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

Mila's point of view.I kept my promise for four months.Four months of carrying that sealed envelope in the pocket of my cardigan like a wound I was not allowed to touch. Four months of watching Kael walk the south tree line every night with his hand pressed to his chest and his jaw tight and his eyes fixed on something nobody else could see. Four months of Rowan asking me quiet careful questions that I answered with careful quiet lies while the envelope grew soft from being handled and the truth inside it pressed against my ribs like something trying to get out.Four months.And then one Tuesday morning in October I woke up before dawn and sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the envelope on my nightstand and something in me said —No more.I picked it up.Turned it over.Sera's handwriting on the front. My name in her careful letters, the ones she had always written like each word mattered and deserved to be placed properly. She had pressed hard with the pen. I could feel the ind

Kael's point of view.I didn't get up off my knees for a long time.The grass was cold and wet under my palms. The morning air was sharp against my face. Rowan stood beside me saying nothing, which was the right thing, which was the only thing anyone could have done in that moment, and I stayed there on my knees in the wet grass with my hands pressed into the ground like I was trying to hold onto the earth because everything above it had just stopped making sense.She was pregnant.When I said the words. When I stood behind that desk and looked at her and said the most final thing one wolf can say to another — she was already carrying my child. She had walked into that room with my baby beneath her ribs and I had spoken the rejection before she could open her mouth and she had pressed her hand to her stomach and said nothing and walked out.She had walked out.Into the dark. Alone. Across the border. Into a town I didn't know the name of.Alone.A girl, Rowan had said quietly, standing

Cressida's point of view.I packed slowly.Not because I had a lot to pack — I had brought three bags to Ashveil and I would leave with three bags and the careful deliberate slowness was not about the bags at all. It was about the morning. About the specific quality of this particular morning, the way the light came in through the guest room window pale and thin, the way the pack house had gone quiet in the strange held-breath way of a place that had just received news too large to immediately process.The ceremony was cancelled.Three days away and cancelled.I folded a dress and put it in the bag and smoothed it flat and thought about the word cancelled and how insufficient it was for what had actually happened. Cancelled was what you said about a dinner reservation. About a meeting that no longer fit the schedule. Not about a Luna ceremony that had taken three months to plan and had represented the formal joining of two pack bloodlines and the political alliance that came with it.N

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