Pregnant and Rejected by My Alpha Mate

Chapter Three: The Wrong Territory

Selene

The wind was merciless. It cut through the jacket I had grabbed on my way out, found every gap, and pressed against my face like cold hands. My eyes watered. I told myself it was only the wind.

I did not stop.

The road stretched ahead of me in the dark, lit only by the single beam of the motorcycle's headlight and whatever the moon was willing to offer through the cloud cover. Trees lined both sides, tall and nameless, blurring into a single dark wall as I pushed the bike faster. I did not know exactly where I was going. North, mostly. Away from pack territory. Away from the smell of that room and the image of Calla's hands spread across her stomach and Ryker's face, so unbearably calm.

Necessary. I pushed the throttle harder.

My body hurts. The seat was not built for long rides without breaks, and my lower back had started a dull, persistent ache somewhere around the first hour. I ignored it. Physical pain was something I could manage. It had edges. It had a source I could point to. The other kind did not.

I kept one hand pressed briefly to my stomach every time I slowed for a curve, a habit that had started without my permission. A reflex. Then I would put my hand back on the handle and keep moving.

The baby did not know any of this yet. That thought kept coming back to me, quiet and strange. Somewhere inside me, something small was just existing, unknowing, unbothered by Calla or Ryker or the cold or the fear. Just growing.

I was going to protect that. Whatever else happened, I was going to protect that. I had been riding for nearly two hours when I saw the headlights.

At first I thought nothing of it. Roads had traffic. People drove at night. I kept my speed and watched the lights in the mirror the way you watch anything unfamiliar, with distant, cautious attention.

They did not fade. Every turn I took, they took. Every time I slowed slightly, they slowed. The distance between us stayed the same, as if whoever was behind me was not trying to catch up but making sure I knew they were there.

My stomach dropped.

"No," I said out loud, to no one, to the dark road.

I pushed the bike as fast as I dared. The engine surged and the trees blurred faster and the headlights behind me stayed. Two of them now that I looked properly. Two bikes. Riding in formation, practiced, deliberate.

Pack riders.

The fear that moved through me was different from what I had felt in Ryker's room. That had been a breaking kind of fear, the kind that comes with grief. This was sharp and immediate and it lived in my hands, which tightened on the handles until my knuckles ached.

I swung off the main road onto a narrower track, unpaved, the surface uneven enough that the bike shuddered under me. I heard the riders behind me adjust. They were good. Whoever Ryker had sent, they knew how to ride.

I took a hard left. Then a sharp right. Then I pushed through a gap in the tree line that I only spotted at the last second, ducking low over the handlebars, branches scraping the top of my helmet.

When I came out the other side, I was on open ground. Rough and wild, the kind of land that had not been cleared or managed. The grass was long and the ground was uneven and the air smelled different here, layered, complex, carrying the scent of wolves I did not recognize.

Unclaimed territory. Or claimed by someone else entirely. I slowed, my breath ragged, and looked back.

The two pack riders had stopped at the tree line. Their headlights sat still, pointing toward me, but neither of them crossed onto the open ground. One of them revved his engine once, the sound sharp and short, like a warning. Or a farewell.

They would not cross the border.

I let out a breath that shook on its way out. My hands were trembling. I relaxed my grip on the handles and let myself sit for a moment, just breathing, the cold air filling my lungs in long, slow pulls.

Then I heard the other engines.

Not behind me. Around me. From the left and the right and somewhere ahead, low rumbles that built and separated and closed in with the easy confidence of people who did not need to hurry because they had already won.

Headlights appeared in a rough semicircle. Five bikes. Six. The riders sat watching me without moving, their engines idling.

I did not run. There was nowhere to run to.

One of them cut his engine and swung off his bike. He was tall, broad across the shoulders, wearing a jacket with markings I did not recognize. He walked toward me with his hands loose at his sides and a slow, unhurried smile on his face.

He stopped a few feet away and tilted his head.

"Looks like you rode into the wrong territory, sweetheart."

Ryker

The room felt wrong the moment I stepped back into it.

Calla had fallen asleep, her breathing slow and even. I had been in the study reviewing border reports for an hour, maybe more. Nothing unusual. Nothing that should have made the back of my neck tighten the way it did now.

I stood in the doorway and my wolf went still.

Then I caught it. Selene's scent, faint, already pulling thin at the edges the way a scent does when its source has been gone long enough for the air to begin forgetting.

She had been here recently. And now she was not.

I moved through the corridor toward her room. The door was open. The bag was gone. The jacket I had left here months ago, the one I had never asked for back because I knew she had kept it and I had let her keep it because I was not as cold as I made myself appear, that was still there.

She had left it deliberately.

Something shifted in my chest. I stood in the center of her empty room and my wolf pushed forward, hard, and with him came the full force of everything I had been holding behind my control for the last several hours.

I breathed in.

And underneath the grief and the fury and the fading trace of her presence, I caught something else. Something I had missed earlier because I had not been paying the right kind of attention.

It was faint. New. Layered underneath her own scent like a note beneath a chord.

My lungs stopped working for one full second.

She was pregnant. My mate had been standing in that doorway carrying my child, and I had told her it was necessary, and then I had asked her to leave.

The sound that came out of me was not human.

I heard boots in the hallway. Marcus, my beta, appeared in the doorway, took one look at my face, and went very still.

"Alpha?"

"She took the motorcycle." My voice was quiet. That was worse than shouting. I knew it. Marcus knew it. "Find her. Every rider we have. Every contact outside the border."

"Understood." He did not move yet. "And when we find her?"

I looked at the empty room. The bare desk. The place where her bag had been.

"Alive," I said. "Bring her back alive."