Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Evelyn's POV

Three months pregnant? This was too much to be just a one time coincidence.

They'd been planning this. From the way she spoke about their plans, it all started to make sense now.

I should have noticed. The way they spoke so casually while I made breakfast every morning. While I ironed his shirts and packed his lunches and told him I loved him before he left for work.

I should have scented it. That was the part that shamed me most. A wolf is supposed to know. A mate is supposed to know. But Marcus had been careful, showering before he came home, drowning himself in cologne, and I had been too trusting to question why his scent never sat right on his skin anymore.

Or maybe my wolf had known all along, and I just refused to listen to her.

"The house is in my name," Marcus said, his voice businesslike now, like we were discussing a real estate transaction and not the destruction of my entire world.

"I'll give you a week to pack your things and get out." He said it casually. Like it was nothing.

"A week?" I finally found my voice, but it sounded distant, like it belonged to someone else. "You're kicking me out? I've lived here for three years! I helped pay for this house!"

"Actually, you didn't." He picked up the envelope and thrust it toward me.

"If you read the mortgage documents you signed, you'll see you're not on the deed. You paid rent, essentially. My lawyer says I'm being generous by giving you a week." He looked at me intensely, as if daring me to say something.

I took the envelope with shaking hands. Inside were divorce papers, neat and official, already signed by him.

There was a sticky note on top in his handwriting. It read, 'Sign on page 7, 12, and 18.'

He'd planned this.

This wasn't a moment of passion or a mistake. He'd gone to a lawyer. Filed paperwork with the Pack Council and the human courts both. Prepared to erase me from his life with the same efficiency he used to close business deals.

And underneath the papers, stamped with the Council's crescent seal, was the formal rejection notice.

*Dissolution of Mate Bond. Initiated by the Alpha party. Omega signature required.*

The words blurred. My chest burned where the bond lived, a deep ache under my sternum that had started the moment he spoke the rejection out loud in our bedroom. I'd read about it in my nursing textbooks and in the old pack healer journals I used to study. Bond severance. They said it felt like a tearing.

They were wrong.

It felt like being hollowed out with a spoon.

"I can't believe this is happening," I whispered, staring at the papers through my tears.

"Oh, honey." Isabelle walked over and patted my shoulder with mock sympathy. "You should have seen this coming. I mean, really, Evelyn. Look at you." She gestured at me dismissively.

"You're so plain. Boring. A dead-end omega from a broke pack. You work yourself to death at that human hospital, you come home smelling like antiseptic, and you never want to do anything fun." She paused and sized me up.

"Marcus is a successful Alpha now. He needs someone who can keep up with him. Someone who looks good on his arm at pack gatherings and company events." She said it with pride, chin lifted, like she'd already claimed the title.

"I went to every single one of his events!" I shouted, anger finally breaking through the numbness.

"In the same three dresses, wearing drugstore makeup, with your hair in that tragic bun." Isabelle laughed. "You looked like his secretary, not his Luna. It was embarrassing. Even the pack elders whispered about it."

Luna. The word hit like a slap. I was never given that title. Three years mated to him and Marcus had never once presented me to the pack as his Luna. I'd told myself he was waiting for the right moment.

There was never going to be a right moment. There was only ever her.

"Get out, Evelyn." Marcus spoke out of the blue. "Take your things and go. I want you out tonight."

"Tonight?" I looked around our bedroom wildly.

"Where am I supposed to go?" I expected him to have some decency, to at least suggest a place, since he seemed to have everything else figured out.

"That's not my problem anymore." He walked to the bathroom and closed the door. I heard the shower turn on.

I stood there, frozen, divorce papers clutched in my hand, while my sister stretched out on my bed, the bed I'd shared with my husband, and smiled at me.

Deep inside me, my wolf paced. She'd been howling since the rejection, a thin, broken sound that scraped the inside of my skull. Now she was pacing tight circles, restless and wounded, her grief bleeding into mine until I couldn't tell where hers ended and mine began.

*Fight,* some old instinct whispered. *Claw her off your bed. Make her bleed.*

But I was an omega. Isabelle carried Beta blood, the same as our father. Even on my best day I couldn't have taken her, and this was very far from my best day.

"Oh, and Evelyn?" Isabelle called out as I finally, numbly, turned toward the door.

"You might want to check on Mom. I know her heart checkup is coming up. Those procedures are so expensive, especially since her wolf got too weak to heal her anymore." She sighed with fake concern. "It would be terrible if anything happened to her."

The casual cruelty in her voice, the hint of threat, sent ice through my veins. But I was too broken to respond. Too shattered to fight.

I walked out of that bedroom, out of that house, out of the life I'd built, with nothing but my purse, my car keys, and the sound of my sister's laughter echoing behind me.

