His Rejected Omega, His Fated White Wolf

I stood in the Alpha's bedroom, trembling as I touched the healer's note hidden in my sleeve.

After three years of waiting, I was finally pregnant with my mate's pup.

But when Lucius walked in, his eyes were as cold as river stones. He threw a parchment onto the table.

"Sign it. The Eastern Estate and the gold are yours."

It was a contract to break our mating bond. He was rejecting me to marry Rosalind, the so-called prophesied Luna.

I was immediately cast out of the castle. The pack mocked me as a discarded stray, and Rosalind's followers even smashed my parents' graves with iron hammers.

Hiding in a freezing safehouse, I held my flat belly in despair.

I couldn't understand. Eight years ago, I saved him from a rain-slicked alley. He had cried into my neck, swearing to protect me for all his days.

Why did he suddenly turn so cruel? Why did he publicly abandon me, yet secretly threaten his new Luna with a brutal death if she ever dared to harm me?

Until I found a hidden ancient text and saw the terrifying truth: The Mate Blood Curse.

If he completed our bond, my unborn child and I would die in a river of blood.

He didn't betray me. He shattered my heart to save my life, and now he was marching into the rogue lands to sacrifice his own soul to break the curse forever.

Wiping my tears, the dormant, ancient power in my veins suddenly snapped taut. I am the White Wolf, and I will take back my pack and wait for my Alpha to come home.

Chapter 1

Evelyn POV:

I stood in the center of the master bedroom in the Alpha's castle. The heavy stone walls, usually a source of warmth, seemed to radiate a deep cold that worked its way through the pile of my velvet dress.

My fingers trembled, brushing against the stiff edge of the parchment concealed in my sleeve. The pack healer's note. A secret I had held for mere hours. I was pregnant. After three years of waiting, I carried the pup of the man I loved.

The groan of rusted brass hinges cut through the silence, and a draft, sharp with the scent of pine from the corridor, gusted into the chamber. Lucius walked in.

The frost of the outer pinewoods clung to his greatcoat; its cold, hard scent was an invisible wall that seemed to halt the very air between us. His jaw was a line of granite. His dark eyes-which I was accustomed to seeing burn for me-were vacant, like polished river stones. Something was wrong. Deeply, fundamentally wrong. I had seen him return from border wars with more warmth in his gaze.

He crossed to the great table of carved mahogany and set down a roll of parchment, its weight making a dull thud upon the wood. He did not unroll it, but pushed it across the polished surface toward me.

"Sign it." The words were gravel in his throat, stripped of the warmth I had known for years.

I took a hesitant step forward. The black script was stark against the vellum. It was a contract to break our mating bond.

It was as if a fist had closed around my lungs, squeezing the breath from them.

"The Eastern Estate will be yours," Lucius stated, his gaze fixed on some point beyond my shoulder. "And sufficient gold to ensure you want for nothing. You will have no need to labor again."

I opened my mouth, but my throat had closed. Before any question could form, a searing white light ignited behind my eyes. The Oracle-the damnable, rare foresight in my bloodline-surged.

I did not see the vision so much as I was plunged into it: a torrent of images forcing its way past my defenses. I stood alone in a freezing downpour, a slick of blood on my inner thighs as the life within me slipped away. Then, the walls of a dungeon, cold and sweating stone; the bite of silver manacles as they closed upon my wrists, the burn sinking to the bone. And beneath it all, a sound I could not place-a low, rhythmic chanting in a language that tasted of rot.

The vision receded, leaving me gasping for air. My fingers dug into the carved lip of the table, the knuckles straining white against my skin. Across from me, Lucius stood rigid, his own hands clenched into fists at his sides, watching my collapse. His expression did not shift to concern. It hardened further, as if my pain confirmed some terrible calculation he had already made.

Eight years. The memory surfaced, unbidden-of finding him, a starving rogue in a rain-slicked alley, and buying his life from the pack guards. Of the devotion he swore, which I had mistaken for the unbreakable tie the Goddess was said to forge. The vision, however, had shown me the truth of his intent. He was going to abandon me.

