Rejected and Pregnant I Fled The Pack novel Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Evelyn pov

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I felt her kick for the first time on a Tuesday morning, a small, insistent flutter low in my belly while I was pulling a tray of muffins out of the oven, and for one bright, uncomplicated moment, I forgot to be afraid of anything at all.

The moment didn’t last.

I was seven months along now, my body changing in ways that made the physical work of running the diner harder with each passing week-harder to stand at the counter for full shifts, harder to bend down and restock the lower shelves, harder to ignore the ache in my lower back by the end of a long day. Pete had taken to hovering more than usual, gruffly insisting he handle the heavier lifting, and I’d started hiring on a part-time server, a sweet local girl named Josie, mostly because I could no longer pretend I could run the place entirely alone.

The diner itself had been open two months now, and it was doing better than I’d let myself hope-regulars filtering in every morning for coffee and eggs, a handful of the same faces every evening for the meatloaf special I’d perfected after weeks of trial and error. It was mine, built entirely from nothing, and some days that alone was enough to keep the fear at bay.

Other days, it wasn’t.

The message had come through an old pack contact three days ago-a wolf named Reeves who’d grown up alongside me and had quietly, carefully, kept in touch after I left, one of the only people from my old life I still trusted enough to answer when he reached out. He’d found me a month earlier through channels I didn’t fully understand and hadn’t asked him to explain, and I’d made him swear, again and again, not to tell anyone else where I was.

*Damon’s looking for you,* his message had read. *Hard. Trackers in three counties now. He says he wants you home.*

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I’d read that message a dozen times since, feeling the same cold spike of fear each time.

*He wants his pup, I thought, standing at the diner counter with my hand pressed instinctively against the curve of my stomach, feeling my daughter shift restlessly beneath my palm. That was the part that scared me most-not Damon’s desperate texts from months ago, not even the faint pull I still occasionally felt through the bond late at night. It was the knowledge that whatever he wanted from me now, it was tangled up entirely with the fact that I was carrying his heir, and alphas didn’t easily let go of things they considered rightfully theirs.

I didn’t know if he wanted me back because he genuinely regretted what he’d done, or because pack law and legacy demanded an heir raised within pack walls, trained under pack tradition, and I was simply the vehicle that made that possible. I told myself it didn’t matter which it

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Char

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was. Either way, the answer was the same.

I wasn’t going back

Reeves’s second message had come through yesterday, and this one had stopped me cold in a different way entirely.

*You should know something else,* he’d written. *Marissa’s pregnant too. Word around the pack is it happened around the same time as you and Damon. But my source says the timing doesn’t add up right. Says the baby can’t be his.*

I’d stared at that message for a long time, sitting alone in my small apartment above the diner, feeling a strange, complicated tangle of emotions I hadn’t expected. Not jealousy, exactly-I’d worked hard over the last several months to strip away whatever remained of my feelings for Damon, and mostly I’d succeeded, mostly what was left when I thought of him now was a tired, distant kind of anger rather than anything resembling love. But something in the news still unsettled me.

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