Pregnant by My Enemy Mate

I smelled her perfume before I even opened the door.

It was that jasmine-and-vanilla thing Serena always wore, the kind that clung to fabric and skin and stayed long after she was gone. I'd always liked it before. Standing in the hallway outside Lucian's bedroom, my hand still on the doorknob, I thought: that's the detail I'll remember. Not what I saw. The smell.

They didn't hear me come in. The door had swung open on its own — Lucian never fixed the latch, and I'd stopped asking him to — and for a moment I just stood there in the light from the hallway, looking at the two of them, and the only thing I felt was a strange, hollow quiet. Like the second after a glass hits the floor, before the sound catches up.

Lucian saw me first. His face did something complicated. Serena turned her head, and her expression settled almost immediately into something soft and regretful, like she'd been rehearsing it.

I looked at them both for exactly as long as it took to understand what I was seeing. Then I turned around and walked back out.

I didn't slam the door. I didn't say a word. I just walked down the hallway and out of the pack house and into the cool night air, and I kept walking until the sound of the bonfire reached me through the trees.

The whole pack was there. That was the thing about Silverfang bonfires — everyone came. Families, warriors, pups running between legs. I'd grown up at these fires. I knew every face in the circle.

I was still standing at the edge of the tree line when Lucian appeared. He'd dressed. He'd actually stopped to put on a clean shirt. I watched him move through the crowd toward the fire's center, and I thought: he's going to do it here. In front of all of them.

I was right.

His voice carried the way an Alpha's voice always does — not loud, exactly, but with a weight that made people go still. "I, Lucian Knight, Beta of the Silverfang Pack, reject you, Avery Mills, as my mate."

The words hit me like a fist to the sternum. That's the only way I can describe it — a physical impact, a tearing sensation deep in my chest, like something that had been woven into me for seven years was being ripped out by the root. My knees wanted to buckle. I didn't let them.

I was aware of faces turning toward me. I was aware of Serena stepping up beside Lucian, her expression arranged into something that looked almost like sorrow. I was aware of the fire crackling and a child somewhere starting to cry, startled by the sudden silence.

I shifted.

It wasn't a decision. My wolf just took over, the way she does when the human part of me runs out of options, and then I was running — four paws on cold ground, the forest