Rejected and Pregnant I Fled The Pack novel Chapter 9

Chapter 9

“Then don’t.” She threw the duffel bag into the passenger seat, refusing to look at me now, her jaw tight. “It’s simple, Damon. Don’t reject me. I’m not asking you to. I’m leaving either way. What you do with the bond is entirely up to you.”

“You’re really going to just walk away.” My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated how many pack members were witnessing this, hated the pitying, scandalized looks I could feel from every direction. “After everything. After the ceremony, after the mark, after all of it, you’re just going to get in a car and drive away like none of it mattered.”

She finally turned to look at me again, and something in her expression shifted-not softer, but sadder somehow, like she was looking at someone she used to know rather than the man she’d bonded herself to two days earlier.

“It mattered,” she said quietly, though her voice still carried in the silence of the gathered crowd. “That’s exactly why I can’t stay. Because it mattered, and you threw it away for someone who’s been sneaking into your bed for weeks, and then you had the audacity to defend her over me. Twice.”

“I made a mistake.”

“You made several.” She climbed into the driver’s seat, one hand on the door, ready to pull it shut. “And now I’m making mine. I’m choosing myself, Damon. For the first time since I agreed to be your mate, I’m choosing myself over this pack, over you, over whatever I thought this bond was supposed to mean.

“You’re pregnant.”

The words weren’t true-not that I knew of, not yet, not that either of us had any way of confirming in that moment-but something in me blurted them out anyway, some desperate, grasping attempt to give her a reason to stay, to manufacture a tether when every real one had already snapped.

Evelyn went very still.

“What did you just say?”

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