The anniversary watch was still in my bag.

I never got to give it to him.

And somewhere between the front door and my car, I felt the first cramp low in my stomach. Sharp and warning and terrifying.

*No,* I thought desperately, pressing a hand to my abdomen. *Not now. Please, not now.*

But my body didn't listen. It never did when my world was falling apart.

I knew what was happening. I'd read the healer journals. When a mate bond is severed, the omega's body pays the price. The bond doesn't just live in the heart. It lives in the blood. In the womb.

His rejection wasn't just killing me.

It was killing our pup.

By the time I pulled up to my mother's small house twenty minutes later, the cramping had gotten worse, and there was blood on my jeans.

I'd been going to tell Marcus tonight. After dinner, with candlelight and champagne he'd drink and sparkling cider I'd only pretend to sip.

"Happy anniversary, darling. We're finally going to be parents." I had rehearsed the line for a week. I'd rehearsed his reply too. In my version, he cried. In my version, he pulled me into his arms and pressed his face into my neck and breathed me in the way mates do.

But my husband was already going to be a father.

Just not with me. Never with me.

I sat in my car outside my mother's house, bleeding, crying, and utterly, completely alone, while inside my body, I lost the last piece of the future I'd believed in.

I don't remember walking from my car to my mother's front door.

One moment I was sitting in the driver's seat, watching blood seep through my jeans, and the next I was pounding on the faded blue paint with my fist.

"Mom! Mama, please open the door!" I called out for the only person who was truly there for me.

My voice sounded hysterical even to my own ears. The cramping had intensified, sharp waves of pain rolling through me, and beneath it, deeper, the raw wound where the bond used to be pulsed in time with my heartbeat.

Two agonies. One body. I couldn't tell anymore which pain was the pup and which was the bond. Maybe there was no difference. Maybe they were the same wound.

But worse than the physical pain was the crushing weight of everything that had just happened.

Marcus. Isabelle. The baby I was losing. The baby she was carrying.

The door swung open, and my mother stood there in her worn bathrobe, her graying hair pulled back in a loose bun.

Margaret Carter had always been a small woman, barely five foot three, but tonight she looked even more fragile than usual. Her face was pale, and I could see the fatigue around her eyes. Her scent, lavender and old pack herbs and home, wrapped around me before her arms did.

"Evelyn?" Her eyes widened as she took in my appearance. My tear stained face, my trembling hands, the way I was clutching my stomach.

Then her nostrils flared. Her wolf was old and weak, but a mother's nose never fails.

She smelled the blood. She smelled the broken bond.

"Baby, what happened? Come inside, quickly." She ushered me in, and the familiar scent of the house hit me. Lavender air freshener. Dried moonflower hanging over the doorway, the old omega charm for protection.

The house, with its creaky floors and mismatched furniture, had always been my safe place. The place where I'd grown up. Where Dad had read me bedtime stories before the rogues took him. Where I'd felt loved and wanted.

Everything my marriage had turned out not to be.

"Mama," I sobbed, collapsing into her arms the moment the door closed behind us. "Mama, it's gone. Everything is gone."

"What's gone, sweetheart? You're scaring me. Are you hurt?" She pulled back, her hands frantically checking me over. Then she saw the blood.

"Oh my God. Evelyn, you're bleeding. We need to get you to the hospital right now." She grabbed for her keys on the hook by the door.

"No." I shook my head violently. "No hospitals. I can't. I just can't."

I worked at Memorial Hospital. Everyone there knew me. And the pack clinic was worse. One look at me and any healer would scent the severed bond, and by morning the whole territory would know. The rejected omega. The discarded wife. I could already hear the whispers.

That was something I couldn't bear.

"Then at least sit down. Let me get you some water." Mom guided me to the old floral couch, the same one we'd had since I was ten. She disappeared into the kitchen, and I heard the sound of running water.

I pressed both hands against my lower abdomen, as if I could somehow hold the pain in. Hold my pup in.

But I knew it was too late. The cramping. The bleeding. The way my body felt wrong, hollowed out, abandoned by its own bond. I'd seen enough miscarriages during my nursing rotations to know. I'd read enough healer journals to know what a severed bond does to an omega carrying an Alpha's pup.

My baby was gone.

And as I sat there on my mother's couch, bleeding out the last piece of my old life, I felt something else go quiet inside me.

My wolf stopped howling.

She stopped pacing. Stopped whimpering. Stopped everything.

She curled up somewhere deep and dark inside me, laid her head down, and went silent.

"Please," I whispered to her, to the empty space where my bond used to be, to anyone who was listening. "Please don't leave me too."

She didn't answer.