Rejected and Pregnant I Fled The Pack novel Chapter 5

Evelyn pov

I don't know how long I laid in that bed after Damon left, staring at the same water stain on my ceiling, before my body finally forced me into motion. Hunger, maybe, though nothing about my stomach felt like it wanted food. Or maybe it was just the desperate need to feel something other than the hollow, aching stillness that had settled into my bones since the night before.

I peeled myself off the mattress and stood under the shower until the water ran cold, scrubbing at my skin like I could somehow wash away the memory clinging to it—Marissa's laugh, Damon's bare back, the particular scent of betrayal that seemed to have worked its way into my very pores. It didn't work, of course. Some things don't rinse off. But at least when I stepped out, dressed in clean clothes with my hair still damp, I looked marginally more human than I had a few hours before.

My stomach growled, hollow and insistent, reminding me I hadn't eaten anything since the night before the ceremony. I told myself I could do this—walk to the pack kitchens, grab something quick, retreat back to my room before anyone had the chance to look at me with pity or, worse, satisfaction. I braced myself and opened my door.

Marissa was standing right outside it.

For one absurd moment I actually thought I might have summoned her through sheer bad luck, some cruel cosmic joke determined to make this day worse than the one before it. She stood there in the hallway, arms crossed, looking entirely too put-together for someone who'd been caught in another woman's mate's bed less than twenty-four hours earlier. Her hair was perfectly styled. Her clothes were pressed. She looked, infuriatingly, like nothing at all had happened.

"Oh good, you're alive," she said, and there was no warmth in it, no trace of the girl who used to braid flowers into my hair when we were children. "I was starting to wonder if you'd just wither away in there dramatically."

I stared at her, genuinely stunned into silence for a moment. Of everything I'd braced myself for—apologies, excuses, even more of Damon's tired justifications—I hadn't prepared myself for outright cruelty. Not from her. Not after everything.

"Marissa—"

"What?" She tilted her head, something sharp and unkind flashing behind her eyes. "Are you going to cry again? Beg me to explain myself? Honestly, Evelyn, I thought you'd handle this with a little more dignity."

"Dignity." The word came out of me like a laugh with no humor in it at all. "You slept with my mate the night after he marked me, and you're lecturing me about dignity?"

"I didn't force him into anything." She examined her nails like this conversation bored her, like my entire shattered world was simply an inconvenience interrupting her morning. "He came to me plenty willingly, if you must know. Has for weeks, actually. I don't know what you expected, marrying an alpha and thinking you'd be enough to satisfy him all on your own."

Something in my chest went white-hot.

"Weeks," I repeated quietly.

She must have realized her mistake a half-second too late, because something flickered across her face—not quite regret, but close to it. Not close enough.

"That's not the point," she said quickly.

"That's exactly the point." My voice was shaking now, but not with the same grief that had wrecked me the night before. This was different. This was fury, clean and consuming, burning away the fog of heartbreak I'd been drowning in since I'd run from that bedroom. "You've been sleeping with him for *weeks*. While I planned our mating ceremony. While I stood beside my best friend and asked her to help me pick out what I'd wear the night he marked me."

"Don't act so innocent." Marissa's own composure cracked slightly, something defensive creeping into her tone. "You know how alphas are, Evelyn. Everyone in this pack knows it. I don't understand why you're acting so shocked that—"

The sound of my hand connecting with her face cracked through the hallway like a gunshot.

I didn't fully register deciding to do it. One moment she was standing there, smug and dismissive, dissecting my heartbreak like it was some minor overreaction on my part, and the next my palm had already made contact, hard enough that she stumbled sideways and lost her footing entirely, landing hard against the hallway floor.

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