Rejected And Pregnant, Marked By Two Alphas

ELOWEN~•~The cracked mirror on my wall didn't give me much to work with, but I made do.I had a stub of eyeliner worn down to almost nothing and a lip tint I had been rationing for weeks, saving it for an occasion important enough to justify using the last of it. Tonight was that occasion. I leaned close to the mirror, careful with my hand, trying to make the little I had go as far as it could.The dress I laid out on the cot was the best one I owned, which wasn't saying much. It was a simple fitted thing in a deep burgundy that I had found folded at the bottom of my bag from what felt like another lifetime. By the standards of what the other girls in the pack would be wearing tonight it was nothing, and I knew that, but Dorian had never once looked at me like what I was wearing mattered. He had seen me in worse. He had seen me in the aftermath of bad days with puffy eyes and dirty clothes and he had still pulled me close, still said my name like it meant something, and that had al

ELOWEN ~•~ I didn’t reach for the rope again. Some deep part of me decided it wasn’t going to end like this, not on the floor of a storage room in the dark, not because of Dorian Cross and a pack that had never once treated me like I was worth keeping. I stayed on the floor for a long time with my hand pressed flat against my stomach and the rope still sitting on the shelf beside me, close enough to reach but suddenly very far away. I tried telling myself I wasn’t sure because the nausea could be anything. It could be the fact that I hadn’t eaten properly in two days. It could be the crying, it could be stress, which I had enough of to last several lifetimes. I went through every other explanation I could find, but none of it made sense. Then I counted back the weeks and my stomach dropped. My last bleed was almost two months ago. I had been so busy just surviving that I never noticed it was late. By the time the last sounds of the ceremony had faded from the other end of the pac

KAEL~•~She was pregnant.I knew it the moment she walked through those doors. You didn’t spend years leading a pack without developing my kind of awareness that picked up on things instantly. She had hidden it well. A woman who could stand in front of me terrified, exhausted, and still thinking clearly enough to manage what she revealed and what she didn’t, that was not nothing.Caden was at my door within twenty minutes of her being escorted to her room. I heard him knock twice before he came in, which was more courtesy than he usually bothered with, which meant he had something to say that he wanted me to be in a receptive mood for before he said it.“Sit down,” I said, before he could open his mouth.He sat. Caden was my Beta and had been for six years, which meant he knew better than most when I was in a mood to be questioned and when I wasn’t. He looked at me across the desk with that careful expression he wore when he was trying to assess which version of me he was dealing w

ELOWEN ~•~ While I was still unpacking, another knock came at the door. I was getting tired of the greetings, but I had to find out who it was, so I walked over and opened it. Three girls stood in the corridor. The tallest carried a dress folded over both arms while the other two held baskets. “We’re to prepare you for dinner, Luna,” the tall one said to the floor. “Alpha’s orders.” So that was how I learned I was expected at dinner. Not from the Alpha himself, but from a girl too frightened to look at me. “What’s your name?” I asked her. She glanced up, startled. “Sasha, Luna.” “You don’t have to call me that.” “Yes I do,” she said, very quietly, and stepped past me into the room. They sat me at the dresser and did my hair and my face while the hall filled up below us, the sound of it growing as the pack gathered to eat. I did not know any of these girls and they did not know me, and none of them would tell me what I was walking into tonight. I watched Sasha’s hands move and

ELOWEN~•~"I'd hate for anything to happen to you before you do."The old me wanted to drop my eyes and say thank you and go. That thing had kept me alive for twenty years. It knew exactly how to make itself small enough that a wolf like Thea would lose interest and move on to easier prey.I held her eyes instead."That's kind of you," I said. "Watching out for me like that. On my first day."A smirk formed at the corner of her mouth. "Of course.""Because I've had people watch out for me before." I kept my voice level, the way I'd watched Kael keep his level in front of the whole pack an hour ago. "In my old pack. They watched out for me every single day. I know exactly what it looks like."The warmth in her face didn't drop so much as set, like something cooling in a mold."You'll find Dravon is nothing like wherever you came from," she said."I'm counting on it."We stood there a moment, the two of us, and I understood that I'd done something. I didn't know if it was smart. I only