Rejected and Pregnant I Fled The Pack novel Chapter 1

Rejected and Pregnant: I Left The Pack

Chapter 1

Evelyn pov

The scent hit me before I even opened the door.

Sweat. Sex. And underneath it, unmistakably, Marissa's perfume—the same jasmine and vanilla she'd worn since we were sixteen, sneaking bottles of it from her mother's vanity while we giggled about boys we'd never actually talk to.

I stood in the hallway outside Damon's room, my hand frozen on the doorframe, and told myself I was wrong. Wolves could be wrong about scents. Grief could confuse a nose. Anything, anything but this.

Then I heard her laugh—that low, satisfied laugh I'd known since childhood—and I knew I wasn't wrong at all.

I should have turned around. Some small, self-preserving part of me screamed to walk away, to pretend I'd never come up those stairs, to keep the mark on my neck sacred for one more night at least. But my hand was already pushing the door open, because some other part of me, the part that still believed in what we'd promised each other twenty-four hours ago, needed to see it wasn't true.

It was true.

Damon's bare back was to me, Marissa's legs wrapped around his waist, her head thrown back against his pillows—the same pillows I'd slept beside just last night while he traced the fresh mark on my neck and whispered that I was his, that he'd never wanted anyone the way he wanted me. Her eyes opened first. They found me over his shoulder, and for one suspended second, she didn't even look ashamed. She looked almost bored, like I'd interrupted something mundane.

"Damon." My own voice sounded like it belonged to someone else, thin and far away.

He turned. And here was the thing I would replay in my mind a thousand times in the months to come—he didn't scramble for the sheets, didn't shove her away in horror, didn't do any of the things a man does when he's been caught doing something unforgivable. He just looked at me with something close to irritation, like I was the inconvenience in this scene.

"Evelyn." He said my name flatly, no apology in it. "You should probably knock."

The absurdity of it, the sheer audacity, knocked whatever breath I had left right out of my chest. I looked at the mark on his own neck, the one I'd given him barely a day ago, still raised and dark against his skin, still humming faintly with the bond that connected us. I could feel it right now—not love, not warmth, but something colder. Satisfaction. He was pleased with himself.

"We mated last night," I said, and I hated that my voice cracked on the word *mated*, hated that even now some pathetic piece of me was waiting for him to say this was a mistake, a terrible misunderstanding, anything. "We marked each other. You told me I was your world."

Marissa had the decency, finally, to pull the sheet up over herself, though she made no move to leave the bed. Damon exhaled like I was the one being unreasonable.

"You had to see this coming, Evelyn." He said it so simply, so matter-of-factly, that for a moment I genuinely didn't understand the words. "You knew what I was before you agreed to this. Alphas don't stay tied to one wolf. It's not natural. Marissa understands that. I thought you would too, eventually."

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