His Rejected Mate, His Hidden Heir

Chapter 4: Two Lines

I threw up for the first time three days after the rejection.

It happened in the kitchen, right in the middle of the lunch rush. One second I was plating sandwiches, and the next my stomach heaved so violently that I barely made it to the slop bucket behind the dry storage. Marta, the head cook, watched me with her lips pressed flat.

"Food poisoning?" she asked.

"Must be," I said, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

She didn't offer to let me leave early. She didn't offer anything. That was fine. I didn't want her kindness. I didn't want anyone's kindness. I wanted to do my work and go back to my room and not exist until the next shift.

The sickness didn't stop.

Every morning — *every single morning* — I woke up nauseous. Some days I could keep it together until my break. Other days I couldn't make it out of bed before my stomach revolted. I started keeping a bucket beside my cot the way other people kept water glasses.

I told myself it was stress. The rejection. The shame. The way the pack looked at me now — not with contempt, exactly, but with a kind of embarrassed disgust, like I was a stain they were waiting to fade. The mark on my neck made it worse. I covered it with my hair, with the collar of my shirt, with a scrap of fabric I tied like a bandana. People still stared. They knew it was there.

Stress,* I told myself. *Your body is reacting to trauma. It's normal.

Except it wasn't normal. Not after two weeks.

The second thing I noticed — after the sickness — was the exhaustion. Bone-deep, soul-heavy exhaustion that sleep couldn't touch. I'd work my shift, crawl back to my room, and collapse onto my cot, and it still wouldn't be enough. My body was running on empty, burning through something I couldn't replenish.

The third thing was the mark.

It had been quiet since the rejection — a low, dull throb I could almost ignore. But in the last few days, it had started pulsing again. Not the desperate, seeking pulse of a new bond, but something different. Something rhythmic. Something that felt almost like...

No.

I wouldn't let myself think it. I couldn't. Because if I thought it, I'd have to face it, and if I faced it, I'd have to deal with it, and I couldn't deal with it. Not this. Not alone. Not here.

But my body wasn't listening to my denial.

On the fourteenth morning, I woke up at 4 AM with my stomach in my throat. I barely made it to the bucket. When the heaving stopped, I sat on the cold floor of my room, my forehead against the wall, and I let myself think the word I'd been avoiding for ten days.

Pregnant.

The thought landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples through everything. Every memory. Every fear. Every calculation I'd ever made about my survival in this pack.

You don't know that,* I told myself. *You're sick. You're stressed. You're—

I was late.

My cycle had always been irregular — another gift of my hybrid blood — but not this late. Not two weeks late. Not with morning sickness and exhaustion and a mating mark that had started pulsing in a way that felt nothing like the rejection.

I pressed my hand to my stomach. Flat. Unchanged. But I could feel it — something small and impossible, a warmth beneath my skin that hadn't been there before. Or maybe I was imagining it. Maybe I wanted to imagine it, because the alternative was...

What?

What was the alternative?

I got dressed. I did my shift. I scrubbed pots and plated food and kept my head down and didn't throw up, not once, which felt like a small victory in a life that had run out of them. After my shift, instead of going back to my room, I walked.

The human town was a twenty-minute walk from the pack's territory border. Most wolves never went there — they had no reason to. But hybrids sometimes did. We ran errands the full-bloods didn't want to bother with. Picked up supplies. Fetched things from the pharmacy that the pack healer couldn't be bothered to stock.

The pharmacy was small, fluorescent-lit, and blessedly empty at three in the afternoon. I grabbed a basket and walked the aisles like I belonged there, like I was just another woman buying shampoo and ibuprofen. I picked up a pregnancy test — the cheapest one, shoved at the back of the bottom shelf like an afterthought — and a bottle of antacids to explain the purchase if anyone asked.

The woman at the register didn't look at me twice. Humans never did. In their eyes, I was just another girl with dark circles under her eyes and a box of antacids.

I walked back to pack territory with the test burning a hole in my jacket pocket.

The communal bathroom was at the end of the servants' corridor, a room with three stalls and a cracked mirror and a rust stain in the sink that had been there since before I was born. I waited until the dinner rush, when everyone would be in the Great Hall, and I slipped inside and locked the door.

The test instructions were simple. I followed them with shaking hands. Set it on the back of the toilet. Waited.

Three minutes.

