Escape While Pregnant, Came Back As Alpha Heir

Chapter3

Astrid POV

The floor seemed to tilt under my feet.

I heard the words. I understood each one separately. But together they made no sense, like someone had scrambled a sentence into pieces and handed them to me wrong.

"What?" My voice came out as barely a sound.

Sable stood straighter. She ran one slow hand across her belly and met my eyes for the first time in a long time. There was no guilt there. No shame. Just the cool, steady look of someone who had already decided how this story ended.

"That is right, Astrid. I am carrying Damon's child. He needed someone who could actually give Ironwood Pack an heir. It had to be a wolf." She tilted her head slightly. "And it had to be someone worthy of the bloodline."

"Damon cheated on me." It was not a question. It came out flat.

Sable let out a small, bored sigh. "It is not like that. There was no sneaking around. No dirty secret. All it took was a medical procedure. His DNA, mine, and a clinic that understood what this pack needed." She stepped closer, lowering her voice so only I could hear. "His mother Vera and his sister Dena brought this idea to me. This was not some wild plan. This was a family decision. His family."

I stared at her.

"You are lying."

"I am standing in front of you, four months pregnant, Astrid. Do I look like I am lying?"

The doctors began moving her gently down the hall. She went without looking back.

I stood alone in the corridor for a long moment.

Then something in me shifted. The shock cracked open and underneath it was something sharper. Hotter.

I walked out of the clinic. I drove to Damon's office building. I did not speed, because the only thing holding me together in that moment was the thought of the baby growing inside me. I would not risk that. Not even now.

But I was shaking by the time I pushed open the door to his office.

Damon was on the phone. He looked up the second I walked in, and whatever he saw on my face made him hang up without a word. He stood up slowly, the way someone does when they already know what is coming.

That told me everything.

"Astrid."

"Is it true?" I asked. I kept my voice as steady as I could. "Sable Voss. Is she carrying your child?"

He was quiet for one second too long.

Then he came around the desk and reached for me. "It is not what you are thinking. I never touched her. It was a medical arrangement. I agreed to a surrogate, Astrid, because I need an heir for the Council. That is all this is."

"You agreed to this." I repeated it slowly. "You knew. You planned it. And you said nothing to me."

He squared his shoulders. Alpha posture. The look he used when he needed someone to stop arguing and start listening.

"I have responsibilities. To this pack. To the Council. I need an heir and we were not able to make that happen. This was the most practical solution."

Practical. He used the word practical.

Something inside my chest cracked straight down the middle.

I thought about the basement full of baby things he had collected in secret. All that quiet hope he had been carrying alone. And instead of talking to me, instead of being honest, he had gone behind my back and made an arrangement with another woman. A woman who had never looked at me like I belonged here. A woman who, whether Damon admitted it or not, had always wanted my place.

I pressed my hand to my stomach without thinking.

"Were you ever going to tell me?"

"When the time was right."

"When was that going to be, Damon? When she was holding the baby at the pack house? When everyone already knew except me?"

He opened his mouth but the office door swung open before he could speak.

In walked Sable, still flushed from the clinic. Behind her came Vera, Damon's mother, sharp and polished as always. And Dena, his sister, wearing that small smug smile she saved for moments like this.

Sable went straight to Damon's side and grabbed his arm with both hands, tears rolling down her face. "Please, Damon. She cannot make me end this pregnancy. I will not let anyone take my baby from me."

Damon put a hand on her back immediately, calm and steady, the way he touched her like it was something he had done before.

I watched that. I catalogued it. I filed it somewhere deep and cold inside myself.

Vera turned to me with a look I had seen a hundred times but never quite this open. "Astrid. You need to understand that this is what is best for the pack. A human Luna was always a risk. You knew that when you came here."

"I gave everything to this pack," I said quietly.

"You gave what you could," Dena said with a shrug. "It just was not enough."

Damon snapped at his sister to stop. But the words were already in the air.

I looked at my husband. Standing there beside Sable, in his own office, in the home I had given two years of my life to. I looked at his face and saw the thing I had been trying not to see for a long time.

He had chosen the pack over me. He had chosen it quietly, politely, and completely.

I lifted my chin.

"I want a divorce, Damon."