My hand, which had been protectively near my sleeve, fell away. The healer's note felt like a hot coal against my skin. I would never tell him about my pup. I had to protect my baby.

I drew myself up, summoning the last vestiges of the pride of my ruined house.

"I, Lucius," he suddenly spoke, the formal words of the rite catching in his throat, a tremor running through them, "reject you, Evelyn, as my mate and my Luna."

In the space between one heartbeat and the next, a deep thrumming ache began along my spine-the spiritual cord that bound us, now stretched taut and singing with a terrible friction, as if it were being frayed, thread by thread.

Lucius took a half-step forward, his hand outstretched. "Evelyn, read the terms first. I have seen to your protection-"

I slapped his hand away. Where our skin met, there was no familiar current, only a profound and unnatural cold that seemed to draw the warmth from my very blood. The cold was wrong. It did not feel like the absence of our bond. It felt like the presence of something else-something invasive, coiled, and patient.

I looked directly into his dark, unreadable eyes.

"I, Evelyn," my own voice was clear and steady in the still chamber, "accept your rejection."

For a long moment after the words left my lips, there was only a ringing silence. Then, not a snap, but a slow, sickening severance deep within my being, a feeling akin to some vital root being drawn, inch by painful inch, from my flesh. The warmth, the shared hum of his presence that had been a constant in my life for years-it all bled away into nothingness.

A hollow ache opened in my chest where that connection had been, and deep inside, my wolf let out a silent, desolate howl, retreating into some dark corner of my consciousness.

The color drained from Lucius's face, leaving it a mask of grey stone. He staggered back a pace, one hand clutching at his chest as if his own ribs had cracked.

I pointed toward the heavy oak door. "Leave," I commanded, my voice scarcely a whisper, yet it carried the weight of a final judgment.

Before he could move, the heavy oak panel swung inward once more, unannounced. Rosalind walked in. The woman the elders whispered was his true, prophesied match. Her scent struck me first-an over-sweet perfume failing to mask a cloying, funereal smell, like gardenias left too long in a vase. A violent lurch in my stomach followed, the first true wave of sickness from my hidden condition.

She was dressed in a gown of stark white, a study in feigned innocence, but her eyes held a gleam of undisguised, cruel triumph.

"Oh, Lucius," she purred, her voice a confection of saccharine sympathy. "Is it done? The council awaits us."

She glided to his side and laid a proprietary hand upon his arm. Her fingers, I noticed, bore a ring of black iron-a metal no wolf of pure blood would willingly wear.

Something ancient and cold stirred in my veins-not an aura, but the dormant authority of my bloodline, a power I had not felt since the day my house fell.

"Remove your presence from this chamber," I said, and the words carried a chilling, resonant weight that was not entirely my own. "Your scent offends the air."

Rosalind gasped, taking an involuntary step back as if from a physical blow. Lucius, in a swift, almost unconscious movement, shifted his body to stand slightly before me, a bulwark against the cloying perfume that now seemed to choke the room.

"Enough, Evelyn," Lucius said, his voice strained. "This is for your welfare. Take the gold."

He grabbed Rosalind's arm in a grip that was far from gentle and pulled her from the room, the heavy door thudding shut behind them.

The chamber fell into a profound silence. A moment later, I felt a desperate, familiar rapping at the edges of my consciousness. The Mind-Link, the telepathic bridge that connected wolves in a pack.

Evelyn, his thoughts crashed into mine, ragged with a panic he had not shown in person. Please, I implore you, listen to me-

I closed my eyes. With a surge of will, I gathered the tatters of my focus and erected a barrier in my mind, not of stone, but of ice-smooth, seamless, and absolute. I felt his frantic thoughts strike it once, then slide away into silence. I had shut him out of my mind forever.

I pressed my palm against my flat belly. He had cast me out. But I would not break. Not with the life I now carried. Whatever dark secret he was hiding, I would uncover it-and I would survive.

But as I gathered the gold and deeds he had left behind, one question burned in my mind with the cold fire of my Oracle's gift: What kind of threat could make an Alpha who feared nothing tremble like a hunted thing?