Rejected by the Alpha, Loved by a Human

CHAPTER 2

Wren's POV

I woke up to the smell of coffee and antiseptic, which meant two things: I was human-shaped again, and I was somewhere I definitely didn't belong.

"Okay. Okay, you're awake." The voice from the woods, closer now, careful. "Don't sit up too fast." He suggested, but I sat up too fast anyway. The room spun — a small living room, a couch under me, a folded blanket that smelled like cedar and clean laundry. A man crouched a few feet away with his hands half-raised, like I was something that might bolt.

He might have been in his thirties, dark hair pushed back like he'd run his fingers through it a dozen times waiting for me to open my eyes, and there was dried blood on the knee of his jeans that I was fairly sure was mine.

"You collapsed on Route 9," he said. "I almost hit you. I would've, if I'd been going another ten miles an hour." He held out a glass of water like an offering. "I'm Sawyer. I called it in, but the closest hospital's forty minutes, it’s a remote area, so that’s kind of expected, and you woke up before the ambulance got here, so — I brought you back to my place, well, my cabin, I don’t live here…well, I do for now, I was taking a break from work. I'm a paramedic, I know that sounds like a weird thing to just announce, but I promise it's relevant. I’m sorry, I’m rambling.”

I didn't take the water yet. My whole body ached in the specific, bone-deep way that only came from a full uncontrolled shift, and under my ribs, that torn place where the bond used to live throbbed like an open wound.

I looked down and realised I was in his clothes. An oversized shirt and sweatpants.

He noticed me looking and immediately flushed in embarrassment. “I’m sorry, your clothes were torn, I didn’t mean to— but you would have been cold and I— I didn’t do anything, I promise.”

"How long was I out?" I managed to ask, totally ignoring the fact that he put me in his clothes.

"About four hours." He watched me the way people watch something they're trying not to spook. "You want to tell me what happened to you? Because your pulse was doing something when I found you that I've genuinely never seen before, and I've been doing this job for more than seven years."

He doesn't know what I am, I realized. He'd found me half-shifted in the dark and somehow, in the panic of it, he hadn't understood what he was looking at. Or he had, and he wasn't saying it, waiting to see what I'd admit to first.

"I fell," I said. It came out flat. Unconvincing even to me.

Sawyer didn't push. That surprised me more than anything else that night. He just set the water down within reach and sat back on his heels, giving me room.

"Okay," he said. "You fell. You want food? I've got eggs and I make a genuinely mediocre grilled cheese."

I almost laughed. It came out wrong, more like a sob that changed its mind halfway. My hand went to my stomach without permission, and Sawyer's eyes tracked the movement.

"Are you hurt there?" He asked, awkwardly placing his hands on his waist.

“No. I’m…” I trailed off. I hadn’t said it out loud, not even to the father of the child. I definitely wasn’t going to tell a human that had picked me up from the street. “I’m fine.”

“What’s your name?”

“Wren,” I croaked out. “Wren Valerius.”

“Valerius? Are you from around here? I haven’t heard that name before.”

I shifted uncomfortably, and he nodded, as if getting the cue that I didn’t have an answer for him.

“So about those eggs…” He trailed off. “Does it sound good?”

"Yes, they’re fine." It wasn't. Nothing was fine. Kade's voice was still looping in my head — I release you, I reject the mate bond — and underneath it, quieter, that flicker of something wrong on Elara Voss's face right before she took my place.

This is the right decision for the pack.

Not the right decision for him. He'd said it like a man reading lines he hadn't written.

I pressed my palm flat against my stomach and made myself breathe. Whatever was happening — whatever had actually happened tonight — I was still pregnant with an Alpha's child, the same Alpha who had just rejected me in front of two hundred witnesses, which meant the baby I was carrying was now, by pack law, unclaimed. Unprotected. A loose thread that the Voss pack, if they ever found out, might have every reason to want cut.

"You're safe here," Sawyer said, misreading my silence as fear of him specifically. "I'm not going to ask you to explain anything tonight. But you should know — whatever you're running from, you can stay till you're steady. No conditions."

I looked at him properly for the first time. Ordinary, in the best sense of the word — no pack scent clinging to him, no weight of politics behind his eyes, nothing about him that wanted anything from me. After a night that had taken everything I had, that ordinariness felt like the only safe thing left in the world.

"Thank you," I said, and meant it more than I'd meant almost anything in months.

He nodded, stood, and went toward the kitchen — and that was when I heard it. Faint, through the thin wall, a sound that turned my blood to ice: a howl, long and searching, rolling down off the ridge behind the house.

Not just any howl.

Delphine's howl. My best friend's voice, carrying one word only a wolf raised in Ashwood pack would understand buried inside the sound.

Found you.

Sawyer turned from the kitchen doorway, frowning at the noise like it was nothing more than a dog somewhere in the hills. "That's a new one," he said. "We don't usually get wolves this close to town."

I was already on my feet, ignoring how the room tilted, my eyes on the dark window.

“Hey, hey, where are you going? It’s not exactly safe out there—” Sawyer yelled after me, but I ignored him, my mind had already wandered far.

If Delphine had tracked me here, that meant she hadn't come alone. And the only reason my pack would come looking for the woman their Alpha had just rejected in front of everyone was if something had changed back at Ashwood since I ran.

Something — or someone — had told them where to look.