Rejected and Pregnant I Fled The Pack novel Chapter 24

Chapter 24

Damon pov

I was three hours into a stack of paperwork my father had left on my desk that morning- supply reports, territory disputes, the endless bureaucratic grind of pack administration that had somehow become my entire life over the last eight months-when the pain hit.

It came without warning, tearing through the bond so suddenly and so violently that I dropped the pen I’d been holding, my whole body going rigid in my chair. Not emotional pain, not the faint echoes of grief or distance I’d grown accustomed to feeling from Evelyn’s side over the months. Physical. Raw. Overwhelming in a way that made my own breath catch, my hands gripping the edge of the desk as some distant, instinctive part of me understood immediately what it meant.

*She’s in labor.*

I stood so fast my chair toppled backward, clattering against the floor, and for a moment I just stood there, frozen, feeling the pain pulse through the connection in waves, feeling something else underneath it too-fear. Her fear, sharp and unmistakable, threading through the physical agony like a live wire.

The bond hadn’t been this open in months. She’d kept it so carefully shut, so deliberately smothered, that I’d started to genuinely wonder if she’d found some way to sever it entirely. Feeling it flare open now, raw and unguarded, hit me with a strange, disorienting mix of relief and dread-relief that some part of the connection between us still existed strong enough to break through her walls, dread at exactly what that meant was happening to her, wherever she was, completely alone.

My office door burst open before I could fully process any of it. My beta, Callum, stood in the doorway, breathing hard like he’d run the entire way from wherever he’d been.

“Alpha.” His voice was tight, urgent. “You need to come. Now.”

Г

“I felt it.” I was already moving, grabbing my jacket off the back of the chair, my mind racing through logistics I hadn’t fully worked out yet-which trackers were closest to our last known lead, how fast I could actually mobilize, whether I even had a real location or just another dead end to chase. “Evelyn’s in labor. I need the tracker reports, everything we have on her last

known-”

“That’s not ” Callum stopped, something complicated crossing his face. “Alpha, there’s something else. Marissa’s gone.”

I froze halfway to the door. “What do you mean, gone?”

“She left sometime last night. Took her things. Nobody’s seen her since.” He hesitated, and I could tell there was more, could see it sitting heavy behind his eyes. “Your mother’s gone too.

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Left a note. She’s with her.”

The words landed strangely, disorienting on top of everything else already flooding through my system. My mother, who had spent the better part of two decades quietly enduring my father’s rotation of companions, who I’d assumed had long since resigned herself to a life of dutiful, silent suffering within these pack walls, had simply–left. With Marissa.

“Where,” I said, though even as I asked it, some deeper, more urgent instinct was already pulling my focus back toward the bond, back toward the pain still pulsing steadily through the connection, growing sharper with every passing minute.

“We don’t know yet. The note wasn’t specific.” Callum’s expression shifted, something almost gentle in it now, an acknowledgment of exactly how much was colliding at once. “Alpha, I think you need to decide right now what matters most, because I don’t think you can chase both at the same time.”

He was right, and some clear, cutting part of my mind understood it immediately, cutting through the disorientation like a blade. My mother was an adult, capable of making her own choices, and whatever had driven her to finally leave alongside Marissa-guilt, solidarity, some quiet reckoning of her own I hadn’t been paying enough attention to notice building-it wasn’t a crisis requiring my immediate intervention. She’d endured decades under father’s

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