They Called Me Their Queen, Then Left Me in Ruin

Audrey

His scent was the first sin.

It wasn’t cologne. It was something elemental, something that clings to the collar of his worn leather jacket like a secret. Pine after a storm, whiskey, and the metallic tang of something wild and dangerous. I was seventeen, a girl from the manicured lawns and silent, sprawling houses of North Crestwood, and I had never smelled anything so real in my life.

His name was West. West of the Bloodmoon Pack. A name whispered with fear and fascination by the human girls in my school who loved to dip their toes in the town’s supernatural underbelly. He was the heir to an Alpha, they said. A prince of savages.

I wasn’t supposed to know him. I wasn’t supposed to meet his gaze across the crowded parking lot of a dive bar I had no business being in. I wasn't supposed to feel the visceral, magnetic pull that yanked my soul right out of my chest when he did.

But I did.

Our courtship was a series of stolen moments in the gray margins of our two worlds. Late-night drives in his rumbling Camaro, his hand resting on my thigh, a casual fire that burned right through my jeans. Conversations about nothing and everything, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that made my bones ache. He saw me. Not Audrey Saint Claire, honor roll student, daughter of a clean-cut family. He saw the girl underneath, the one suffocating on polite smiles and silent dinners. He saw me, and he wanted me.

And I, like a fool, mistook being wanted for being loved.

Then, one Tuesday morning, after a night spent tangled in his sheets, the world tilted. A wave of nausea so profound it sent me stumbling to the bathroom. A missed cycle I’d chalked up to stress. A whisper of a terrifying possibility that had taken root in the quiet, hopeful part of my heart.

The two pink lines on the plastic stick were not a whisper. They were a scream.

I sat on the cold tile of my bathroom floor, the test clutched in my trembling hand, and I felt a dizzying, terrifying joy. His. A part of him, growing inside me.

The joy lasted exactly four hours. It lasted until I saw the picture. A group of she-wolves from his pack, tagged in a photo at a bonfire. And there he was. West. His arm was slung casually around a beautiful, predatory-looking brunette, his head bent close to hers, laughing. It was an innocent picture. It was a dagger in my heart.

My sister, Essence, found me crying. She knew about West. She had warned me. “Wolves don't love humans, Audrey,” she’d said. “They devour them.”

I didn’t listen. Now, with the proof of my own naivete growing in my womb and the image of his casual betrayal burned onto the back of my eyelids, her words echoed in the hollow space where my heart used to be.

I had to tell him. I had to see his face.

The confrontation was brutal and swift. I showed him the test, my hands shaking, my voice a pathetic whisper.

He looked at it. He looked at me. And he laughed. A cold, sharp, dismissive sound.

“Get real, Audrey,” he’d said, his eyes hard as flint. “A half-breed pup? My father, the Alpha, would skin me alive. That thing isn't mine.”

That thing.

The boy who had made me feel seen had just rendered me invisible. He turned and walked away, leaving me standing in the bruised twilight with the weight of two heartbeats inside me and the scent of his betrayal clinging to my skin.