THE NIGHT MY ALPHA THREW ME OUT

Chapter 2

Nora POV

Six weeks after the rejection, I threw up in a gas station bathroom and understood my whole life had just changed.

I stared at the little plastic stick until the second line stopped looking like a mistake and started looking like a fact I couldn't argue my way out of. Pregnant. Carrying Damian Cross's child, five miles outside a town I'd never heard of, with forty-two dollars in my pocket and a bond-wound in my chest that still ached every time I breathed too deep.

I sat on the bathroom floor for a long time. The tile was cold under me, and somewhere outside a truck idled and a bell rang every time the gas station door opened, and I just sat there with my back against the sink cabinet, trying to make my mind catch up to what my body already knew.

I thought about going back. I want to be honest about that, because it would be easy to write myself as someone who never doubted, and that would be a lie. I thought about walking straight back into Redthorn territory, standing in front of Damian, and saying, look what you threw away. I thought about the satisfaction of watching his face break the same way mine had, in front of anyone who cared to watch.

Then I thought about what would come after that satisfaction faded. A pack that had laughed while I doubled over in pain in the middle of their gathering circle. Elders who had called me a mistake before I'd even opened my mouth to defend myself. A rejected mate raising an Alpha's child in a place that already despised her that child would grow up despised too, second-guessed from the cradle, watched like a problem waiting to happen instead of a person.

I wasn't going to do that to my baby. I decided it right there on that cold bathroom tile, one hand pressed flat against my stomach like I could make a promise directly to whoever was in there listening: whoever this child was going to be, they were going to grow up somewhere nobody got to look at them and see a mistake first.

I got up, washed my face in the sink, and started walking.

I found Millbrook three days later a small town too far from any known pack territory for wolves to bother patrolling it, the kind of place where nobody asked hard questions if you paid cash and kept your head down and worked hard. My feet were blistered by the time I saw the first buildings, and I remember standing at the edge of Main Street thinking that I looked exactly like what I was: a girl running from something, with nothing but a bag on her shoulder and no plan past the next hour.

I got a job at a tailor's shop the first week, sweeping floors and hemming trousers for almost nothing. The owner was an old woman named Ruth, sharp-eyed and slow-moving, who watched me flinch every time the bell over her door rang too loud and never once commented on it. She never asked why a nineteen-year-old girl had shown up alone with a hollow look in her eyes and calluses on her hands that didn't match the rest of her soft, sheltered story. She just handed me a broom the first day and a needle the second, and within a month she was teaching me to cut fabric properly, guiding my hands along the pattern lines like she had all the patience in the world for someone who had none left for herself.

"You work like someone who's used to being told what to do," Ruth said to me once, not unkindly, watching me fold a stack of linens faster than she'd asked. "Someday you'll work like someone who decides for herself. I look forward to seeing that."

I didn't understand what she meant then. I understood it more with every week that passed.

The mornings were the hardest. Sickness came in waves that had nothing to do with the baby and everything to do with grief, some mornings so bad I had to sit on the floor of my tiny rented room with my forehead against my knees until it passed. I told myself it would get easier. Some days it did. Most days I just got better at hiding it, the same skill I'd spent nineteen years perfecting in Redthorn, just aimed at a different audience now.

I told everyone my husband had died. It was easier than the truth, and in a strange, twisted way it wasn't even a full lie the boy I thought Damian could be, the one who'd pressed his forehead to mine and said I don't want this to stop, he really had died. Just not in the way people assumed when they heard the word widow and looked at me with soft, careful pity.

Talia Frost moved into the apartment above the tailor shop two months after I did. She was loud, blunt, worked the counter at the diner across the street, and had a laugh that carried through the whole building whenever something struck her funny, which was often. I avoided her at first the way I avoided everyone polite, brief, never lingering long enough for questions to take root. But Millbrook was small, and Talia was persistent in a way that wore down my walls without ever seeming to try.

She caught me crying in the shop stairwell one night when the bond-wound flared without warning, grief with no explanation I could ever give a human being. I expected her to ask. Everyone always asked.

"You don't have to tell me what happened," she said instead, sitting down on the step beside me without being invited, like it was the most natural thing in the world. "But you don't have to sit here alone either."

I didn't tell her what I was. I couldn't. But I let her sit with me anyway, shoulder to shoulder on the cold stairs, saying nothing at all for a long time. And when she finally stood to leave, she squeezed my hand once and said, "For what it's worth, whoever he was, he's an i***t for letting you go."

I didn't correct her. I just nodded, and that was the first night in Millbrook I didn't feel completely, bottomlessly alone the first small proof that maybe I could build something real here, out of nothing, with no one watching to decide whether I deserved it.