Rejected By My Alpha, Alone with his Hair

Chapter 2

Ivy POV

I stared at the little stick on the bathroom counter for eleven minutes, willing the second line to disappear.

It didn't disappear. It got darker, if anything, like it wanted to make sure I understood.

I sat down hard on the edge of the tub. Outside the small window, Ashen Hollow was going about its ordinary evening smoke curling up from chimneys, someone's dog barking, the life of a pack that had no idea the Alpha's rejected mate was carrying his child two streets over.

My mother's cough rattled through the thin wall again. She'd been sick for months, the kind of sick that ate at her a little more every week, the kind we couldn't afford to treat properly on what she made scrubbing the pack hall floors. I pressed my hand over my mouth and let myself cry, finally, quietly, so she wouldn't hear.

I had exactly two choices, and I turned them over half the night like stones in my palm.

I could go to Ronan. Tell him. Watch his face while he decided whether I was lying, whether I'd planned this, whether an omega girl with nothing to her name had gotten herself pregnant on purpose to trap an Alpha into a bond he'd already thrown away in front of the whole pack.

Or I could not.

By morning I still hadn't decided. Halsey decided for me, in her way, the second I told her.

"You have to tell him," she said, pacing my tiny kitchen like the floor had personally offended her. "Whatever you think of him right now, that's his child too. He deserves to know."

"He rejected me in front of the entire pack, Halsey."

"He rejected the bond. Not knowing you were pregnant. That's different, and you know it's different."

She was right, and I hated that she was right. So three days later, I put on the only coat that still fit comfortably, walked up to the Blackwood pack house with my chin high and my hands shaking inside my pockets, and asked to see the Alpha.

The guard at the door a boy I'd gone to school with, who used to trade lunch with me when we were nine wouldn't meet my eyes. "He's occupied, Ivy."

"It's important."

"He's occupied," the boy said again, softer this time, almost like an apology.

I came back the next day. And the day after that. On the fourth day, I finally got past the door, only to find Ronan already halfway across the courtyard with Delia Grayfen on his arm, the two of them deep in some conversation about wedding logistics that carried clear across the stone.

He saw me. I watched it happen his eyes catching mine, that same flicker from the council hall, gone just as fast.

"Ronan." I made myself say it loud enough to carry. "I need to speak with you. Alone."

Delia's grip tightened on his sleeve. Ronan's jaw did that thing again, the tightening, the wall going up.

"Whatever it is, Ivy, this isn't the time."

"It's about something important."

"I said this isn't the time." His voice had an edge now, the Alpha voice, the one that made lesser wolves drop their eyes without thinking. It landed on me like a slap. "If this is about the bond, I've already made my position clear. Don't make this harder than it needs to be."

Something in me went very quiet and very cold.

He thought I was here to beg. He thought three visits in four days meant I was here to cry and plead and try to talk him out of his precious alliance.

He didn't know. And he wasn't even going to give me the chance to tell him.

"Fine," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. "You've made your position clear."

I turned around and walked out of that courtyard with my back straight, and I did not look back once not even when I heard Delia ask him, low, "What was that about?" and heard him answer, "Nothing. It's handled."

Nothing. Handled.

I got three blocks away before I had to duck into an alley and be sick against a wall, my whole body shaking, my hand pressed flat against my stomach like I could apologize to the tiny thing growing there for the mess it had been born into.

That night I sat with my mother in the small room where she spent most of her days now, and I finally told her everything the bond, the rejection, the baby, the courtyard, all of it, in one long, shaking breath.

She didn't say a word for a long time. She just reached over and took my hand, the way she used to when I was small and scared of thunder.

"You went to him four times," she said finally. "That's four more chances than most men deserve after what he did to you in that hall."

"I know."

"Then you're done owing him anything." Her grip tightened. "You hear me, Ivy? Whatever happens next, you don't owe that boy one more conversation."

I nodded, even though something in my chest still ached at the thought of walking away for good. Loving someone for six years doesn't switch off just because they've decided you're not worth the trouble.

But something else had settled into place beside the ache, something harder and steadier. I wasn't going to spend the rest of my pregnancy standing outside a pack house gate, waiting for a man to decide I mattered.

I found my mother's eyes and made a decision I'd been circling for days without letting myself land on it.

"Mama," I said. "How would you feel about Cedar Ridge?"

She blinked. "Cedar Ridge? Ivy, that's two days' travel. I can barely make it down the stairs some mornings."

"I know what I'm asking." I knelt in front of her chair and took both her hands in mine. "But I can't stay here. Not like this. Not raising a child in a pack where everyone already knows exactly how little I'm worth to its Alpha."

She studied my face for a long moment, and something in her expression shifted not agreement yet, but the beginning of it.

"Let me sleep on it," she said quietly.

I nodded, and for the first time in days, some small, stubborn part of me felt like I could breathe again.