After My Alpha Rejected Me for the Lycan Throne

The bond broke at 10:14 on a Tuesday morning, three days before I would have called it love.

I didn't know that yet. I was still sitting at the kitchen table with my hands folded over my belly, seven months pregnant and so tired the edges of the room kept blurring. The chamomile tea Margaret had poured me twenty minutes ago sat cooling in front of my right hand. I hadn't touched it. The smell alone made my stomach turn.

"Sign it, Cassidy." Margaret's voice came from somewhere above my head. She'd been standing there for ten minutes, the Anderson land deed spread flat on the table between us like a butcher's diagram. "It's just a formality. Jett's already managing the territory. This simply makes it official."

My hand moved toward the pen. Stopped. My wolf—silent for so long I'd almost forgotten what she felt like—slammed against my ribs. Once. Hard. A warning I didn't understand.

I pressed two fingers to my mating mark. The habit was old, automatic. Check the bond. Make sure he can't feel what I'm feeling. Make sure I'm not broadcasting.

"I need to talk to Jett first," I said quietly.

Margaret's hand came down on my shoulder. Not hard. Just present. "He's very busy, dear. Don't trouble him with things he's already decided."

The kitchen door opened.

I didn't have to look up to know it was him. The bond told me first—a warm pulse of recognition, the biological certainty that my mate had entered the room. For seven years, that feeling had been comfort. Safety. Proof.

Jett didn't say anything. He just stood in the doorway, backlit by the hallway, his hands in his pockets. Casual. Present. Watching.

"Cassidy," he said. Just my name. But underneath it—threaded through the mate bond like a subsonic frequency I felt in my bones before I heard it in my ears—was the command.

Alpha tone.

My body obeyed before my brain could catch up. My knees hit the tile. My hands went flat against the floor, fingers splayed, shielding my belly from the impact. The pen I'd been holding clattered away. I didn't drop to my knees. I was dropped—like a puppet with cut strings, like something that had never been holding itself up in the first place.

The bond didn't ask. It took.

I stayed there, on my hands and knees on the kitchen floor, breathing through my mouth because my wolf was howling now, furious and trapped and so far away I couldn't reach her. My mating mark burned cold.

Footsteps. Teagan's voice, sharp and too loud. "What the hell—"

"Family matter," Margaret said smoothly. "Cassidy's just a bit emotional. Pregnancy hormones. You understand."

I lifted my head. Found Teagan standing in the doorway to the hall, her bag still on her shoulder from the drive up, her face white. She looked at me. At Jett. At Margaret's hand still resting on my shoulder like a leash.

I met her eyes. Held them. We'd grown up reading each other across rooms, across silences, across the things our father taught us not to say out loud. I didn't have words for what I needed her to understand. I only had this: *Not yet.*

She saw it. I watched her see it. Her jaw tightened. She didn't move.

"I'll sign it," I said. My voice came out steady. I was proud of that. I reached for the pen.

Margaret slid it toward me.

I picked it up. Held it over the signature line. My hand was shaking, but that was fine. Pregnant women were allowed to shake. I pressed the pen to the paper. Felt the bond hum with Jett's satisfaction, a warm pleased pulse that made my stomach turn.

I wrote the first letter of my name.

Then I stopped.

"I need water," I said. "I'm dizzy."

Margaret's hand tightened on my shoulder. "After you sign."

"I'm going to be sick." I wasn't lying. The wolfsbane in the tea I hadn't drunk was still in the air, still coating my throat. My wolf was still slamming against my ribs. "Please."

Jett sighed. I felt it through the bond before I heard it—irritation, like I was a meeting running long. "Let her have water, Mother. We're not monsters."

Margaret stepped back. I pushed myself up off the floor, one hand on the table edge, the other still cradling my belly. Teagan moved toward me. I shook my head once, sharp. She stopped.

I walked to the sink. Ran the tap. Filled a glass. Drank it with my back to all of them, staring out the window at the forest line. My father had built this pack house with his own hands. The kitchen window faced east so the morning light would hit the table where his family ate breakfast.

I set the glass down. Turned around.

"I'll sign it tomorrow," I said. "When I'm not dizzy."

Margaret opened her mouth.

"Tomorrow," Jett said. The word dropped into the room like a gavel. He looked at me with the expression he used at pack meetings—patient, reasonable, the face of a man who had never raised his voice to his pregnant mate. "That's fair. Rest today. We'll finish this in the morning."

He left first. Margaret followed, taking the deed with her.

Teagan waited until their footsteps faded. Then she crossed the kitchen and crouched in front of me, her hands on my knees.

"Cass," she whispered. "What the fuck was that."

I looked down at her. My sister. The one person in this house who had never stopped being mine.

"That," I said quietly, "was the last time."

Her eyes widened. Behind her ribs, I saw it—the smallest flinch, like something inside her had just woken up and was testing the bars of its cage.

I touched her face. "I need you to trust me. Can you do that?"

She nodded.

"Good," I said. "Because I'm going to need Stella."