I Accepted My Alpha’s Rejection While Carrying His Pup Chapter 11

I Accepted My Alpha’s Rejection While Carrying His Pup Chapter 11

At thirty weeks, everything came crashing together.

I was walking home from Dr. Wells’ clinic when someone stepped out from between two buildings.

Not a guard. Not Caspian.

Kane.

I barely recognized him.

He’d lost so much weight his cheekbones looked sharp enough to cut. His eyes were sunken. His clothes were muddy up to the knees. The man who used to fill a ballroom just by walking into it now looked like a ghost in a torn coat.

“Ivy. Please. Five minutes.”

“How did you get past the King’s guards?”

“I didn’t. I went around them. Through the river valley. On foot. Six miles.”

He’d crossed half a frozen forest to sneak past a Lycan King’s border.

The desperation was almost impressive.

“I know about the pup,” he said. “Rhett smelled her that night. A girl.”

My hands curled into fists. “You don’t get to say that like it’s yours to know.”

“She is mine, Ivy.”

“You had a wife who loved you. You threw that away.”

He flinched. Then he reached into his coat and pulled out a small velvet box.

“I know everything now,” he said quickly. “Victor. The tea. I tore Redmoon’s alliance to pieces. I dragged Rhett in front of the pack for what he did to you. I’m changing everything.”

He opened the box.

Inside was a ring. Enormous. Blinding. Next to it, a small silver pin in the shape of a crescent moon. The Blackridge Luna mark.

“Let me mark you again. Let me rebuild the bond. No politics. No Redmoon. Just us.”

Three years ago, that ring would have made me cry for a week.

Now it just made me tired.

“Kane. Do you know that Victor Crane paid the rogues who killed my parents?

His face went gray. “Yes. Lydia told me.”

“You pulled me out of that wreck. You held me at the funeral. You promised I’d never be alone again.” My voice shook. “And then you left me alone in your house with the daughter of the man who murdered them.”

“I didn’t know-”

“You didn’t look. That’s different.”

“I should have protected you,” he whispered.

“You should have noticed me.”

He stared at me. The box trembled in his hand.

“Do you remember our anniversary?” I asked. “I crossed that whole ballroom in front of three hundred wolves and asked you to dance. You said, ‘In a minute, Ivy.”

“In a minute,” he repeated. His voice broke apart on the words.

“That minute was three years long. I stood there in a dress I picked for you, at a party I planned for you, waiting for sixty seconds of your attention. And you couldn’t even give me that.”

He closed the box slowly.

“Is it the King?”

“This isn’t about Caspian. It’s about you. You had everything, Kane. Everything. And you let it starve right in front of you.”

“Victor’s going to come for you,” he said desperately. “Let me stand between you and him. At least let me

To that

“That’s not your place anymore.”

“Ivy-”

“Go home. Find someone who makes you want to show up. Not someone you only miss once she’s gone.”

I turned and walked away.

He didn’t follow.

But I heard it behind me, carried through the falling snow. A sound I would hear in my head for weeks.

Kane Ashford. Alpha of Blackridge.

Crying.

Not the kind of crying a man does when he wants you to turn around.

The real kind. The broken, gasping kind. The sound of a man finally understanding what he’d lost-three

years too late.

I made it all the way back to the diner before my own tears came.

Grandma didn’t ask. She just pulled me into her arms and held me in the doorway while the bell above us jingled.

That night, I lay awake with my hands on my belly.

My daughter kicked, slow and steady, like she was trying to tell me something.

We’re okay, I told her. We’re going to be okay.

Nova was quiet for a long time.

Then she said something that made every hair on my body stand up.

He didn’t go home, Ivy.

“What?”

The Alpha. He’s still out there. In the trees. Watching the diner.

I went to the window.

Qut past the edge of town, just inside the tree line, two eyes glowed in the dark.

Standing guard.