Rejected and Pregnant I Fled The Pack (Evelyn and Damon) novel Chapter 274

Ethan pov

I smelled her before I saw her.

Rain had been falling since sunset, the cold, steady kind that soaks through a jacket in minutes, and I was finishing the last stretch of the northern border patrol when a scent cut through the wet pine and mud. It was sweet, like honey and wildflowers, and under it ran something sharp and frightened. I turned twenty two months ago and took over my father's pack. I wanted to lead differently. I needed to lead differently. My father and his father almost lost it all because of traditions and stupidity. I sniffed the air.

My wolf stopped dead.

*Mate.*

The word hit me so hard I actually stumbled. Twenty years old, and I'd heard every story about this moment. Everyone said it would feel like lightning, or like coming home. Nobody had mentioned that it would feel like being grabbed by the chest and pulled in one direction.

"Easy," I muttered to myself, though my wolf was already straining forward. "She's scared. Don't make it worse."

I slowed my pace, forcing myself to move like a man walking through the woods instead of a wolf about to bolt toward his future. The scent led me to the edge of our territory, where the old stone marker stood half-buried in ferns.

She was huddled against it.

She was tiny, maybe five feet tall if she stood straight, and she was curled so tightly into herself that she looked like a bundle of wet clothes. Dark hair was plastered to her face. Her sweater was thin and soaked through, and her sneakers were caked in mud up to the ankles. She was shaking hard enough that I could see it from twenty feet away.

Her head snapped up when a branch cracked under my boot.

Her eyes were huge, gray-green and wild, and in the beam of my flashlight I saw the muddy tracks of tears on her cheeks. She scrambled backward against the stone, her breath coming in short, panicked gasps.

I stopped immediately and lowered the flashlight so it wasn't in her face.

"Hey," I said softly. "I'm not going to hurt you."

She didn't answer. Her eyes darted past me, to the trees and the dark, calculating how fast she could run. I knew that look. It was the look of someone who had been chased before.

"My name's Ethan," I tried. "Ethan Blackwood. This is Stormcrest territory. You're at our northern border." I crouched down slowly, keeping my hands visible and my movements small. "You're safe here. I promise."

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