Pregnant After My Alpha Rejected Me

the Rejection-b

She reached the double doors at the back of the hall. Pushed one open into the cold night air. Let it swing shut behind her.Only then did she let herself stop.She stood on the top step, one hand braced against the wooden post, and looked out at the dark tree line beyond the pack houses, and waited for the ground to feel solid again. It didn't. Her legs were shaking now that no one could see them shake.

Her breath was coming too fast, too shallow, and she pressed her free hand flat against her sternum like she could hold the torn place together by force.Behind her, through the doors, she heard the hall come back to life—voices rising, the low murmur of two hundred people processing what they'd just witnessed, someone's chair scraping back. Life continuing. The pack moving on already, the way packs did, because one omega's ruined night wasn't going to stop the world from turning.She made it three streets before she broke.It happened in the alley behind the old mill house, in the dark, where nobody would see.

She pressed her back against the brick wall and slid down until she was sitting on the cold ground, knees drawn up, and she cried the way she hadn't let herself cry in the hall—ugly, gasping, both hands pressed over her mouth so the sound wouldn't carry. She cried until her chest ached from it, until the torn place under her ribs had stopped feeling like an open wound and started feeling like something duller.

Something that would still be there tomorrow, and the day after that, but wouldn't kill her outright.She thought about her aunt, waiting up for her at home, who'd know the second Elena walked through the door that something had gone wrong, because Elena had never once in her life been able to hide anything from that woman.

She thought about the dress she was wearing, chosen so carefully, and how stupid it felt now, sitting in an alley with her knees pulled to her chest.She thought about Kane's face in that half-second before he'd looked away—that flicker of something that wasn't rejection at all, that looked almost like a man watching himself do something he didn't want to do. You know why, he'd said.She didn't.

And some small, stubborn part of her—the part that had survived losing her parents at nine years old, the part that had learned to stretch a paycheck and patch a roof and never once ask for help she couldn't pay back—that part of her decided, sitting in the cold alley with her face still wet, that she was going to find out.Not because it would fix anything. The bond was severed. Whatever they'd had, whatever she'd let herself believe in for four months, was gone in a way that couldn't be undone by an explanation.But she refused to spend the rest of her life not knowing why.She stood eventually. Wiped her face with the heel of her hand. Smoothed down the front of the dress that had been meant for a claiming and instead had witnessed the opposite.

And she walked home the long way, avoiding the main road, avoiding anyone who might have already heard—because word traveled fast in a pack this size, faster than she could outrun it even if she tried—and she let herself feel, just for those last few minutes of darkness and privacy, exactly as broken as she was.By the time she reached her aunt's porch light, she'd rebuilt the stillness in her hands. She'd practice it every day from now on, she understood. Not because it came naturally.

Because it was the only armor she had left.---Behind her, in the Pack Hall, Kane stood in the same spot for a long time after the doors swung shut.The hall was emptying slowly around him—pack members filing out in twos and threes, some throwing him careful glances, most avoiding his eyes entirely, the way people avoided the gaze of someone who'd just done something they didn't understand and weren't sure they wanted to be near. Reyes was still close, watching him with the patient, satisfied look of a man who'd gotten exactly what he came for."You did the right thing," Reyes said quietly, once most of the hall had cleared.

"The pack will forget this by the next full moon."Kane didn't answer. His eyes were on the doors Elena had walked through, still swinging faintly on their hinges."She'll forget it too," Reyes added. "Eventually."Kane's hands, at his sides, curled slowly into fists.He had not forgotten the look on her face when she'd asked him why. He didn't think he'd forget it if he lived three hundred years. He'd stood in front of the only woman he'd ever wanted to claim and let her believe he simply didn't want her anymore, because the alternative—telling her the truth, telling her what Reyes had threatened, what the council had voted on behind closed doors two nights ago while Kane sat trapped between two impossible choices—the alternative would have destroyed her faster and worse than the lie he'd told instead.*A clean rejection now, or a forced separation later, done by the council instead of by you, in whatever manner they decide is necessary.* Reyes's words, delivered flat and reasonable four nights ago, in this same hall, with the doors locked. *You have one night to decide which kind of cruelty you'd rather live with, Alpha.

He'd chosen the one he could control. The one where at least the words came from his own mouth instead of a council decree. He'd told himself that was mercy.Standing here now, watching the doors settle still, he understood it hadn't felt like mercy to her at all."Alpha." Reyes's voice, patient, testing. "Is something wrong?"Kane looked at him for a long moment—long enough that Reyes's expression flickered, just slightly, with something that might have been the first thread of unease."No," Kane said.

"Nothing's wrong."He walked out through a side door instead of the main one, because he couldn't make himself pass through the doors Elena had used, couldn't make himself retrace her exact path out of this hall, out of his life, out of the future he'd let himself imagine for four months before Reyes and the council decided it was a future the pack couldn't afford.Outside, the night was cold and clear.

He stood on the side steps and looked toward the edge of the property, toward the direction he knew Elena's aunt's house stood, though he couldn't see it from here.For one second—one single unguarded second, alone in the dark where nobody could see his face do what it wanted to do instead of what the ceremony had required—something in his chest gave the same way hers had, a tearing, a wrongness, a voice in the back of his skull screaming that he'd just made the worst mistake of his life and there might not be any fixing it.