I stared at the wall. The paint was peeling near the ceiling — a water stain from last winter's pipe burst. Someone had drawn a crude wolf in pencil near the light switch. The fluorescent light hummed and flickered, casting everything in a sickly greenish glow.

Please,* I thought. *Please let it be negative. Please let this be stress. Please—

I didn't know what I was praying to. The Moon Goddess? She'd already given me a Mate who didn't want me. My mother? She was dead. My father? Dead. There was no one listening, no one who cared whether the result was one line or two.

I looked down.

Two lines.

Pink. Unmistakable. Positive.

The world didn't end. The fluorescent light didn't shatter. The cracked mirror didn't crack further. Everything looked exactly the same — the peeling paint, the pencil wolf, the rust stain — except nothing would ever be the same again.

I was pregnant.

I was carrying Kane IronClaw's child.

I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the cold tile floor, the test still in my hand, and I let the reality wash over me. Not like a wave — waves have rhythm, they recede. This was a flood. Sudden and total and drowning.

An Alpha's heir.

Even from a hybrid. Even from a woman he'd publicly rejected. An Alpha's heir was the most valuable thing in any pack — more important than territory, than alliances, than the Luna herself. A child with Kane's bloodline would be powerful. Possibly the most powerful wolf of his generation, given what hybrid vigor could do to an already dominant bloodline.

The pack would take him.

The knowledge settled in my gut like a stone, heavy and certain. They wouldn't let a hybrid raise an Alpha's heir. They'd take him the moment he was born — maybe sooner, if they found out. The elders would argue about it. Some would want him raised among full-bloods, "properly." Others would want him eliminated entirely — a bastard heir was a threat to the succession. But none of them — *none of them* — would want me to keep him.

And Kane...

Kane didn't know. If he found out, what would he do? Claim the child? Reject it, like he'd rejected me? Use it as proof that the bond was "real" after all, that he'd been wrong to reject me? Or would he look at me with that same cold nothing and say, "Get rid of it"?

I didn't know. I couldn't predict him. The man who'd marked me in a frenzy and rejected me in the cold light of morning — I had no idea what he would do with this information. And I wasn't going to wait around to find out.

I pressed my palm flat against my stomach. Still flat. Still unchanged. But beneath my hand, beneath skin and muscle and bone, a tiny life was growing. A cluster of cells with Kane's blood and my stubbornness and a future I was not going to let anyone steal.

You're mine,* I thought, and the fierceness of it surprised me. *You're mine, and I will not let them take you.

The mark on my neck pulsed once — a warm, answering throb, as if the bond itself recognized the life growing beneath my heart. I pressed my other hand over the mark, smothering it.

No,* I told the bond. *You don't get to have a say in this. He doesn't get to have a say in this.

The bond went quiet.

I sat on the bathroom floor for a long time. Long enough for the dinner rush to end. Long enough for the corridors to fill with the sounds of the pack returning to their rooms, their families, their lives. Long enough for me to build a plan in the dark space behind my eyes.

I couldn't stay.

That was the first thing I knew with absolute, bone-deep certainty. I could not stay in this pack and carry this child. The moment anyone noticed — a missed cycle, a rounding belly, a scent change that any wolf with half a nose would detect — it would be over. They'd drag me before the elders. They'd call Kane. They'd decide my child's fate in a room I wasn't invited into.

I had to run.

Not tonight — I wasn't ready. I had no money, no supplies, no destination. I couldn't outrun a pack of werewolves on foot with nothing but the clothes on my back. I needed time. I needed a plan.

But I had something I didn't have before the test. Something more powerful than money or supplies or a head start.

I had a reason.

I looked at myself in the cracked bathroom mirror — marked, rejected, pregnant, and more alone than I had ever been. But somewhere beneath the terror, a new resolve was hardening, crystallizing into something unbreakable.

I would not let them take my child.

I flushed the test down the toilet, washed my hands, and walked out of the bathroom with a secret burning inside me like a second heartbeat.

No one looked at me as I passed through the corridors. No one ever did. I was still invisible — still the weak-blood, the hybrid, the nothing.

But I was carrying the Alpha's heir, and that made me the most dangerous person in this pack.

They just didn't know it yet.

* * *

The mark pulsed once more, soft and secret, as I closed my door. I pressed my hand to my stomach and made a promise to the tiny life I couldn't yet feel: I will find a way. I will get us out. And no one — not the elders, not the pack, and not the Alpha who rejected me — will ever take you from me.