Chapter 1

Rejected and Pregnant: I Left The Pack

Chapter 1

Evelyn pov

The scent hit me before I even opened the door.

Sweat. Sex. And underneath it, unmistakably, Marissa's perfume—the same jasmine and vanilla she'd worn since we were sixteen, sneaking bottles of it from her mother's vanity while we giggled about boys we'd never actually talk to.

I stood in the hallway outside Damon's room, my hand frozen on the doorframe, and told myself I was wrong. Wolves could be wrong about scents. Grief could confuse a nose. Anything, anything but this.

Then I heard her laugh—that low, satisfied laugh I'd known since childhood—and I knew I wasn't wrong at all.

I should have turned around. Some small, self-preserving part of me screamed to walk away, to pretend I'd never come up those stairs, to keep the mark on my neck sacred for one more night at least. But my hand was already pushing the door open, because some other part of me, the part that still believed in what we'd promised each other twenty-four hours ago, needed to see it wasn't true.

It was true.

Damon's bare back was to me, Marissa's legs wrapped around his waist, her head thrown back against his pillows—the same pillows I'd slept beside just last night while he traced the fresh mark on my neck and whispered that I was his, that he'd never wanted anyone the way he wanted me. Her eyes opened first. They found me over his shoulder, and for one suspended second, she didn't even look ashamed. She looked almost bored, like I'd interrupted something mundane.

"Damon." My own voice sounded like it belonged to someone else, thin and far away.

He turned. And here was the thing I would replay in my mind a thousand times in the months to come—he didn't scramble for the sheets, didn't shove her away in horror, didn't do any of the things a man does when he's been caught doing something unforgivable. He just looked at me with something close to irritation, like I was the inconvenience in this scene.

"Evelyn." He said my name flatly, no apology in it. "You should probably knock."

The absurdity of it, the sheer audacity, knocked whatever breath I had left right out of my chest. I looked at the mark on his own neck, the one I'd given him barely a day ago, still raised and dark against his skin, still humming faintly with the bond that connected us. I could feel it right now—not love, not warmth, but something colder. Satisfaction. He was pleased with himself.

"We mated last night," I said, and I hated that my voice cracked on the word *mated*, hated that even now some pathetic piece of me was waiting for him to say this was a mistake, a terrible misunderstanding, anything. "We marked each other. You told me I was your world."

Marissa had the decency, finally, to pull the sheet up over herself, though she made no move to leave the bed. Damon exhaled like I was the one being unreasonable.

"You had to see this coming, Evelyn." He said it so simply, so matter-of-factly, that for a moment I genuinely didn't understand the words. "You knew what I was before you agreed to this. Alphas don't stay tied to one wolf. It's not natural. Marissa understands that. I thought you would too, eventually."

"You *marked* me." I heard my own voice rising, cracking apart at the edges. "That's not a—a casual thing, Damon, that's a bond, that's supposed to mean—"

"It means what I say it means." His tone hardened, that alpha authority creeping into his voice like he could simply command the pain out of me, order me to accept this the way he ordered omegas to fall in line. "You're being dramatic. Nothing has to change. You'll still be my mate, my Luna when I take my father's position. This doesn't take anything away from you."

*This doesn't take anything away from you.*

As if my dignity wasn't sitting shattered on his bedroom floor. As if my best friend—the girl who'd held my hand through my mother's funeral, who'd promised to be my maid of honor before either of us even had mates—wasn't currently naked in the bed he'd marked me in less than twenty-four hours earlier.

I looked at Marissa. Really looked at her, searching her face for even a flicker of the girl I'd grown up with, the one who used to sneak into my room during thunderstorms because she was scared of the noise, the one I'd trusted with every secret I had.

"How long?" I asked her directly, because somehow her betrayal felt like it needed its own reckoning, separate from his. "How long has this been going on?"

She had the grace to look away, at least. "Evelyn, it's not—it's just how things are for alphas. I didn't want to hurt you. I just... I've loved him since we were kids. You knew that."

I had known that. I'd known it and dismissed it as a childhood crush, the kind every girl in the pack seemed to have on Damon at some point, because I never imagined she'd act on it. Never imagined he'd let her. Never imagined either of them would choose one single night—the night after he marked me, the night I'd trusted him with my entire body and future—to do this.

Something in my chest went very still and very cold. The kind of stillness that comes right before something breaks completely.

"Get out," Damon said suddenly, and for one disorienting moment I thought he meant Marissa. Then I realized, from the way his eyes had fixed on me, that he didn't. "You're causing a scene. The whole floor can probably hear you."

I laughed. It came out broken, ugly, nothing like a real laugh at all. "I'm causing a scene? You're in bed with my best friend the day after you marked me, and *I'm* causing a scene?"

"Evelyn." His voice dropped into that low, commanding register, the alpha tone he rarely used on me, the one that made lesser wolves bow their heads without thinking. I felt it pull at something instinctive in my gut, some deep-buried submission the bond wanted me to feel. I hated that it worked at all, even for a fraction of a second. "Go back to your room. We'll discuss this later, when you've calmed down."

*Calmed down.* Like I was a child throwing a tantrum. Like my entire world hadn't just cracked open at the seams.

I didn't answer him. I couldn't, not without the sob building in my throat breaking loose in front of both of them, and I refused—*refused*—to give either of them the satisfaction of watching me fall apart. So I turned and I ran. Down the hallway, down the stairs, past pack members who looked up in confusion as I shoved through the front doors and out into the cold night air, my bare feet hitting the packed dirt of the compound grounds.

Behind me, I heard Damon's voice carry down from the window, not even bothering to come after me. "You had to see this coming."

Maybe I had. Maybe some quiet, unacknowledged part of me had always known Damon Cross would never truly be mine, mark or no mark, bond or no bond. But knowing something in the abstract and living through the reality of it were two entirely different kinds of pain, and right now, running blind through the trees with tears freezing on my cheeks, I didn't know which hurt more—his betrayal, or my own stupidity for ever believing I deserved better.

I didn't stop running until the pack lands were far behind me, until the lights of the compound had disappeared through the trees, until my legs gave out beneath me and I collapsed against the base of an old oak, sobbing into hands that still smelled, faintly, like him.

I had no way of knowing yet that I was already carrying something of his inside me—something that would force me to choose, in the weeks to come, between the pack that had raised me and the life I would have to build entirely on my own.