All Chapters of Pregnant And Rejected Mate : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Mila had kept the letter in the same drawer for eight months. Underneath a folded scarf, beneath a stack of undelivered thank-you cards from Ada's retirement party two years back, tucked far enough into the dark that she didn't have to see it every time she opened the drawer for something else. She knew exactly where it was at all times. That was the strange thing about hiding something — you never really stopped feeling its weight, even buried.Sera had pressed it into her hands the night she left, both of them standing at the door of Mila's cabin in the dark, Sera's bag already over one shoulder like she'd made peace with leaving before she'd even finished saying goodbye."Don't open it until morning," Sera had said. "Promise me.""Sera, please, just talk to me, tell me what's—""Promise me." Her voice had cracked on it, and Mila remembered how her hands were shaking when she pushed the folded paper into Mila's palms and closed her fingers over it like she was sealing something shut.

Mila didn't answer right away, and that alone told Rowan everything. He stood on her doorstep, chest still heaving from the run across the yard, watching her fingers tighten around the folded paper in her hand like she could will it back into the drawer she'd taken it from."Mila." His voice had dropped, careful now, like he was talking to something that might bolt. "Please.""I made a promise." "I know you did." He held her gaze steady. "I'm not asking you to break it tonight. I'm asking if I'm right to be standing here feeling like the ground's about to open up under this whole pack." She didn't answer that either, but something in her face cracked, just slightly, just enough that Rowan felt his stomach drop the rest of the way to the floor."Two days," he said quietly. "The ceremony's in two days, Mila.""I know when the ceremony is.""Then you understand why I'm asking."She looked down at the letter in her hands, and for a long moment Rowan thought she might actually hand it to hi

Kael was through the door before Rowan finished his sentence, boots hitting the hallway floor hard, moving on instinct the way he only moved when something ancient and animal in him took over from whatever careful control he usually kept clamped down.Mila was halfway up the main stairs when he found her, breathless, one hand braced against the banister, her face white in the low hall light. "Where is she?" Kael's voice came out rough, urgent, before he'd even reached the top step. "Sera. Is it Sera?"Mila froze, and for one terrible second Kael thought he'd said too much, given away something he'd spent weeks trying to keep buried even from himself. But whatever calculation had been running behind her eyes seemed to collapse in that instant, like his question had answered something she'd still been debating whether to ask."I need to talk to you," Mila said. "Both of you. Now." Rowan reached the top of the stairs a step behind Kael, breathing hard. "Mila, what's happened?" "Not here.

They left before sunrise. Kael hadn't slept, hadn't tried, hadn't done anything since Cressida walked out of his study except sit at his desk with Sera's letter flattened in front of him, reading it over and over until the words stopped making new wounds and just sat there, familiar, aching in a way he'd have to learn to carry.Rowan found him still there when the first gray light came through the window."We need a plan," Rowan said. "Not just riding out blind.""I don't care about a plan." Kael's voice was rough, sleepless. "I care about finding her before—"He didn't finish that sentence. He hadn't been able to finish it all night."Kael." Rowan pulled the chair around, sat across from him the way he had a hundred times before, but this time his face carried none of the careful patience from the night before. This was urgency now, focused and sharp. "If we go tearing across three territories with no idea where she went, we'll lose days we don't have. We need to think like trackers,

The stairs up to Sera's apartment took Kael three at a time, Rowan close behind him, Ada calling something after them that neither man stopped to hear.The door hung wide open, swinging slow on its hinges in the cold night air, and Kael's whole body went rigid at the sight of it — a chair overturned just inside, a lamp knocked from the small table by the window, its bulb shattered across the floorboards in a scatter of glass that caught the hall light like something scattered on purpose, in a struggle, in a fight that hadn't lasted long enough for whoever lived here to win it."Sera?" His voice cracked on her name, raw, already knowing before he finished saying it that the room was empty. "Sera!" Nothing answered. Just the hollow quiet of an apartment that had been occupied minutes ago and wasn't anymore, the kind of silence that sits wrong in a room, too still, too recently disturbed."Kael." Rowan's voice, low, urgent, from the doorway of what looked like it might have been meant as