My Alpha Rejected His Pregnant Luna

The water hit my hands at 4:47 in the afternoon, three hours before the Solstice Banquet, and I knew before I screamed that it wasn't water.

Wolfsbane has a smell. Sharp, green, metallic underneath. It hit the back of my throat before the heat even registered on my skin. Then the burn came—not the clean scald of boiling water, but something that ate downward, blistering layer by layer, my forearms going from pink to chemical white in the span of a breath. I dropped against the kitchen counter. My knees buckled. I pressed my palm flat against my belly because that is what I do when I am about to fall apart.

My pup. My pup my pup my pup.

"I tripped!" Callie wailed.

She was already on the floor. Already crying. She'd gone down faster than the basin had, the empty copper bowl rolling away from her like evidence she'd flung. Her face was wet in less than a second. I have never been able to do that. Cry on command. It's a skill, what she does, and I've watched her practice it on Alexander for almost a year now and pretended I didn't see.

"Callie?" His voice. From the hall.

Not mine. Not my scream. Hers. Her sob was what reached him.

Alexander came through the kitchen door at a run and dropped to his knees beside her. Not me. He went past me—past his pregnant Luna, leaning against a counter with her forearms blistering open—and he gathered Callie against his chest like she was the one bleeding.

"Shh," he was saying. "Shh, sweetheart, it's all right, what happened—"

"I tripped," she sobbed into his shirt. "I'm so sorry, Alpha, I'm so sorry, the basin was so heavy—"

Marcus came in second. Our Beta. He stopped in the doorway and his eyes went over the scene the way Marcus's eyes always do—catalogue, log, file. He looked at me. He looked at Callie. He looked at the ladle on the floor where it had rolled into the corner. And then, quietly, while Alexander's face was buried in Callie's hair, Marcus walked over and picked the ladle up and put it inside his coat.

He did not look at me when he did it. But he did it.

I tried to say Alexander's name. My mouth wouldn't make the shape. The wolfsbane was already in my blood; I could feel it like a second heartbeat behind the first, off-rhythm, wrong.

Nobody came for me.

I don't remember leaving the kitchen. I remember the cold. The blizzard had come down hard while I was inside, and the snow blew sideways across the courtyard, and my forearms were wet with something that wasn't water and wasn't quite blood. I walked toward the healer's cottage because that was the only direction my body knew. The pack house loomed to my left, lit gold from inside, every window bright. The Banquet. They had started without me.

I stopped at the doors because the doors opened.

The whole hall was assembled. Every face I had served for three years, turned toward the threshold. The long table. The pine garlands I had hung myself two days ago. Alexander at the head. Callie on his right—not in Omega gray, in green silk, standing where I should have stood.

He looked at me across the length of the hall. He saw me. He saw the burns. He saw the snow in my hair and the blood on my sleeves and his own pup pressing my coat tight at the waist.

He opened his mouth.

"I, Alexander Duncan, Alpha of the Shadowvale Pack—"

No.

"—reject you, Alina Morrison, as my mate and Luna."

The mark on my neck went cold first. Then empty. Like a door closing on a room I had lived in for three years and would never enter again. The bond didn't tear. It snapped. A clean dry crack inside my chest, loud enough that every wolf in the hall flinched at the same instant.

I heard someone gasp. I heard Callie's small, satisfied breath.

I hit the snow on my knees.

The pain came in waves that had nothing to do with the burns. It went through the bond-place at my throat and down my spine and into my womb and I curled around my belly and I could not, I could not, I could not breathe—

And then something in me that had been quiet for too long stopped being quiet.

It rose. From under the years and under the dormancy and under whatever it was that had kept me half a wolf my whole life. It rose like a tide rising under a frozen lake, and the ice cracked, and something enormous came up through the cracks.

My bones moved.

I shifted in the snow without choosing to. The shift tore through me hot and silver and unstoppable, and when I stood I stood on four legs, and I was tall—taller than the doorway, taller than the Alpha at the threshold, taller than anything I had ever imagined being.

The hall went silent.

I looked at them through wolf-eyes for the first time in my life. Every wolf in that room dropped their gaze. Every single one. Alexander's black wolf shouldered into being beside Callie and he was small. He was small. His chin came to my shoulder.

Callie's mouth was still open in its little victorious shape. It froze there.

I did not speak through the mind-link. I had nothing to say to them.

I turned. I put my back to the open doors and to the man who had just unmade me, and I walked into the blizzard, and behind me I heard Alexander's voice rise—rough, cracking, not Alpha anymore—

"Alina—"

I did not turn around.