My Alpha Rejected Me for His Pregnant Omega

The pain should have finished me.

I felt it coming. The second wave of the broken bond rolled up from my chest, hot and jagged, looking for the last soft part of me to tear through.

It hit a wall.

Something inside me, buried so deep I never knew it was there, stopped the pain cold. Then the wall cracked. The pain didn't break *through* me.

It broke something *open*.

My body locked. Every muscle went rigid at once. My fingers froze on the edge of the altar, and I couldn't let go.

Then I heard the first crack.

It was loud in that silent hall. Bone. My bone. My left shoulder popped and slid, and I felt it move under my skin like something alive. My spine bowed back so hard my head tipped toward the ceiling. Pins flew from my hair and pinged across the stone.

"Sloane?" Calliope's voice. Close. Scared. "Sloane!"

I couldn't answer her. My jaw was stretching.

A sound tore up from my chest. I thought it would be a scream. It wasn't.

It was a howl.

It was deep and huge and old, and it shook the candles in their holders. It didn't sound like me. It sounded like something that had been locked in a dark room for twenty years and had just kicked the door off its hinges.

*Finally,* a voice said inside my head. Low. Female. Patient as winter. *Finally, little one.*

The shift ripped outward.

My silver gown split down the back. Fur poured over my skin, thick and white. My hands hit the platform, and they weren't hands anymore. They were paws, wide as dinner plates, and under them the stone groaned. A crack shot across the ceremonial platform like lightning. Then another. Chips of rock skittered down the steps.

I rose.

And I kept rising.

When it was over, I was looking *down* at the altar. Down at the front row. Down at the carved beams that I used to tilt my head back to see. The candlelight slid over my fur and turned it the color of polished metal.

Then my scent hit the room.

For three years it had been faint. Grant used to joke that I smelled like nothing at all. Now it flooded out of me in a wave. White nightshade, cool and sweet. Winter iron, sharp as a blade left out in the snow.

The hall breathed it in.

And the hall went down.

It started at the front. The elders folded first, knees hitting the floor with soft thuds. Then the warriors in their pressed black. Then the allied Alphas, men who had never knelt to anyone. Their Lunas went down beside them, heads bowed, hands shaking on their laps.

No one chose it. I could see that on their faces. Shock. Fear. Their bodies had decided before their minds caught up.

I turned my head.

Grant was still standing two steps below the altar. Piper's blood was red on his lower lip. His mouth was open.

His knees gave out.

He hit the stone hard. I heard the crack of it. His hands slapped the floor to catch himself. Somewhere inside him, his wolf whimpered. I could *hear* it, a thin, high sound, like a pup that knows it's in trouble.

He looked up at me.

For three years, I had looked up at Grant Collins. Across desks. Across beds. Across this very hall. Now he knelt on the floor with his face white as paper, and I was the one looking down.

*Worthless,* he had called me. Not twenty minutes ago.

Beside him, Piper was on her knees in her Luna white. One hand clutched her new mark. The other clutched her belly. She wasn't smiling anymore.

Then a second howl split the air.

It came from the east wall. From the last pillar.

Theron.

He was the only one in the hall still standing, and barely. One hand gripped the pillar. His head was thrown back, and the sound coming out of him was not human. It was a roar, raw and wild, ten years deep.

I smelled him then. Really smelled him, for the first time in my life.

Storm-cedar. Black iron. Rain on hot stone.

My wolf went still. Then she leaned toward him with her whole body.

*Mate,* she breathed.

The word hit my chest like a fist.

*Mate. Mate. MATE.*

I could almost see our scents in the air. Pale threads and dark ones, reaching across the kneeling crowd, twisting together over their bowed heads. Nightshade wrapping around cedar. Iron meeting iron.

Theron's eyes found mine. They were burning gold.

He didn't look surprised. That was the thing I would remember later. He looked like a man who had been waiting at a train station for ten years, and the train had just pulled in.

For one breath, the hall disappeared. There was no Grant. No Piper. No broken bond bleeding under the ice. Only him, and the look on his face, and a feeling I had no name for.

Then I heard steel leave a sheath.

The sound was soft. It cut through everything.

Gamma Reeves was on his feet.

How, I didn't know. His legs were shaking. Sweat ran down his temple. Every inch of him was fighting my aura, and he was losing, but he was standing. In his right hand, a silver blade caught the candlelight.

Silver. The one thing that could kill me in any form.

"Unsanctioned shift," he said. His voice cracked, then steadied. "At a sworn ceremony. In front of the Alpha."

He took a step toward the platform.

"Under Ironcrest law, that's a threat to the pack." Another step. "Grounds for immediate execution."

Nobody moved. Nobody *could*. Hundreds of wolves pinned to the floor by my own blood, watching.

Reeves climbed the first cracked step. He raised the blade.

"And I'll carry it out."