After My Alpha Rejected Me for My Stepsister

The paper in my hand felt warmer than it should have.

I stood in the long hallway outside Damian's office, the healer's report folded once down the middle, my thumb pressing slow circles against the inside of my wrist. Three years I had walked this hallway. Three years I had carried trays, messages, mended uniforms, and the polite silence of a Luna who had never been told she was loved. Tonight, for the first time, I was carrying something else.

A pup. His pup.

I rehearsed the words in my head like I used to rehearse healing remedies as a girl. Damian. I have something to tell you. I'm pregnant.

My wolf, Hazel, paced inside me, restless and bright. He'll look at you now, she whispered. He'll have to look at you now.

I almost smiled. After three years of being a fixture in his pack house, of laying out his cufflinks and seasoning his food without salt because his ulcer hated salt, I let myself believe the simplest thing. That a child would do what devotion had not.

Then the front doors opened.

The smell hit the corridor before the voice did. French perfume — the heavy, expensive kind, the kind you don't spritz, you pour. Roses crushed under amber. Something underneath it that made my throat tighten without me knowing why.

I moved to the staircase landing and looked down.

Diana stood in the entrance hall in a cream coat that probably cost more than the studio I would later open without knowing it. My stepsister. The Bell daughter who had run from this exact house three years ago and let me take her place. She was laughing at something a warrior had said, her hair longer than I remembered, her cheeks flushed from the cold.

And Damian was already there.

I hadn't even seen him leave his office. He must have heard her the moment her shoes hit the marble. He crossed to her in three long strides, and I watched him do something I had never seen him do.

His shoulders dropped.

That hard, granite line of muscle he carried even in his sleep — it loosened. His chin tipped down. He breathed her in. Not a polite inhale. A long, slow draw, as if he had been holding his breath since the day she left and finally remembered how to let it out.

My thumb pressed harder against my wrist. I felt the small, fast beat of my pulse there, and I felt Hazel go very, very still.

The report crumpled a little in my fingers.

"Welcome home," Damian said, low, and I had heard that voice in my ear a thousand times across a thousand mornings, but never in that register. Never with that softness underneath it.

I did not go down the stairs.

I went back to my room and washed my face and pinned my hair the way a Luna pins her hair for a formal pack dinner. I put on the