I Accepted My Alpha’s Rejection While Carrying His Pup Chapter 02

I Accepted My Alpha’s Rejection While Carrying His Pup Chapter 02

I married Kane Ashford because he saved my life.

Ironic, considering how close he came to ending it.

I was nineteen when rogues ran my parents’ car off a mountain road. I remember the glass. The screaming. My mother’s hand going still in mine.

Then I remember a huge dark wolf tearing through the rogues like they were paper.

When it was over, the wolf shifted into a man. Tall. Bloody. Breathing hard. He crouched beside the wreck, pulled me out, and pressed his face into my hair.

He inhaled once and went completely still.

“Mate,” he whispered.

That was Kane.

He held me at my parents’ funeral. He paid for everything. He made the world feel survivable when it had just ended. And when the pack whispered that their Alpha’s fated mate had no wolf and smelled almost human, he snarled at them until they went quiet.

“I don’t care what you are,” he told me. “You’re mine. You’ll never be alone again.”

He lied.

The loneliness started six months after our mating ceremony, when Lydia Crane came home.

His childhood sweetheart. Daughter of Alpha Victor Crane of the Redmoon Pack. Beautiful, powerful, and fluent in the art of making me feel small without ever raising her voice.

“Our packs have history,” Kane said. “Redmoon is our biggest ally. I can’t shut her out.”

I nodded. Because I trusted him.

Lydia was so sweet to me at first. She brought me a special herbal tea blend in a pretty tin.

“For your nerves, Luna. Everyone says you look so tired.”

I drank it every morning for three years.

And every month, I got a little more tired.

Then came the late-night meetings. The phone calls he took in the other room. The full moon runs where the whole pack shifted and raced into the forest together, Kane’s black wolf side by side with Lydia’s red one.

I stood on the porch in my robe and watched them go.

I cooked dinner every night and ate alone at a table set for two.

The guards stopped meeting my eyes. The Omegas in the kitchen started looking at me with something worse than disrespect.

Pity.

Everyone knew before I did.

But I kept smiling. I kept hosting. I kept being the perfect Luna. Because I thought if I was perfect enough, he’d come back to me.

The anniversary gala was my last try.

Six weeks of planning. His favorite bourbon. His late mother’s honey cake recipe. A band playing the song from our first dance.

He spent the whole night with her.

At nine o’clock, I crossed the ballroom in front of everyone and held out my hand.

“Dance with me?” I asked my husband. At our own anniversary party.

He looked at me like I’d interrupted something important.

“In a minute, Ivy.”

That minute never came.

At ten, I found the decree.

At ten fifteen, I signed it.

At ten thirty, I was gone.

Now I sat on an overnight bus rattling north through the dark, forehead against the cold window, finally letting myself feel all of it. Three years of loving a man who had already let me go.

My body ached everywhere. My head was pounding. And weirdly, for the first time in forever, I didn’t want that tea.

I’d skipped it that morning. Morning sickness. I couldn’t keep anything down.

My phone buzzed.

Kane.

“Where are you? Lydia wants to make a toast to us. Don’t sulk. It’s embarrassing.”

To us.

He still thought I’d run off to cry in a bathroom somewhere. That I’d come back, fix my makeup, and smile the way I always did.

He didn’t know I was already sixty miles away.

He didn’t know the thing he’d felt on the dance floor wasn’t indigestion.

It was the sound of me leaving.

And he had no idea that I was carrying his pup.