Page 102 of Rejected and Pregnant By the Alpha King

The thudding in my chest has made it hard to breathe. “How many years, Delilah?”

She shrugs at me. “Since her dad left.”

Gods…

Even if it turns out Raine lied to me about the baby and wanting to be with me, I’m starting to see that her desperation to get outof this predicament when she first found me is becoming more and more justified by the day.

How could anyone let a pack member be treated this way? Daniel’s certainly got plenty of things wrong with him, but this takes it to a whole other level.

The guilt in my heart grows stronger by the day, as does my regret for letting my emotions get the better of me the day she arrived at my borders and begged to see me. I should’ve told Camden. And then I should’ve let him talk me out of sending her away before we could get to the bottom of the truth.

He would’ve at least kept Raine long enough to figure out what was real and what wasn’t.

Now all I’m left with is chasing her down and hoping like hell she’s okay.

The door to the cabin is pushed open and Constance’s scent wafts through the doorway. “I think I got what we were looking for.”

I turn to see her, and she holds up a large binder that has a thick string wrapped around its middle, tied off by a loop. She hands it to me when she gets closer, the door to the cabin shutting behind her haphazardly with how warped the door is.

Camden passes by her to lift the door back into the jamb while I grab a seat at the small dining room table and spread the folder out. “Where did you end up finding it?”

“In his office, like you suggested. Dodging his nosy enforcers was annoying while I was leaving,” she says, taking the seat opposite of me. “But I managed to come back here without a tail.”

That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. If Constance is anything, it’s a damn shadow.

“Is that really going to tell us where Raine might be?” Delilah asks, spooning some soup into a bowl for me and bringing it over.

She leans over Constance, a few pieces of her long, wavy hair falling into my vision. I have half a mind to tug on it out of sheer impulse—needing something to do with my hands that isn’t picking at the skin around my nails obsessively.

“It might.” Ignoring my own thoughts, I flip open the folder and scan the first few pages.

The contents are mainly reports of Raine and her activities throughout the day while she’d still been with Andromeda. Her comings and goings were recorded quite heavily and with enough detail for me to find uncomfortable.

What had been the purpose of Daniel’s obsession with her? Sure, her father had been his beta, but he seemed to have an uncontrollable need to punish her for her father’s wrongdoings for some reason.

I’ve never heard of that before. While it’s exceedingly rare for a beta to walk away from their duties to their pack, it’s not completely unheard of.

Why wasn’t Daniel putting in half this much effort into tracking down his estranged beta?

“If anything, it’ll at least tell uswhereshe got sold to,” Constance says, interrupting my thoughts. “As long as we have some kind of direction or clue as to where she might be, then we can figure it out. I grabbed the ledgers too. So if Daniel’s been doing business with this pack longer than getting Raine sold to them, we’ll know.”

Nodding, I flip through a few more pages.She’s a damn genius.

More notes about Raine’s treatment within the pack. Details surrounding certain packmates treating her poorly and what had been done about it—which was realistically nothing. What kind of resources she’d been taking up. How things were distributed among the pack and giving Raine the least.

The lists and notes are endless and with each passing one, I grow that much more angry.

My mate was treated terribly for much of her growing years, and into adulthood. I can’t even fathom how she turned out the way she did, with her kind heart and her even more open personality. Even if her father defected all those years ago, he must’ve been a great man to teach her those things.

“Look.” Camden points. “Some kind of correspondence. And it’s recent.”

The top of the photocopied paper is dated from a few weeks ago, Daniel’s scratchy penmanship littering the page with what looks like some kind of letter to someone looking for a breeder, ending with an offer to negotiate a price “upon acceptance of the terms.”

The next photocopied page is the same writing—Daniel’s—seeming to be responding to a letter that was sent to him, with prices and an admittance to the “breeder” in question already had some kind of defect.

Throughout the letter, Daniel apologizes several times to the person he’s writing to, pleading with the buyer not to back out and that a severe discount will be implemented, should the sale go through.

“Sale” has my stomach turning.

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