After His Pup Ended My Pregnancy, He Locked Me Away

My name is Ellie Watson. I am twenty-two years old. I am a wolfless Omega from the Greymist Pack, which means in my world I am almost nothing at all.

That night at the Shadowvale banquet, I was carrying a tray of champagne flutes and counting the steps from the kitchen to the long oak tables. Twelve steps. I'd counted them three times already. Counting kept my hands steady. I was the only Greymist Omega they sent to serve. The ranked wolves stood in another room, talking pack business. I belonged with the glasses.

I was wearing the plain black dress they gave me at the door. My hair was pinned up. I had been told not to speak unless a guest spoke first. That was fine. No one ever did.

Then the scent hit me.

It was dark cedar and woodsmoke and something deeper underneath, something warm. It rolled across the hall like heat from an open oven. I stopped walking. The tray shook in my hands and one of the glasses tipped and spilled onto the white linen and I did not move to fix it.

I had read about this. Every wolfless girl reads about this. The scent that finds you across a crowded room. The Moon Goddess, finally remembering your name.

I looked up.

He was already looking at me.

I knew who he was. Everyone knew who he was. Alpha Alistair Vane of Shadowvale, tall, dark-haired, jaw cut sharp, the kind of man who walked into rooms and changed the temperature in them. He was on the far side of the hall, surrounded by other Alphas, mid-sentence with someone important. He stopped mid-sentence. He set down his glass.

He crossed the floor.

The whole hall noticed. People stepped aside without being asked. I could not move. I could not breathe. I pressed my thumbnail into my palm so hard I felt the skin split.

He stopped in front of me. He was so close I could feel the heat off his chest. He looked down at me like he was reading a sentence he had been waiting his whole life to read.

"Mate," he said.

The word landed in the hall like a struck bell.

I heard a glass shatter somewhere. Someone gasped. My Beta, Dara Whitfield, was suddenly at my elbow, her hand light on my back, her voice very low. "Ellie. Ellie, breathe."

I couldn't. The scent was filling my whole chest. I had spent twenty-two years being passed over by the goddess and now she was here, here, in dark cedar and smoke, in a man who was looking at me like I mattered.

Alistair held out his hand.

"Do you accept?" he asked. Quiet. Just for me.

I said yes.

I said yes before I had time to wonder why.

He marked me four days later. The bite was clean and quick and I cried into his shoulder afterward, not from pain, from gratitude. I moved into the Shadowvale Luna suite