The Mark He Refused To Claim

CHAPTER 2

Three weeks later, I stood in the pack kitchen's small bathroom with a pregnancy test shaking in my hand, watching the second line bloom slowly into certainty against the white plastic strip.

Two lines. Clear as day. No mistaking it, no matter how many times, I blinked and looked again, hoping the fluorescent light was playing some cruel trick on my eyes.

I sat down hard on the edge of the tub, the cold porcelain seeping through my uniform, and let my mind drag me back to the one night I had never talked about with anyone, not even Priya, not even myself in the quiet hours when sleep wouldn't come. Three weeks before the terrace. Three weeks before Dane even knew what I was to him. A night after the spring tournament, when he'd found me alone by the river with a split lip from defending myself against a boy twice my size who'd decided a kitchen omega made an easy target, and something in the careful way he'd cleaned the cut, the low steady sound of his voice while he did it, had cracked something open in both of us that neither of us was ready to name. It hadn't felt reckless at the time. It had felt like the truest thing either of us had ever done. We never spoke of it again. I told myself it meant nothing, the way you tell yourself a lot of things when the alternative is too dangerous to hold.

"Nora?" Priya's voice came through the thin bathroom door, careful in the way she always sounded when she suspected something was wrong before she had proof of it. Priya was the only other omega in the kitchen staff who had ever bothered to talk to me instead of about me, and in three years of scrubbing pots side by side she had become the closest thing to a sister I had left in this pack. "You've been in there ten minutes. Talk to me."

I opened the door, the test still clutched so tightly in my fist that the plastic edge had left a mark in my palm, and watched her face travel from confusion to horror in the space of a single breath.

"Oh, Nora." She said my name like a prayer and a curse at once.

"If the elders find out," I said, my voice shaking harder than I wanted it to, "they will take this baby the second it's born. You know how this pack handles inconvenient truths. Dane is marrying into the Voss line in six weeks, Priya. A hidden heir would blow up an alliance his father has spent two years building, and they will not let a kitchen girl be the reason it collapses. They will find a way to make the problem disappear, one way or another, and I will have no say in how."

Priya grabbed both my hands, her grip fierce enough to hurt. "Then they don't find out. We figure this out together, Nora. You are not doing this alone."

I didn't sleep that night, or the next, lying awake running numbers in my head that never quite added up no matter how many times I recalculated them. I had almost nothing saved. No family beyond my aunt Delphine, whose health had been declining for months in ways she kept trying to hide from me. No pack allies who would risk their own standing to protect me if this came to light. But I had six weeks before the wedding sealed the alliance for good, and lying there in the dark with one hand pressed flat against my still flat stomach, I decided that six weeks was enough time to disappear completely.

The pack announced Dane's engagement to Camila Voss two days later, a formal ceremony with banners strung across the great hall and toasts that went on long past midnight. I served drinks at the reception with my hands perfectly steady and my heart in pieces behind a smile I had practiced in the mirror that morning, because steadiness was the only weapon I had left, and I refused to let anyone in that room see it fail.

I started saving everything I could after that. Extra shifts nobody else wanted. Meals I told myself I wasn't hungry for even when my body argued otherwise. Small amounts folded carefully into a tin box hidden beneath a loose floorboard in my room, counted and recounted every night before I let myself sleep, watching the total climb one careful coin at a time.

Dane found me once during those weeks, alone in the kitchen garden pulling weeds I didn't actually need to pull, just an excuse to be outside where the walls of the service wing couldn't close in on me.

"I wanted to explain myself," he said, hands shoved deep in his pockets, looking younger and less certain than I had ever seen him look in front of a crowd.

"You don't owe me anything." I kept my voice flat and even, the same careful tone I used with pack elders who intimidated me into silence. "You already explained yourself very clearly. In front of everyone who mattered to you."

"Nora." Just my name, but it carried six weeks of things he clearly hadn't found the courage to say out loud.

"Don't." The word came out sharper than I intended, and I watched something shift behind his eyes, surprise maybe, that I wasn't trembling in front of him the way I once would have. "You made your choice on that terrace, Dane. I am making mine now, and it doesn't involve you anymore."

He didn't follow me when I walked away, and some small, stubborn part of me had almost wanted him to.

My aunt Delphine, the only family I had left in the world, took a sharp turn for the worse two weeks after that conversation. I found her collapsed on the floor of her small cottage on a grey, ordinary morning, and the healer who came said her heart was simply tired, worn thin by decades of hard living, and that there was little left to do but keep her as comfortable as possible.

I sat with her for three days straight, sleeping in the wooden chair beside her bed, holding her hand through the worst of the long nights when her breathing turned shallow and frightening. On the last night, she gripped my fingers with more strength than I thought her failing body had left in it, and made me promise, in a voice barely above a whisper, that I would leave this place, that I would build something real for myself and for the baby growing inside me, somewhere far away from every wolf who had ever decided, without asking, exactly how much I was worth.

I promised her everything she asked. I would have promised her the moon if she'd wanted it.

She died just before dawn, quiet and finally at peace, and I spent the rest of that day feeling like the last wall holding my whole life upright had simply been taken away without warning.

Three nights later, with the funeral behind me and nothing left in that small cottage that still felt like home, I packed a single bag, took the tin box from beneath the floorboard, and slipped out into the dark toward the southern border road, my heart pounding harder with every silent step I took away from everything I had ever known.

I made it almost to the checkpoint before a pack enforcer stepped out of the tree line directly in front of me, and every plan I had carefully built over six long weeks froze solid in my chest.