Chapter 1

Chapter 1

ANNALISA

My Alpha husband demanded I plan my own rejection ceremony.

He had no idea I was pregnant.And he had no idea our baby's heart would stop beating in less than thirty days...

I sat in Dr. Faison’s office. The silence was suffocating. I had been dreading this moment all morning. Ever since I woke up with sharp abdominal cramps, while my husband stood by the window, smiling at his phone, talking to his first love.

"The fetus is viable," Dr. Faison said, "but the heart rate is severely unstable and inconsistent with what is expected of the fetus. At the rate we are tracking, you have a window of approximately one month before the pregnancy becomes a miscarriage. You need a medical intervention before then.''

I had always wanted a child, it was a dream of mine, now that dream was here but I was being told It might not become a reality.

"What kind of intervention?" I asked.

He had leaned forward in his chair, his hands folded on the desk, and told me something I had not expected.

Proximity to its father. Specifically — the Alpha's scent, especially the sire that was involved in the making. Not just that, I needed to have a lot of physical contact. Shared sleeping space. The baby's heart, he explained, was responding to an absence. A gap where that presence should have been. Without it, the pregnancy would not hold.

The drive home was a blur. I gripped the steering wheel, trying to see the road through a film of hot tears.

Antonio had not touched me in over a year.

The one time he had barely a month ago— the one time in four years of marriage that he had come to my room, drunk on whiskey and carried grief in his heart that I had not fully understood at the time — he had not been there with me at all.

Not really. He had said her name. Christiana.

While he took me, over and over and I laid there and told myself that it was worth it.

He had not remembered it the next morning. I had known that when I saw him eating breakfast and ignoring me, just like he did daily that whatever had happened the night before had been buried in him somewhere he did not intend to go looking.

But I had not forgotten.

And now, three weeks later, I discovered that I was pregnant.

I parked in front of the Greenwood estate and sat in the car for a moment before I got out, staring at the huge mansion sprawled ahead. I grew up in this house. Not as a daughter of it but almost something similar to that, I was a child brought home by Antonio's father after my parents died, given a room and meals and told that I would be the mate to Antonio once I grew up. I had followed Antonio around as a teenager the way lonely children follow anyone who lets them, and he had tolerated it the way older boys tolerate things that they hated but were persistent.

His father had decided we were perfect for each other.

We were not.

Antonio had known it longer than I had. But I had not understood it fully until the wedding night when he sat across from me in a room full of white flowers and pack elders and looked at me with the expression of a man who had swallowed something bitter and decided he was going to live with the taste of it forever.

That was the moment my heart went cold, but I still loved him, and I believed my love could change him. But now, I wasn’t sure I could change anything anymore—maybe only a child could keep him here.

How pathetic I was...

I found him in his study. He was standing at the window when I pushed open the door, his back towards me. He turned when he heard me come in, and his face arranged itself into his usual expression he had reserved just for me; blank, distant, neutral. The look of a man clocking the presence of something he neither needed nor wanted to engage with.

"I need to talk to you," I said breaking the silence instead, I had to do it now, rip it out and tell him before I would lose my cool.

"So do I." He turned fully and moved to his desk, picking up his pen, setting it back down. A habit. "Christiana is back."

I already knew. The whole pack had known since yesterday. She had driven through the front gates in a white car with the windows down and her hair loose, and the whispers had started before she even stepped out. His first love. His true fated mate. The woman he had been in love with since before I ever existed in his life in any meaningful way. The woman who had been the bane in my marriage not working out, because my husband could not leave the past behind and focus on building something with me.

But I didn’t have the luxury of caring about Christiana right now.

Not when my child was running out of time.

"Antonio," I said. I stepped fully into the room and pulled the door shut behind me.

"I'm pregnant——"

“Prepare the Moon Rite, Annalisa”, he said at the exact same time, his voice cutting cleanly through mine. “I’m going to claim my fated mate.”