When My Alpha Rejected Me for Bearing No Heir

I almost didn't go.

Melissa had been on me for two weeks about the iron supplements — *Grace, you look pale, Grace, you need to eat more red meat, Grace, just go pick up the prescription* — and on a grey Tuesday morning I finally ran out of excuses. The healer's clinic was a twelve-minute drive from the pack house. I told myself I'd be in and out before nine.

I parked in the small lot off the clinic's main entrance, cut the engine, and reached for my bag.

That's when I saw them.

Nolan was at the side entrance, maybe forty feet from where I sat. He had one hand pressed against the small of Ava Burns's back — gently, carefully, the way you handle something precious — and his other hand was flat against her belly. She was enormous. Seven months, at least. She tilted her face up and laughed at something he murmured into her hair, and he smiled down at her with an expression I had not seen on his face in over a year.

I did not move.

I sat behind the windshield and watched him guide her through the side door, his hand never leaving her back until the door swung shut between them and the grey morning went quiet again.

I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the engine to cool. Long enough for the first fat drops of rain to hit the windshield and slide down in slow, crooked lines.

Then I started the car and drove.

Three blocks from the clinic I pulled over on a street I didn't recognize and pressed my thumb hard against the inside of my wrist. Bone-deep. I pressed until the ache was the only thing I could feel, and I held it there and breathed.

A year. Minimum. She was seven months along, and Ava Burns did not strike me as the kind of woman who waited to confirm a pregnancy before she used it. Which meant this had been going on for at least a year. Probably longer. And I had prepared his desk every night. Fed his dog. Made his coffee. Stood beside him at three separate allied pack gatherings and smiled in the photographs.

I picked up my phone and called Melissa.

She answered on the second ring. "Gray. What's wrong?"

I heard my own voice come out flat and clean, the way it gets when I have decided not to feel something yet. "Nolan and Ava have been together for a year. She's seven months pregnant. I need the best pack attorney in three territories by Friday."

There was a half-second pause — not surprise, I realized. More like confirmation of something she had been quietly suspecting. "Already pulling the name up," she said. The tap of her keyboard came through the line. "Don't make coffee yet. I'm on my way."

She arrived at the pack house fifty minutes later with a tote bag over one shoulder