Rejected and Pregnant I Fled The Pack (Evelyn and Damon) novel Chapter 276

Marissa pov

The lock clicked, and for the first time in three days I let myself breathe.

I stood in the middle of the guest room with Ethan Criss's jacket hanging off my shoulders, dripping rainwater onto a floor that looked far too clean for me. There was a bed with a real quilt, a lamp with a warm yellow shade, and a window with curtains. It was an ordinary room, and it was the safest place I'd stood in years.

My legs gave out. I slid down the door until I was sitting on the floor with my knees pulled up and my face pressed into the collar of his jacket. It smelled like cedar and rain and something warm underneath that my wolf couldn't stop leaning toward.

*Mate,* she whispered. She hadn't spoken so clearly in days, not since the bus station.

*Not now,* I told her. *We can't.*

*Mate,* she said again, softer, and she curled up inside me like she was finally resting.

I pressed my fist against my mouth and shook.

I hadn't planned any of this. I'd planned to find the border of a pack that took in runaways, ask for sanctuary, and disappear into whatever corner of Stormcrest they'd give me. I'd heard the rumor in a diner two states away, from a waitress who noticed my wrists and slid an extra roll across the counter without a word. *Cross pack doesn't send people back,* she'd said quietly. *Not if they're running from something real.*

I hadn't planned on a mate. Mates were for girls whose parents hadn't already sold them.

My father called it an arrangement. That was the word he used at dinner, in the same tone he used for a new business contract. Garrett Voss, forty-six, owner of half the lumber contracts in three counties, wanted a wife. The Voss family had money and mine had debts, and I was the only asset my parents had left that anyone wanted to buy.

"He's very generous," my mother had said, not looking up from her plate. "You'll want for nothing."

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