Rejected and Pregnant I Fled The Pack (Evelyn and Damon) novel Chapter 280

Ethan pov

Two days after I found her, Marissa came down for dinner on her own.

It was a small thing, but I'd been counting. The first morning she ate eggs at the counter with her shoulders up around her ears. The second day she took her meals upstairs and left the empty trays outside her door, neatly stacked, as if she were afraid of leaving a mess. Tonight she walked into the dining room in my old hoodie, with her hair braided over one shoulder, and took the seat at the end of the long table nearest the exit.

My mother, who had been told in no uncertain terms not to crowd her, nodded once and passed the bread without a word. I could have kissed her for it.

"The potatoes are good," Marissa said to no one in particular.

"My grandmother's recipe," said my little cousin Pip, who was nine and had no concept of tact. "Are you Ethan's girlfriend?"

"Pip," my mother said.

"She smells like him."

"*Pip.*"

Marissa went pink to the tips of her ears, but the corner of her mouth twitched. "I'm just a guest," she said. "He loaned me a hoodie."

"That's his favorite hoodie," Pip said, with the gravity of a judge handing down a sentence.

I coughed into my water glass. Across the table, my mother was studying the ceiling with enormous interest, and Marissa laughed. It was a short, startled laugh, rusty from disuse, and every head at the table turned toward it before pretending they hadn't.

I held onto that sound.

I was in the middle of saying something unimportant about the garden when my phone buzzed against my thigh. I ignored it. It buzzed again, and then a third time, the rapid pattern I'd assigned to exactly one contact.

I glanced down under the table's edge.

*Alpha, it's Tomas at the north gate. A black SUV and a sedan just pulled up outside the border line. Man and woman, mid-fifties, plus two men who stayed in the vehicle. The man says his name is Daniel Dawn. He's asking for his daughter. What do you want us to do?*

My father had left that morning for a three-day council meeting with the regional packs. He'd handed me the pack phone at the door and said *You're in charge until Friday* in the tone of a man who expected me to be bored. The warriors had been calling me Alpha all day, half joking and half not.

I wasn't bored now.

Every muscle in my body locked. My wolf surged up hard enough that I felt my canines press against my gums, and a low growl started in my chest before I could stop it. I turned it into a cough and reached for my glass.

Marissa was watching me.

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