My Mate Rejected Me While I Carried His Child

The metallic taste was stronger that morning.

I'd learned to recognize it over the past week—the sharp, wrong edge underneath the bland porridge, the faint burn at the back of my throat. Wolfsbane. Melanie had been patient at first, adding just enough to make me weak, to make my hands shake during Omega duties. But this morning the dose was different. Heavier. My healer's mind cataloged the symptoms even as I forced down three spoonfuls: elevated heart rate, nausea, the beginning tremor in my fingers.

I set the bowl down and pressed two fingers to my wrist. Pulse: 98. Too fast.

I had four hours of kitchen duty ahead of me. I could manage four hours. I'd managed worse.

I was wrong.

Two hours in, my vision started to blur at the edges. I was scrubbing a stockpot when the first cramp hit—low and vicious, doubling me over the sink. The pot clattered against the basin. Mira looked up from the cutting board.

"Isabelle?"

I straightened. Breathed through it. "I'm fine."

The second cramp dropped me to my knees.

I hit the tile hard, palms flat against the cold stone, and the pain was everywhere—not just my abdomen but my chest, my spine, radiating outward in waves that made my teeth clench. Something warm spread beneath me. I looked down.

Blood.

A lot of it.

Mira's knife clattered to the floor. The other Omega—the older one whose name I'd never learned—froze with her hands dusted in flour, staring.

I pressed both palms against my stomach. The flutter I'd been monitoring for weeks was gone. Just gone. In its place was heat and pain and the wet, irreversible knowledge that I was losing something I would never get back.

My lips moved. I think I said *no*. I think I said *please*. The words had no sound.

The blood kept coming.

Mira dropped beside me, her hands hovering over mine like she wanted to help but didn't know how. The older Omega stayed where she was, flour-dusted hands pressed to her mouth.

Then boots appeared in the doorway.

Lucian's Beta stood there for three seconds. His eyes swept the scene—me on the floor, the blood spreading in a dark pool across the tile, the two women frozen in place. His expression didn't change. He pulled out his phone.

"Alpha," he said, his voice clipped and professional. "We have a situation in the Omega kitchen. The healer—" A pause. I heard Lucian's voice through the phone, muffled but distinct. The Beta's jaw tightened. "Understood. I'll handle it."

He ended the call and looked at Mira and the older Omega. His tone was the same one he used for pack logistics—calm, precise, utterly without emotion.

"You saw nothing," he said. "This didn't happen. If anyone asks, Isabelle was reassigned to border cleanup this morning and left before dawn. Do you understand?"

Mira's face went white. The older Omega nodded once, fast.

"Your housing is pack-allocated," the Beta continued. "Your food rations are pack-allocated. Your positions here are at the Alpha's discretion." He let that sit for a moment. "I trust we have an understanding."

Mira nodded. Her hands were shaking.

The Beta made another call. "I need a vehicle at the north service entrance. Five minutes. Discrete." He crouched beside me and pressed a folded kitchen towel against the worst of the bleeding with the efficiency of someone managing a spill. He did not look at my face. "You're being moved off pack grounds. The Alpha's orders."

I tried to speak. Nothing came out but a wet, gasping sound.

He lifted me—one arm under my shoulders, one under my knees—and carried me through the service corridor like I weighed nothing. The rejection wound under my sternum was cold. The place where the baby had been was empty. My head lolled against his shoulder and I saw Mira standing in the kitchen doorway, her flour-dusted hands clenched at her sides, watching me disappear.

The vehicle was waiting. The Beta laid me across the back seat, tucked the blood-soaked towel around me, and climbed into the driver's seat without a word.

I stared at the roof of the car. My pulse was too fast and too weak at the same time. My healer's mind was still trying to catalog symptoms—shock, blood loss, systemic poisoning—but the list kept fracturing into white noise.

Somewhere far away, through the severed bond that was supposed to be ash, I felt something flicker.

A pulse of heat. A surge of grief. Not mine.

Lucian's wolf, trying to reach me from inside a man who had already decided I was disposable.

The pulse lasted half a breath. Then it was gone, crushed under his conscious will, and the bond went silent again.

The car turned onto the border road. I closed my eyes.

Under my sternum, the coal was still warm. Impossibly, stubbornly warm.

*You are not done,* the voice whispered.

I didn't believe her.

But I was still breathing.