After My Alpha Rejected Me for My Stepsister

The paper in my hand felt warmer than it should have.

I stood in the long hallway outside Damian's office, the healer's report folded once down the middle, my thumb pressing slow circles against the inside of my wrist. Three years I had walked this hallway. Three years I had carried trays, messages, mended uniforms, and the polite silence of a Luna who had never been told she was loved. Tonight, for the first time, I was carrying something else.

A pup. His pup.

I rehearsed the words in my head like I used to rehearse healing remedies as a girl. Damian. I have something to tell you. I'm pregnant.

My wolf, Hazel, paced inside me, restless and bright. He'll look at you now, she whispered. He'll have to look at you now.

I almost smiled. After three years of being a fixture in his pack house, of laying out his cufflinks and seasoning his food without salt because his ulcer hated salt, I let myself believe the simplest thing. That a child would do what devotion had not.

Then the front doors opened.

The smell hit the corridor before the voice did. French perfume — the heavy, expensive kind, the kind you don't spritz, you pour. Roses crushed under amber. Something underneath it that made my throat tighten without me knowing why.

I moved to the staircase landing and looked down.

Diana stood in the entrance hall in a cream coat that probably cost more than the studio I would later open without knowing it. My stepsister. The Bell daughter who had run from this exact house three years ago and let me take her place. She was laughing at something a warrior had said, her hair longer than I remembered, her cheeks flushed from the cold.

And Damian was already there.

I hadn't even seen him leave his office. He must have heard her the moment her shoes hit the marble. He crossed to her in three long strides, and I watched him do something I had never seen him do.

His shoulders dropped.

That hard, granite line of muscle he carried even in his sleep — it loosened. His chin tipped down. He breathed her in. Not a polite inhale. A long, slow draw, as if he had been holding his breath since the day she left and finally remembered how to let it out.

My thumb pressed harder against my wrist. I felt the small, fast beat of my pulse there, and I felt Hazel go very, very still.

The report crumpled a little in my fingers.

"Welcome home," Damian said, low, and I had heard that voice in my ear a thousand times across a thousand mornings, but never in that register. Never with that softness underneath it.

I did not go down the stairs.

I went back to my room and washed my face and pinned my hair the way a Luna pins her hair for a formal pack dinner. I put on the blue dress because Damian had once said blue suited the dining hall lights. I put the healer's report inside the breast pocket of my cardigan, against my ribs, and I told myself, I will tell him after.

The dining hall was already full when I arrived.

Caleb Reyes, Damian's Beta, stood at his usual place to the right of the head chair. He gave me a small nod, the kind he had been giving me for three years, the kind that said you are seen even if no one else sees you. The Gamma was there, two senior warriors, the elder council members. Twenty pairs of werewolf eyes that had watched me serve this pack since I was nineteen.

Diana was at Damian's left.

Not at the empty chair down the table. At his left. The Luna's chair. My chair.

I walked to my seat and sat down anyway. I did not look at her. I rested my hands in my lap and waited for the meal to be served, the way a Luna does, and told myself the chair was a misunderstanding. A guest's mistake. Someone would correct it.

Damian stood up.

The room quieted on instinct. His Alpha aura did that, the way a hand on the back of a dog's neck does. Heads tipped forward. Forks went still.

He did not look at me.

"I, Damian Cunningham," he said, "Alpha of the Shadowcrest Pack —"

My stomach dropped before my mind caught up.

"— reject you, Brooke Torres, as my mate and Luna."

The bond tore.

I cannot describe it like a human breakup. I can only say it was a blade, and it went in through my sternum and came out through my spine, and Hazel screamed inside me in a way I had never heard a wolf scream. My knees hit the dining hall floor before I knew I had moved. The healer's report slipped out of my pocket and skidded under the table. My breath would not come. There was something hot and metallic in the back of my throat, and I realized after a second that it was a sound I was making.

Someone gasped. Caleb's chair scraped.

I looked up through the wet blur in my eyes, and Diana was watching me. One small, careful corner of her mouth was lifted. Just enough.

"There has been," Damian said, and his voice was steady, the voice of a man reading a memo, "a misunderstanding I should have corrected long ago. For the past three years, I have been taking wolfsbane contraceptive herbs. Conception between us is not possible. It has never been possible."

He set a folder on the table.

"Healer's records. Three years of dosage logs, signed."

The silence in that hall changed shape.

I felt it before I understood it. The eyes that had been on me in pity slid sideways into something else. Suspicion. Disgust. The elder to my right pulled his sleeve back as if my dress might touch him. Caleb's jaw worked, hard, but he did not speak. Pack rules. Beta does not contradict Alpha at table.

They think I cheated. The thought arrived clean and quiet through the noise. They think the pup is another wolf's.

I could not even stand up to defend myself. The bond was still ripping. Hazel was a wounded thing in my chest, whining, half-conscious. I stayed on my knees on the polished wood floor of the dining hall I had decorated for the harvest feast last month, and I waited for the world to stop tilting.

A junior pack girl, eighteen at most, was sent to walk me to my room. She did not touch me. She did not speak. She kept two steps ahead the whole way, as if my disgrace were something she could catch.

My door closed behind me.

I sat on the edge of the bed.

The healer's report was back in my hand — the girl had picked it up and given it to me without looking at me, like a piece of trash she didn't want to be seen carrying. I unfolded it. Pregnancy confirmed. Six weeks. Healthy heartbeat detected.

I stared at it for a long time.

Hazel was quiet now. Not gone. Just quiet, the way a wolf goes quiet right before she decides what she is willing to die for.

Something inside me went quiet with her.

Not broken. Quiet.

I set the report on the nightstand. I straightened my spine against the headboard. I reached for the small notebook in the drawer where I used to write grocery lists for Damian's gut-friendly meals, and I opened it to a clean page.

At the top, in careful, even handwriting, I wrote a single word.

Leave.

Then, underneath it, I began to make a list.