Chapter 2: Slice twice 

The words hung in the air like smoke, choking every bit of breath from Roxie's lungs.

I'm already carrying his baby. I'm the right mate for him.

She stared at her sister's hand resting against her stomach, at the smug curve of Chloe's mouth, and felt something inside her chest crack down the middle like ice giving way.

"You're lying," Roxie whispered, though she already knew Chloe wasn't. Chloe never lied about things that could hurt this much. She only ever told the truth when the truth was a weapon.

"Am I?" Chloe tilted her head, golden hair catching the lamplight, savoring every second of Roxie's unraveling. "Did you really think a future Alpha was going to choose a wolfless little grease monkey over the mother of his heir?"

"Chloe." Jaxon started, but there was no real warning in it. No defense of Roxie. Just discomfort at being caught in the mess he'd made.

Chloe ignored him entirely, stepping closer to Roxie, close enough that Roxie could smell the same cologne that used to linger on her own clothes after Jaxon held her.

"You were never going to be Luna," Chloe said softly, cruelly. "You can't even shift. What did you think you had to offer him? Broken toys and a busted wolf gene?"

 Roxie was outrageously offended when Chloe word snapped through with an immediate effect her palm cracked across Chloe's cheek before she'd even decided to react, the sound sharp and final in the quiet room.

Chloe's head snapped sideways. Silence swallowed everything.

Then Jaxon immediately retaliated.

His hand caught Roxie across the face so hard the world tilted sideways, pain exploding white-hot across her cheekbone. She stumbled into the doorframe, vision swimming, the taste of copper flooding her mouth.

"Don't you ever touch her again," he snarled, stepping between them like Roxie was the monster in the room. As if Roxie was the one who'd broken something sacred tonight.

She pressed a trembling hand to her throbbing face, staring up at him in disbelief. This was the same hand that had once brushed hair from her eyes and told her she was enough exactly as she was.

"Jaxon," she breathed, voice cracking. "Please…"

"I, Jaxon, future Alpha of the Blackwood Pack," he said, voice cold and formal, each word was a blade to Roxie skin, "reject you, Roxie Blackwood, as my fated mate."

The bond inside her chest, the invisible thread she'd felt tugging toward him since she knew Jaxon was her mate, tore apart with a violence that ripped a strangled sob straight from her throat. She doubled over, one hand pressed flat against her sternum, as if she could hold the pieces of herself together by force.

Chloe's laughter chased her out the door.

Roxie didn't remember the walk to her father's office. She only remembered arriving, breathless and shaking, blood still warm on her split lip, some last foolish sliver of hope still burning in her chest.

He's still my father. He has to care. He has to.

She shoved the door open without knocking.

"Dad." Her voice broke on the word. "Jaxon and Chloe, they….he rejected me, he hit me, please, you have to do something."

Alpha Thomas Blackwood didn't look up from the papers on his desk.

That single, deliberate silence told her everything before he said a word.

"So how's that new information," he said finally, flat as stone. "I've known for weeks."

The floor seemed to fall away beneath her. "You knew?"

"Chloe is carrying a true bloodline pup." He set down his pen with maddening calm, finally lifting his eyes to hers, eyes with nothing in them. No warmth. No apology. No trace of the father she used to beg, uselessly, for a single kind word. "Do you understand what that means for this pack's future? Pure lineage, tied directly to the next Alpha. This is bigger than your feelings, Roxie."

"Bigger than my…." Her voice shattered. "He hit me. Your daughter. And you knew he was cheating with Chloe this whole time and said nothing?"

"You need to accept this quietly and move on." His tone was the same one he used on pack business, cold and administrative, like she was a complaint to be filed and forgotten. "Don't make this harder than it already is."

"Harder for who?" Tears blurred her vision, hot and furious. "I am your daughter."

"You're wolfless." He said it the exact way other men in the pack call her worthless, without even flinching at the cruelty of it. "You were never going to be Luna material. Be grateful I still let you live under this pack's protection at all."

The words landed and something inside Roxie went cold and very, very still, colder than the bruise blooming across her cheek.

She had nothing left to say to a man who'd already picked his side weeks ago and let her walk into that room like a fool, hoping for comfort he'd decided long before tonight that she didn't deserve.

She turned without another word and shoved through the office doors, needing air, needing distance, needing to be anywhere that wasn't this house full of people who'd never once chosen her and slammed hard into a wall of solid muscle.

As she walked out of her father's office, the impact of the man she just hit knocked the breath clean out of her. She staggered back a step, disoriented, registering only heat and size and a presence so overwhelming it pressed against her skin like the air before lightning struck.

She didn't apologize.

She didn't even look up.

Grief and fury blinded her to everything except the desperate need to get away, and she shoved past the stranger without a single word, storming down the corridor with her fists clenched and her ruined heart hammering against her ribs.

Behind her, the entire hallway had gone silent. 

dead, breathless silent, the kind of silence that fell over a room only when something dangerous had just walked into it.

Roxie never once looked back to see who she had angrily pushed away 

He was the Alpha king