Chapter 4

ELOWEN

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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 pack house and the corridors had gone properly quiet, I had run out of things to test.

 

I was pregnant with Dorian’s child and there was no way I was staying in this pack.

 

The rejection alone was going to make things worse, I had already accepted that much while I was still running out of the hall with the laughter chasing me. But a pregnancy on top of it?

 

An unmated omega with no rank and no standing, carrying the future Alpha’s child without his acknowledgment, without anyone in this pack who would lift a finger for her, without so much as a room that was actually hers? That wasn’t a life and I wasn’t going to bring my child in to know such a cold world.

 

Yes, I was not getting rid of the baby.

 

My child was not going to be born in a storage room.

 

My child was not going to learn what it felt like to be the thing nobody wanted, the inconvenience, the lowest name on every list. I wasn’t going to let my child grow up in a pack where the circumstances of their birth were used against them.

 

I was also not telling Dorian.

 

After the way he stood in front of the whole pack and said those words with nothing in his eyes, after the way he looked at me like I was a stranger causing a scene he had to manage, there was nothing left between us to tell anything to. He was not going to know. Not today, not in a year, not ever. This child was mine and mine alone.

 

When the pack house finally went dark and the last set of footsteps faded from the corridor outside my door, I sat up and started packing.

 

There was not much to put in the bag. A few dresses, my toiletries, the stub of eyeliner I had been rationing for months, the lip tint that was empty now, used up that evening on a face that had been full of the wrong kind of hope. The small envelope of money from the bottom of the bag. A thin cardigan I had owned for so long I couldn’t remember where it came from.

 

I picked up my bag and ran as fast as my legs could carry me, my heart pounding so loud my ears could clearly hear them. And not for one second did I turn to look back.

 

The pack border was just a line where the territory ended and the open world began. I crossed it without slowing down and the air changed around me. I was no different from a rogue wolf now but I didn’t let that bother me.

 

I kept walking.

 

I did not look back at the Blackthorn pack house. There was nothing there that I needed to see again. I had a long way to go before morning, and the life inside me was the only thing I owed any attention to now.

 

Open territory at night was nothing like being inside a pack’s borders. The darkness was deeper out here. Every sound in the trees on either side of the road made something instinctive in me pull tight. A wolf without a pack was a wolf without protection. The world outside pack borders had its own hierarchy and I was currently at the bottom of it.

 

I walked through the night without stopping. I kept my feet moving and my eyes on the road ahead as I focused on practical things.

 

I had no idea what the next days would look like for a pregnant unmated omega with no pack affiliation and nobody in the world who knew where she was.

 

It wasn’t too long before I got exhausted from all the running. The road had narrowed through a stretch of dense trees and I had been moving through what I believed was still neutral territory, the open land between pack borders that no single Alpha claimed.

 

At some point, without a clear marker or any warning I could have acted on, that changed.

 

The air shifted first. A pack border. It was almost as if it recognised that something foreign has entered it.

 

I stopped walking.

 

I was already inside.

 

I turned slowly, trying to work out which direction I had come from, whether backing out was still a realistic option, and that was when I heard them. Movement through the trees to my left and to my right, deliberate and coordinated.

 

Three wolves stepped out of the trees. They were all large with no readable expression on their faces. They were not aggressive but they were also very clearly not presenting me with a choice.

 

The one in front looked me over briefly. “You’re trespassing in Dravon Pack territory,” he said. “You’re going to come with us.”

 

I thought about running. My body considered it but I was way too exhausted and outnumbered and pregnant and whatever was waiting on the other side of being brought in as a trespasser was almost certainly safer than what was waiting on the other side of trying to outrun three pack wolves in their own territory at dawn.

 

They brought me through the trees and across open ground through a cluster of pack buildings that were larger and better maintained than anything in Blackthorn, and one of them kept a hard grip on my arm the whole way, tight enough to bruise it, until eventually we were in a plain room inside what I gathered was the main pack house.

 

It was warmer in here than any room I had slept in for as long as I could remember.

 

I didn’t feel safe, and I had no idea what was going to happen to me, but at least I was no longer roaming.

 

“We’re going to wait to see what our Alpha would like to do with a tiny little piece like you.” One of them smirked, running a finger down my face.

 

I shrugged, tired.

 

“Please, don’t harm me” I begged. “I didn’t mean any harm, I got into your territory by accident. I’ll leave, I’m sorry, just let me go I beg of you.”

 

"Shut it," another one ordered. “Our Alpha is the one who decides if you’re to go free or not. Come with me, he wants to see you.”

 

I could feel my heart pounding very audibly and I hoped they didn’t hear it too.

 

Who was this Alpha? And what was he going to do with me?