Rejected and Pregnant I Fled The Pack novel Chapter 55

Chapter 55

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Chapter 55

Damon pov

I pushed open the office door and stopped short in the doorway.

My father sat on the leather couch against the far wall, a drink in one hand, ice long since melted, judging by how. loosely he held the glass. Old photographs were spread across the low table in front of him – pack photos, decades old from the look of the faded color, my mother young and smiling in most of them, myself as a boy in a few others.

He looked up as I entered, and whatever composure he usually wore had fully cracked apart, replaced by something raw and furious in equal measure.

“Do you know what these are,” he said, not really a question, his voice thick in a way I didn’t immediately recognize.

“I don’t know what you’re doing with old photographs, no.” I moved toward my desk, keeping my distance deliberately. “I didn’t come here to look through family albums with you.”

“Thirty-two years.” He picked one up, studied it a moment, then set it back down with exaggerated care. “Thirty- two years since this one. Your mother, before either of us knew what this life would actually cost her.” He looked up at me, something bitter and wounded flickering behind his eyes. “She left, Damon. Really left. Filed formal separation papers this morning. Did you know that?”

I hadn’t. Something in my chest tightened, surprised despite everything that had already unfolded over the past two days. “No. I didn’t know that.”

“Of course you didn’t. She didn’t call her own son to tell him. She called a solicitor instead.” He drained the rest of his glass, setting it down harder than necessary. “Thirty years, and this is what I’m left with. A wife who won’t speak to me. A son who dismantled my standing in front of the entire council. A pack quietly wondering if I’ve lost my grip entirely.”

“You’re not going to make me responsible for choices you made over three decades,” I said carefully, staying near my desk, watching him with wary attention. “Mom leaving isn’t about yesterday’s council session. It’s about everything that came before it.”

“Everything that came before it was tradition,” he snapped, though the fury in his voice had less conviction behind it now than it had in the hallway yesterday, something more exhausted and genuinely wounded bleeding through instead. “The same tradition my father practiced and his father before him. I never once believed I was doing anything except exactly what was expected of me.”

“Maybe that’s the actual problem,” I said quietly. “Never once questioning whether what was expected of you was right in the first place.”

He was quiet for a long moment, staring down at the old photograph still in his hand my mother, young, genuinely smiling in a way I realized, with some discomfort, that I hadn’t actually seen in years.

“I don’t know how to be anything else,” he said finally, so quietly I almost missed it. “Thirty years of one way of leading, Damon. I don’t know how to simply become something different because a council ruled against me once.

For one brief, strange moment, something like sympathy moved through me, looking at him sitting there surrounded by old photographs, genuinely lost in a way I’d never witnessed from him before.

“You could start by actually talking to Mom,” I said. “Not demanding she come back. Actually, I asked her what

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Chapter 55

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she needed all these years that she never got.”

“She won’t speak to me.” I sighed. He caused all of this bullshit and I fell into line with him. I lost my mate for months because I believed his crazy bullshit. Keep a side piece, he always said as I was growing up. He always said mates give us kids, but side pieces give us hot sex. He loved being able to choose whoever made him hard. I did the worst by choosing Marissa, my mate’s best friend. She came willingly, and I hate myself for that.

“Then maybe that tells you something, too.” He huffed as he sat the glass down carefully. He kept staring at my mom, and I knew somewhere inside him he missed her.

He looked up at me, something flickering behind his tired eyes that might have been the first real consideration he’d given that idea. I didn’t know if it would actually change anything – thirty years of patterns rarely unwound from a single conversation, however honest.

“Evelyn’s back,” I said, watching him carefully for his reaction. “She’s staying, for now. I need you to understand that whatever’s happening with Mom, whatever you’re feeling right now, none of it changes what the council ruled yesterday.”

Something in his expression hardened again, old defensiveness reasserting itself even through the exhaustion. “I heard she’s already being fed sympathy from half the pack elders.” I sighed again.

“She’s being given a fair hearing,” I corrected. “Something you could try extending yourself if you actually want any of this to get easier.” He looked at me, and I saw disgust in his eyes.

“It worked until your mate decided to explode it all. This tradition worked well, and now it is ruined, “he muttered with disgust.

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