My Alpha Rejected Me to Claim My Pregnant Sister

I woke to the smell of blood and silence.

Not my blood. Older than that. Colder.

The medical wing was dim, lit by a single lamp in the corner. My body felt like someone had wrung it out and left it to dry. My neck throbbed where the mark had been—where it still was, technically, except now it was just scar tissue. Dead nerve endings. A door that had been bricked over from the other side.

Maren was sitting in the chair beside the bed. She didn't pretend to be doing something else when she saw my eyes open. She just looked at me, her face very still, her hands folded in her lap.

There was a bundle on the bed beside me. Wrapped in white cloth. Very small.

I already knew. I think I'd known the moment the bond severed and that twisting, tearing sensation had ripped through my womb on the stone floor. But knowing and seeing are two different kinds of grief.

Maren stood. She lifted the bundle gently—so gently, the way you carry something irreplaceable—and placed it in my arms.

"She didn't suffer," Maren said quietly. "It was the shock. The bond-severance. Her body couldn't—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "She didn't suffer, Eliza."

She.

I hadn't known it was a girl.

I held her against my chest. She weighed almost nothing. The white cloth was soft, and I pulled it back just enough to see her face—small and still and perfect, with Kashton's jaw and my nose and a full head of dark hair that would have curled at the ends, probably, given time.

She never got time.

I didn't scream. There was nothing left in me to scream with. I just rocked, very slowly, back and forth, my lips pressed to her forehead. She was already cold. I rocked her anyway.

I don't know how long I sat like that.

Eventually, I lifted my head. My voice came out flat. Even. Like I was reading from a document.

"How long was I unconscious?"

Maren exhaled slowly. "Fourteen hours."

I nodded once. I looked down at my daughter's face one more time. Then I carefully, carefully set her down on the bed beside me, smoothing the cloth around her like she might still be cold.

"Okay," I said.

That was all.

Maren moved to change my bandages without being asked. She worked in silence, unwinding the dressing from my ribs and hip, her hands precise and gentle. I stared at the ceiling and breathed.

That's when the window shifted.

Just a crack—a draft from somewhere in the pack house, carried on the night air. But a wolf's nose doesn't need more than a crack.

The scent hit me like a closed fist.

Kashton's scent. Pine and smoke, unmistakably his. But it wasn't fresh. It wasn't from tonight, or last week, or even last month. It was old. Months deep. Layered into Zaria's skin the way a scent only gets when two wolves have been sharing the same bed, the same space, the same air for a long, long time.

I'd smelled Zaria's vanilla-sweet musk in the hospital room earlier without thinking twice. She'd been here, probably, while I was unconscious. Gloating, maybe. Or just passing by.

But that combination—his scent woven into hers like thread through fabric, intimate and old and unmistakable—

The rogue attack story dissolved.

There was no rogue. There was no traumatized wolf. There was no pup in danger.

Kashton was the father of Zaria's pup. He had been with her for months. The rejection, the ceremony, the fabricated justification delivered in that smooth, rehearsed voice—all of it had been theater. Carefully staged. Timed for the Moon Ceremony so the pack would witness the transfer of bond and no one could object without challenging an Alpha in front of his entire pack.

He had planned this. While I was carrying his child. While I was tending the wolfsbane plants and maintaining the wards and making sure his territory stayed safe, he had been building a future with my sister.

My eyes went very still.

I didn't cry. Crying would have meant there was still something soft left to break. There wasn't.

"Close the window," I said.

Maren looked up from the bandage. Something in my voice made her move immediately, no questions. The latch clicked shut.

"Bring me something to write with."

She crossed to the supply cabinet and came back with a notepad and a pen. She set them in my lap.

I uncapped the pen.

And then something happened that I didn't plan for.

It started in my spine—a pressure, low and ancient, like the first tremor before an earthquake. My bones made a sound. An audible crack, then another. My muscles seized and released and seized again, and I felt something rise up from a place so deep inside me that I hadn't known it existed.

A presence. Massive. Furious. Silver.

The pen fell from my hand.

Maren stumbled backward. The two junior healers near the door dropped to their knees like their legs had been cut out from under them. Medical instruments rattled off the shelves. The lamp flickered. The air in the room became something dense and pressurized, something that pressed against the walls and hummed.

I felt my body change.

Not painfully. Not the way I'd always imagined shifting would feel. It felt like finally—like a door swinging open that had been sealed shut since the day I was born.

Something silver and enormous stood where I had been.