Rejected and Pregnant I Fled The Pack novel Chapter 35

Chapter 35

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Chapter 35

Grace pov

I’d just finished my first real shower since Willow was born-Pete’s wife had brought me a change of clothes the day before, and something about finally washing away the last twenty-four hours of sweat and exhaustion had felt like the first genuinely normal thing I’d done in days. I was sitting up in bed, hair still damp, Willow sleeping* in the bassinet beside me, when my phone lit up with an unfamiliar number.

I almost didn’t answer. Almost let it ring through to voicemail the way I had with every unfamiliar number over the past eight months, some deep instinctive caution refusing to fully relax even now. But something made me pick up, some tired, worn-down curiosity outweighing the caution for once.

I wished immediately that I hadn’t.

“You have no idea what you’ve done to me.” Marissa’s voice came through sharp and furious before I’d even managed a full hello, no greeting, no preamble, just pure unfiltered rage pouring through the line. “Do you understand what my life looks like right now because of you?”

“Marissa-”

“No, don’t.” Her voice cracked, somewhere between fury and something rawer underneath it. “Don’t act confused. Damon’s father is threatening to have me formally declared unfit. Enforcers showed up at his cabin door yesterday. I’m hiding out in the middle of nowhere with his mother, pregnant, alone, because everything fell apart the second you decided to run off and turn this into some pack-wide scandal.”

I stared at the phone, disbelief and old, exhausted anger both rising up at once. “I turned this into a scandal? Marissa, you slept with my mate the night after he marked me. I didn’t create this. I just refused to stay quiet about it.”

“You could have handled it privately.” Her voice rose further, sharp enough that I pulled the phone slightly away from my ear. “Instead you ran off dramatically, made us all look like villains, and now I’m the one paying for it. My whole life is unraveling because you couldn’t just accept things the way every other Luna before you has accepted them.”

Somewhere in the background on her end, I heard it-a baby crying, thin and distant but unmistakable, followed by the low, soothing murmur of an older woman’s voice. Damon’s mother, I realized, trying to calm what could only be Marissa’s own child.

Something in me went very still.

“Marissa,” I said slowly, cutting through her rising tirade. “Is that your baby crying?”

The line went quiet for a moment, some of her fury faltering. “Yes. She’s colicky. Won’t settle unless someone’s walking her around constantly.”

I sat with that for a moment, feeling something complicated shift in my chest-not sympathy exactly, I didn’t have room left for that toward her, not after everything. But something adjacent to it. Some old, worn-down memory of the girl who used to hold my hand through nightmares, now somewhere far from home, exhausted and frightened with a newborn of her own.

“I’m sorry things are hard for you right now,” I said finally, meaning it in the narrow, limited way I actually could. “But I’m not sorry I left, Marissa. And I’m definitely not going to sit here and let you tell me my leaving is what ruined your life. You did that yourself, the moment you decided sleeping with someone else’s mate was something you were entitled to.”

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Chapter 35

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“I loved him first.” Her voice cracked fully now, tears audible beneath the anger. “Before you ever even met him. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“No,” I said simply, surprising myself with how steady the word came out. “It doesn’t. Loving someone doesn’t give you the right to destroy what they built with somebody else. You knew he’d marked me. You knew what that meant. And you did it anyway, and then you stood outside my door the next morning and laughed at me for being upset about it.”

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