My Mate Rejected Me While I Was in Labor

For the first two weeks in the Crescent Throne guest wing, I lived like a stray dog waiting for a boot.

Every time a floorboard creaked in the hallway, my shoulders bunched toward my ears. My right hand moved on its own, fingertips pressing against the jagged scar on my neck. The skin was rough and cold. There was no bond there anymore, no burning pull, but phantom pain is a stubborn thing.

Whenever a guard spoke with authority downstairs, my chest seized. I expected the heavy, suffocating smash of an Alpha tone to drop me to my knees. For five years under Gideon’s roof, breathing had felt like a privilege I had to earn. Elara Carter’s sharp, haughty voice still echoed in the back of my mind. *The omega.* *The girl.* She had said it so often it felt stamped into my skin.

Lucas never commanded me.

He didn't make speeches, and he didn't demand gratitude. Every morning, he set a tray of hot broth, roasted potatoes, and fresh bread on the low table near the fire. He didn't linger to watch me eat. He just placed it there and left the door open, giving me space to breathe.

In the evenings, when I sat by the window nursing Miracle, Lucas would come in and take the armchair across the room. He brought leather-bound ledgers and read in silence. He never asked about the scars on my ribs or the limp in my stride. He only spoke if I spoke first.

In that quiet room, Elara's venom finally began to lose its volume.

What unsettled me more was my own body.

Whenever Lucas walked into the room, my skin warmed. His scent—cedar and clean, hard rain—washed the tension straight out of my neck. It didn't burn like Gideon’s pine and smoke had. It sank deep into my chest, gentle and steady, reaching a quiet, numb place inside me that had never stirred for anyone.

I caught myself leaning toward him when he passed the tea. I caught myself listening for his slow, heavy footsteps in the corridor before he even reached the door.

One snowy morning, as he set a steaming mug of peppermint tea on the sill beside me, I couldn't hold it in anymore.

"Why are you doing this, Lucas?" My voice sounded thin, rust-colored from disuse. "Why are you being so kind to me?"

Lucas paused. His dark eyes met mine, steady and open, without a flicker of pity or calculation.

"Because your father was a good man," he said simply. "You are his daughter, and you are in my territory. That's the whole reason."

My throat tightened. No debts. No hidden conditions. No punishment waiting around the corner. It was the most uncomplicated sentence anyone had spoken to me in five years, and I had to look down at my tea so he wouldn't see my eyes sting.

***

Three days later, Soren knocked on the open door. He carried a sealed black leather dossier stamped with the crest of the Shadowmere border patrol.

"Intercepted from Damon Cole's private line," Soren said quietly, handing the papers to Lucas. "Things are coming apart in the east."

Lucas opened the folder and sat on the edge of the desk, letting me see the typed dispatch.

While I had been learning how to exist without flinching, Shadowmere had become a madhouse.

My phantom scent had saturated the entire Alpha house. Amber and white jasmine clung to the drapes, the carpets, and the stone walls. Gideon had ordered the Omegas to scrub every room from ceiling to baseboard with lye and bleach. They scrubbed until their hands bled, but the smell only grew stronger. It was a bond-ghost—the Moon Goddess’s curse on a man who violently severs what was meant to be whole.

Every morning, Gideon stood at his study window for twenty, thirty, forty minutes. He was trying to compose his aura like he used to, trying to force his dominance back into line.

It didn't work. His control was slipping.

During a routine combat drill in the courtyard, his Alpha tone snapped. He didn't mean to unleash it, but the pressure hit three Delta warriors like a falling roof. The command crushed them into the frozen mud for no reason at all. One young warrior bled freely from both nostrils before Gideon managed to choke the power back down.

Beta Damon Cole had filed the incident report without writing a single editorial comment. The bare, dry facts were damning enough.

Then came the confrontation.

Right after the training disaster, Elara Carter had marched straight into Gideon's study. She didn't bother to knock. She stood in front of his window, her arms crossed tight over her chest, her face carved from ice.

She told him his obsession with my ghost was destroying the pack's confidence. She called me a rank-less, worthless omega who never deserved the Luna title to begin with. She said he had been right to throw me out into the snow, and that he needed to stop mourning a nobody and put another heir inside Lylah immediately.

Gideon had stood there in the center of the room. He didn't shout. He didn't defend himself. He listened to every single word his mother threw at him.

And when she finished, his voice was deathly quiet.

*"Leave."*

Elara had frozen. In thirty-two years, her son had never dismissed her. She walked out of the study in stunned silence.

As she walked down the Alpha corridor, she passed the open door of the room where I used to sleep on a thin cot. The air drifting from it was thick with the scent of amber and jasmine.

She kept her eyes locked straight ahead, terrified to look inside.