it into fact: three baskets, three colored chart tabs, three spaces on the neonatal board.
Marcus ran his hand along the right uterine horn before completing the removal. His fingers stopped.
“Hold on.”
Tori looked up from the monitor. “Bleeding?”
“No.” Marcus bent closer, moving his hand a fraction. “Elise, bring the ultrasound.”
She wheeled it beside him and placed the probe where he indicated. The image came up crowded and indistinct. Marcus changed the angle. A curved spine appeared high beneath Mara’s ribs, behind the tissue they had been working to save, but it did not move.
Elise searched lower, following the outline until a faint pulse flickered on the screen. She adjusted the gain and held the probe perfectly still.
There was a fourth cub high in the right horn, and its heart was still moving…
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