PREGNANT AFTER THE ALPHA’S REJECTION

I was twelve years old the first time Damien Blackthorn looked through me as if I were air. He was sixteen, already built like a warrior, already wearing authority on his shoulders like a second skin. The Alpha’s son. The future of Blackthorn Pack. I was nobody—the daughter of a dead omega and a father who drank more than he breathed. “Move, runt.” That was all he said. I was standing at the packhouse gate, waiting for my father to collect his monthly food ration. Damien walked past me with three boys trailing behind him like shadows, and he shoved my shoulder without even looking at my face. I stumbled. My knee hit the gravel. Blood came. None of them stopped. I sat on that ground for a long time, watching him disappear through the packhouse doors. Something burned in my chest. Not hatred. Not yet. Just the quiet, terrible knowledge that some people were born to take up space, and some were born to be pushed out of it. I was the second kind. My name is Elena Voss. For eighteen years, Blackthorn Pack taught me what I was worth. Nothing. My father, Gerald Voss, was an omega who lost his mate during my birth and never forgave me for surviving. He did not beat me every day. Some days he simply forgot I existed, and those were almost worse, because hope would start to grow in my chest, and then he would come home smelling of whiskey and everything would begin again. “Useless. Just like your mother. She died to give me you.” I cooked. I cleaned. I kept my head down at school while the other girls wore their wolf marks with pride and I wore long sleeves to hide what my father left behind. I ran small errands for the packhouse kitchen so we could eat. I told myself survival was enough. It was not enough. But I kept going. Because somewhere underneath all that pain, something in me refused to die. My wolf, the one I shifted for the first time at fifteen, was different. She was white. Pure white, not the grey or brown of omega wolves. She was larger than she should have been. When she appeared, I hid her. I did not understand why instinct screamed at me to keep her secret, but I listened. Some gifts, shown too early, get taken away. The night everything changed, I was seventeen and carrying a pot of stew across the packhouse courtyard for the kitchen staff. The annual Alpha Ceremony was three days away. The whole pack was restless with excitement. Damien Blackthorn was about to be installed as Alpha of Blackthorn Pack, the youngest in pack history. Everyone worshipped him already. Girls painted their lips and pressed their dresses and prayed the Moon Goddess had written his name next to theirs. I prayed for nothing. I wanted nothing from Damien Blackthorn except distance. The pot was heavy. My arms were shaking. Then I felt it. A pull. Deep in my chest. Behind my ribs. Like something reached inside me and grabbed hold of my soul and yanked. I stopped walking. The pot nearly slipped. “Watch where you are standing.” I looked up. Damien stood three feet away. He was eighteen now, taller than I remembered, jaw sharper, eyes darker. He wore a black training shirt, and there was dried blood on his knuckles from sparring. He stared at me the way a man stares at something in his path that he has not decided whether to step over or crush. The pull hit him too. I saw it. One fraction of a second where his eyes changed, where something animal and ancient moved across his face. Mate. My wolf whispered it like a prayer. His jaw locked. “No.” He said it quietly. Almost to himself. Then his eyes found mine and they were cold again, colder than before, cold like he had reached inside that one warm second and killed it with his bare hands. “Absolutely not.” My mouth was dry. “What?” “You heard me.” He stepped closer. His voice dropped low so no one around us could hear. “Whatever you think you just felt, forget it. I am three days from becoming Alpha of this pack. I will not have an omega as a mate. I will not have you.” The words landed like stones in still water. “The bond is not real,” he said. “I reject it. I reject you, Elena Voss. Completely and permanently.” The pain came without warning. It started in my chest and spread to every nerve ending I had. My knees buckled. I caught the pot before it fell, but I could not catch myself. I gripped the courtyard wall with one hand and breathed through it, breathed through the tearing sensation of something being ripped from the center of me. Damien watched. He did not flinch. He did not look away. He watched me suffer like a man confirming a decision he had already made. “Clean yourself up before the ceremony guests arrive,” he said. “You look pathetic.” He walked away. I stood there against that wall, in the middle of a cheerful, decorated courtyard full of pack members laughing and stringing lights, and I made myself a promise through the pain. I will leave. And when I come back, you will know exactly who you rejected. I did not know then how true that would become. I did not know what was already beginning inside me.