Rejected While Pregnant with the Alpha’s Secret Heir

Chapter 2 – The Walk Away

I don’t remember how I get back to the house.

One minute I’m in the clearing, rain cold on my face, elders’ whispers needling at the edges of my hearing. The next, I’m stumbling down the back steps of the pack house, one hand flat against my still-twisting stomach, the other sliding along the railing because my legs don’t feel like mine.

No one stops me.

They part.

Wolves I’ve run with since I was sixteen look away as I pass through the narrow hall behind the kitchen. Someone’s making coffee, the sharp, bitter scent mixing with wet fur and damp clothes. A beta female I trained with busies herself with a mug she doesn’t need, shoulders rigid.

Cowards, my wolf snarls, but the sound is thin and far away. Numbness is creeping in, like frost. Maybe it’s better than the ripping agony from the clearing.

I push open the door to the small room that’s been mine for three years. The one we were supposed to leave together when the new house was finished. Our house.

Boxes still sit half-packed in the corner. A stack of paint swatches fans across the dresser—forest green, warm gray, a soft off-white he said would look good with my hair.

I close the door and lean my forehead against it.

The echo of his words follows me in, relentless.

I renounce you as my mate. I sever our bond.

My stomach lurches. I barely make it to the tiny bathroom before I’m on my knees, fingers clutching cold porcelain as my body tries to expel… something. Anything.

It doesn’t. Just dry heaves and acid and the humiliating sting of tears. My throat burns.

This isn’t just the bond, my mind whispers, traitorous. You’ve felt off for days.

I squeeze my eyes shut and breathe through my nose. Inhale: mildew, harsh cleanser, the faint metallic tang of my own blood where I bit my lip. Exhale: a strangled, half-sob, half-growl.

I force myself up, rinse my mouth, catch my reflection in the streaked mirror.

I look like a ghost. Skin too pale, eyes too bright, dark hair plastered to my cheeks in damp strands. There’s a wildness in my gaze I don’t recognize; the wolf has been shaken loose from all her familiar cages and doesn’t know where to put her teeth.

“You’re fine,” I whisper to myself. “It’s just shock.”

My hand drifts, uninvited, to my lower belly again.

“Stop.” I slap my own fingers away like they belong to someone else.

I am not doing this right now. Not when I still taste his rejection on my tongue. Not when my wolf is crouched in a corner of my chest, keening quietly.

Pack tradition is clear: when a bond is severed, the rejected mate doesn’t linger. We’re not thrown out physically. That would look bad. We are simply… expected to go.

Less mess. Fewer reminders.

I’ve seen it before. A woman sliding her ring off under the watchful eyes of elders, a man folding his mate mark into his shirt and pretending it never burned there. They pack quickly. They don’t drag it out.

The pack hates drawn-out endings. Wolves prefer a clean break.

Too bad this one took my heart with it.

I move on autopilot, grabbing the first bag I can find, shoving clothes in without folding. Jeans, a couple of worn T-shirts, the sweater that still smells faintly of cedar and his skin. I hesitate, then stuff it in anyway. I can always burn it later.

The world blurs at the edges. My breath keeps stuttering like my lungs forgot how.

I throw in my worn boots, a bottle of shampoo, the small box of beat-up human-world documents I never fully let go of—old ID, birth certificate, a debit card with almost nothing on it. The human girl I used to be before the pack claimed me and my wolf woke fully.

Maybe I’ll need to be her again.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand. A message flashes from Ivara.

ARE YOU OK??

WHERE ARE YOU? I’M COMING—

I stare at it until the words smear. My thumbs hover over the screen.

I could tell her everything. I could beg her to make him see sense, to stand between us and the council. I could confess the late cycle and the nausea and the way my hand keeps finding my stomach like it has a mind of its own.

But I can already hear the script.

He had no choice.

It’s for the pack.

At least he did it cleanly.

I put the phone face down without answering.

If I tell anyone here that I might be pregnant, that there’s a chance his blood is beating tiny and new inside me, it won’t be mine anymore. It’ll be theirs. A bargaining chip. A resource.

The pack can’t afford you.

What happens to a child they can’t afford either?

Bile rises again. I swallow it down.

I zip the bag. The sound is too loud in the small room.

My gaze snags on a photo on the dresser: me on Corin’s back, both of us laughing, his hair a mess from my fingers, our wolves humming under our skin like shared music.

I pick it up, stare for a second, then lay it face down.

“I’m not yours to discard,” I say to the empty room. My voice shakes, but the words taste right. “And if there’s a life inside me, he doesn’t get a say in that, either. Not anymore.”

The first part is a lie. The second I’m making true.

Bag over my shoulder, I open the door and step into the hall. Voices hush. The air is thick with pity and curiosity and the sour tang of relief that it isn’t them.

No one reaches for me.

Fine.

I walk through the house that was almost my home, past the kitchen where omelets and strategy sessions used to share space on lazy mornings, past the living room where we fell asleep tangled on the couch after long runs. Every step is a small burial.

On the front porch, the rain has softened to a mist. The gravel drive is slick, the old truck I used for errands sitting under the lone floodlight like it’s waiting.

Behind me, the pack house looms. Behind that, the forest. Behind all of it, the man who chose duty over us.

I don’t look back.

My hand settles on my lower belly as I walk to the truck, fingers spreading, protective, possessive.

“You’re mine,” I murmur under my breath to the maybe-echo beneath my skin. “Whatever you are. Whatever you become. You’re mine.”

The wolf inside me lifts her head at that, quiet and fierce.

I open the truck door, heart pounding, and drive toward the human town lights in the distance, with nothing but a bag of clothes, a box of old papers, and a growing suspicion that I am leaving more than a mate and a pack behind.

I might be leaving the father of my child who will never know we existed.