My Alpha Rejected Me While I Gave Birth

The floor of the truck was freezing, but my legs were on fire.

The wolfsbane-soaked rope bit deep into my ankles and knees, lashing my thighs together so tightly that my bones ground against each other with every jolt of the truck. Blistering welts were already rising under the rough hemp, spreading up my skin in angry, burning arcs. I could smell it—that sickening, bitter scent of rotten almonds radiating from my own flesh.

My neck felt hollow. Where Derek’s bite mark had lived for three years, there was only cold, dead flesh. The mate bond had been torn away, and the psychic wound was hemorrhaging my aura like a severed artery. With every mile we climbed into the Cascades, a piece of my life force drained out onto the dirty rubber floor mats.

Beneath my ribs, a tiny foot nudged my side.

I pressed my trembling fingers against my swollen belly, curling my upper body as close to my child as the tight space allowed.

"Twenty-one," I whispered, my voice barely a rasp over the hum of the tires. "Twenty-two."

I was counting her kicks. It was the only thing keeping me anchored.

*Stay with me, little girl,* I pleaded silently. *Please, just stay with Mama.*

In the front seat, the glow of Carly’s smartphone lit up the cab. She let out a bright, mocking laugh.

"Look at this, babe," Carly said, leaning across the console and shoving the screen in Derek’s face. "The northern ridge territory Marcus is giving us has two natural springs. We can build the new Alpha cabin right on the bluff."

Derek glanced at the screen, a smug grin pulling at the corner of his mouth. "Told you I'd handle it. Ironvale is finally expanding."

He reached up, grabbed the rearview mirror, and tilted it upward toward the ceiling. He didn't want to see me. He didn't want to see the blood pooling beneath my hips, or the way my face was pressed into the dirt of his floorboards.

Another contraction hit me. It was violent, a sledgehammer striking my pelvis from the inside. My daughter was trying to come into the world, but my bound legs gave her nowhere to go.

I clamped my teeth into my arm to stop from screaming.

*Shift,* I told myself. *You have to shift. Break the ropes.*

I reached deep inside, searching for my wolf. But there was nothing. No silver eyes, no fangs, no snarling protector. My wolf was collapsed in the dark, buried beneath the suffocating poison of the wolfsbane and the shock of the broken bond. She was unreachable.

*The pack link,* I thought frantically. *Wesley. Someone.*

I pushed my thoughts toward the pack network, but my mind slammed into dead static. The moment Derek spoke the rejection, Ironvale had severed me. To the pack’s magic, I didn't exist. I was nobody.

A heavy, suffocating stillness crept into my belly. The kicks stopped.

"No," I choked out, tears burning my eyes. "No, no, Emmeline, kick me. Please."

Thirty seconds passed. Then a minute.

A weak, fluttery movement pushed against my palm. It was faint. Faltering. She was losing oxygen. Trapped inside a dying body, starved for space and air, my baby was fading.

They were going to drive until we were both dead, and then they were going to dump our bodies into a ravine and call it a rogue attack. No one was coming to save us. If anyone was going to bring help, I had to do it myself.

My vision was tunneling. The edges of the cab blurred into streaks of black and gray.

*I am not dying on this floor,* I thought. *My daughter is not dying in this truck.*

I closed my eyes and pulled on the absolute last reserve of my soul. Past the wolfsbane burning through my blood, past the bleeding hole where my mate bond had been ripped away, there was a tiny, stubborn ember. It wasn't Ironvale magic. It wasn't anything Derek had ever touched. It was older, deeper, and purely mine.

I took all my agony, all my fear, and every single beat of my daughter's struggling heart, and I forged it into a single, desperate scream.

I didn't aim it at Ironvale. I didn't aim it at anyone I knew.

I just threw it outward into the frozen dark—a raw, wordless distress pulse tearing through the sky like a flare. Under pack law, through wolfsbane suppression and a severed bond, it was physically impossible.

The pulse ripped out of my chest, shattering the last of my strength, and shot into the void.

Hundreds of miles away, across jagged peaks and frozen pine forests, the signal struck something vast.

It didn't bounce off empty space. It collided head-on with a frequency that had been waiting for it in the shadows for ten years.

Deep within the sovereign territory of the Lycan Court, Prince Evander froze.

He was walking the perimeter of the royal guard barracks, snow falling silently around his broad shoulders, when the invisible shockwave hit him. It wasn't just a mind-link; it was her. The distinct, undeniable soul-signature of the girl he had loved in silence for a decade, drenched in blood and screaming for her child’s life.

Evander’s eyes flared molten gold.

He didn't give an explanation. He didn't issue an order.

Mid-stride, his human bones snapped and reformed with terrifying, fluid speed. A massive, pure-black Lycan wolf—towering nearly nine feet tall—burst through his clothing before his boots even hit the ground. A royal roar tore from his throat, shaking the snow from the spruce trees and dropping every guard in the courtyard into an instinctive crouch.

*With me!* his Lycan command thundered across the compound.

Ten royal escorts shifted behind him in an explosion of fur and raw power, but Evander was already gone. He hurled himself across the frozen border, his massive paws tearing chunks out of the ice, moving at a lethal, impossible speed only royal Lycan blood could sustain.

His wolf had locked onto her dying scent. And this time, he was not letting her go.