My Alpha Chose Her Over Me

The cabin groaned in the wind like something dying.

I pulled the threadbare blanket tighter around my shoulders, but it did nothing against the cold that seeped through the gaps in the wooden walls. Rain dripped steadily through a crack in the roof, plinking into the metal bucket I'd placed in the corner three days ago. The sound had become a metronome marking the hours of my exile.

This wasn't how I'd imagined my life when I'd defied my father and left the Silver Moon Pack. Alpha John had warned me. Begged me, actually, in that gruff way of his that passed for tenderness. "That man will break you, Nora," he'd said, his hand heavy on my shoulder. "He doesn't see you. He only sees what he's lost."

But I'd been so sure. So stupidly, blindly sure that Dariel Bradley was my destiny.

I pushed myself up from the sagging mattress, my bare feet hitting the icy floorboards. The pregnancy test sat on the makeshift nightstand—a wooden crate I'd found behind the Pack House kitchens. I'd stared at those two pink lines for twenty minutes straight, watching them darken as if they might disappear if I blinked.

They hadn't disappeared.

My hand drifted to my stomach, still flat beneath my worn nightgown. A pup. Dariel's pup. The heir to the Dark River Pack.

This changed everything. It had to.

For six months, I'd lived in this cabin like a ghost on the edge of his territory. I cleaned the Pack House floors on my hands and knees for pocket change. I waited for him to visit, sometimes going weeks without seeing him. When he did come, it was always late at night, smelling of whiskey and something darker—desperation, maybe, or regret. He'd take what he needed from my body and leave before dawn, never staying long enough for me to pretend it meant something.

But a pup. A pup was permanent. Undeniable.

He would have to claim me now. He would have to see me.

"This is it," I whispered to the empty room, to the cold and the dripping water and the howling wind. "This is when everything changes."

I moved to the cracked mirror hanging above the basin, studying my reflection in the gray morning light. My dark hair hung limp and tangled. My cheeks looked hollow, the bones too prominent. When had I started looking so... diminished?

I thought of my father's Pack House, with its heated floors and endless hot water. I thought of my old bedroom with its four-poster bed and the closet full of dresses I'd left behind. I'd been an Alpha's daughter once. I'd had status. Respect.

Now I was whatever this was.

But not for long.

I pulled open the wooden chest at the foot of my bed, pawing through the meager collection of clothes I'd managed to bring with me. Most were ruined now—stained from cleaning work or worn thin from too many washes in cold water. My fingers closed around