Rejected and Pregnant I Fled The Pack novel Chapter 22

Chapter 22

Evelyn pov

The contractions started just after midnight, low and dull at first, easy enough to dismiss as the same Braxton Hicks tightening K’d been feeling on and off for the last few weeks. I lay in the dark of my small apartment above the diner, one hand pressed against my stomach, breathing through it, telling myself it would pass the way the others had.

By two in the morning, I understood it wasn’t going to pass.

The pain came in earnest now, sharper, closer together, and somewhere beneath the physical intensity of it, a different kind of fear began creeping in-one that had nothing to do with the labor itself and everything to do with what I knew instinctively might happen because of it.

*The bond.*

I’d spent eight months building walls around it, smothering every instinct that wanted to reach back toward Damon, keeping my end of the connection as quiet and unresponsive as I possibly could. It had worked, mostly. The faint pulses I still occasionally felt from his side had grown fainter over the months, and I’d let myself believe, in my more hopeful moments, that maybe he was finally starting to let go.

But labor was different. I didn’t know exactly how mate bonds worked during childbirth-I’d never had cause to learn something so specific but some deep, instinctive part of me understood that whatever careful control I’d maintained over the connection for eight months was about to be tested in a way I had no way of preparing for. Pain like this, fear like this, the visceral, overwhelming intensity of bringing a child into the world-it would strip away my defenses whether I wanted it to or not. Bonds reached for each other hardest in moments of extremity, and I couldn’t imagine anything more extreme than this.

If he felt it—if he felt me now, raw and unguarded and in pain—he would know exactly where to start looking. And if my walls came down even for a moment during the hours ahead, if the sheer physical intensity of labor pulled something through the connection I couldn’t control, he might do more than just start looking.

He might actually find me.

I gripped the edge of my bed through another contraction, breathing hard, trying to keep my mind clear enough to think through the fear instead of simply drowning in it. I’d made a plan for this, back when I first started showing, back when the reality of giving birth alone in a town with no pack support first settled in as something I needed to actually prepare for rather than simply survive emotionally. I had a bag packed by the door, ready for the drive to the small human hospital twenty minutes outside town. I had Pete’s number programmed for exactly this scenario, since he’d insisted months ago that I have someone who could get me there quickly if it happened in the middle of the night.

1/2

+15 Bonus

What I didn’t have was any plan at all for what came after, if the bond betrayed my location in the middle of it.

*If he comes, I can’t run with a newborn.*

The thought hit me with a fresh wave of panic that had nothing to do with the physical pain radiating through my lower back. I’d built an entire identity around the ability to run if I needed to-car gassed, savings accessible, always some quiet awareness in the back of my mind of how quickly I could leave if Damon’s search ever got too close. But that calculation had always assumed I’d be running alone, or at most, heavily pregnant but still mobile.

A newborn changed everything. I couldn’t throw a duffel bag over my shoulder and drive through the night with an infant days old, couldn’t manage the kind of frantic, evasive movement that had kept me hidden for eight months. If Damon showed up here in the days immediately following birth, exhausted and vulnerable and utterly unprepared to defend myself the way I might have been able to months ago, I wouldn’t have the option of simply disappearing again.

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