THE ALPHA WHO REJECTED ME BEGGED FOR MY RETURN

CHAPTER FIVE- THE NORTH DOES NOT WELCOME WEAKNESS

The Northern Shadow Pack was nothing like I’d pictured.

I’d expected another packhouse, bigger than Silvermoon’s, maybe grander. What I got was a fortress carved directly into a mountain.

Three days on the road. Lucian drove the whole way himself, stopping only when the morning sickness got bad enough that I needed the shoulder of the highway and a plastic bag. Dr. Evans’s pills barely touched it. Lyra was miserable in my skull the entire time, and her misery bled straight into mine.

On the third morning the trees broke open and there it was. A black stone wall twenty feet high cutting straight across the mountain pass. Behind it, dark wood houses with smoke rising from every chimney, warriors training in a yard even as snow came down sideways, and above all of it, a castle built into solid rock.

“The North,” Lucian said, and there was no mistaking the pride in it.

The gates opened. People stopped what they were doing to watch our SUV roll through, noses lifting, catching my scent before they’d even seen my face. A stranger. An outsider. Pregnant.

The whispers started before we’d parked.

Lucian came around and opened my door, offered his hand, and I took it because my legs had gone unreliable somewhere around hour two.

A woman appeared at the top of the castle steps the instant we stepped out. Tall, striking, black hair, the same pale eyes as Lucian, wrapped in a fur coat that probably cost more than my whole life had. Her presence hit the air like a slap.

“Lucian.” Her voice cut through the yard. “Three days late for the border meeting. And you brought home a stray?”

“Mara.” Something in his tone dropped ten degrees. “This is Aria. She’s under my personal protection. She stays in the east wing.”

Mara came down the steps slowly, eyes tracking me head to foot, stopping on my stomach even though there was nothing there yet to see. Her nose flared.

“She’s carrying.” Flat, certain. “And she’s Silvermoon. I can smell it on her from here. You dragged a pregnant Silvermoon rogue into our territory? Have you completely lost your mind?”

Every wolf in that training yard had stopped moving. Every ear was on us now.

My face went hot. Every instinct told me to shrink, to look at the ground the way I’d been taught my whole life. Lyra snarled instead, sharp and immediate.

Chin up. We do not bow to her.

I made myself hold Mara’s stare. “I’m not a rogue. I was banished. Those aren’t the same thing.”

Mara laughed once, short and ugly. “Banished for what, exactly? Theft? w*****g yourself out to a taken Alpha?”

“Mara.” Lucian’s voice cracked through the yard like a whip, and I felt the ground itself shudder under it. Two lower-ranked wolves dropped to a knee without meaning to. “That’s enough. She is my guest.”

“She’s a liability,” Mara shot back, not backing down an inch, which told me exactly how high her rank had to be. “The Conclave is in a week. Silvermoon will be sitting across from us at that table. If they see her here, they’ll say we stole their wolf, that we’re hiding their criminal. A pregnant one, no less. Whose is it? Some Silvermoon boy who threw her out the second he got what he wanted?”

Every word landed exactly where it was aimed. She was saying, out loud, in front of the entire yard, the thing I was most afraid was true. That I was a burden. That this baby was a mistake before it had even taken its first breath.

My hand found my stomach on its own.

Lucian moved without warning, putting his whole body between me and Mara’s line of sight.

“Mara is my sister,” he said to me, low, then turned back to her, and his voice went to ice. “And she’s forgetting herself. Aria is a white wolf. Think very carefully about what that actually means before you say another word.”

Mara’s expression cracked open. She looked at me properly for the first time, my hair, my eyes, the way even the yard had gone silent around us.

“No.” Barely a whisper. “You’re lying to me.”

“Have I ever lied to you, Mara?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Take her to the east wing. The room with the fireplace. Bring her real food, not whatever scraps you feed the omegas.”

Mara’s jaw worked, but she nodded. “Fine. The pack won’t accept her, Lucian. You know how the North treats things it hasn’t tested. We do not welcome weakness here.”

“Then she’ll show them exactly what she is.” Lucian looked back at me, something almost gentle behind the ice now. “Can you do that, little wolf?”

I thought about Kael’s face the second before he rejected me. Selene’s smile from the floor. The flicker of light on that ultrasound screen, too small to see and already fighting harder than anyone in that room had given me credit for.

I was finished being weak.

“Give me a month.” My voice came out steadier than I felt, Lyra pushing something into it that made it carry farther than a normal voice should. Heads turned across the training yard. “A month, and I’ll show this whole pack exactly what a white wolf is capable of.”

Mara’s eyebrows lifted, caught off guard. Lucian’s mouth curved into something real, something that changed his whole face for a second.

“Good.” He turned toward the castle. “Training starts at dawn. If the sickness hits you mid run, you vomit in the snow and you keep running.”

That night I lay in the biggest bed I had ever seen, in a stone room warmed by a fire that never stopped burning, eating stew Mara had brought herself while she watched me like I might detonate. My hand stayed on my stomach the whole time.

Far south, in Silvermoon, Kael stood on his balcony unable to sleep, one hand pressed flat over a chest that shouldn’t have felt anything anymore. A second heartbeat, faint and fast, pulsing straight through a bond that was supposed to be dead. He didn’t understand it. He thought the grief was finally cracking him open.

He whispered into the cold, “Aria?”

And in the North, inside me, my pup kicked for the very first time, as if it had heard him too.

I gasped, tears blurring everything, and whispered back into the empty room, “He doesn’t get to hear you. You’re mine.”

Lyra howled somewhere deep in my chest, half promise, half warning.

The North didn’t welcome weakness. So I would make myself into something they had no choice but to kneel for.