Chapter Two #3
I’m quickly descending into the stereotype of the desperate, crazy omega. But why is he ignoring me? I need him. I told him—I told him I needed him to be here.
My fingers are bleeding freely over the phone screen now, threads of red sinking and spreading through the cracked glass.
Seven rings becomes five, then three. The way they do when someone screens your call and presses end prematurely.
My next call immediately connects to his full voicemail. He turned off his phone.
I shudder.
“He isn’t coming,” I whisper. And somehow saying it out loud makes it finally register as true. As real. This is really happening.
I am going into my first heat without my mate.
I’ve never even heard of it happening. It’s unthinkable. Tantamount to abandoning someone at the altar, with magnitudes more physical discomfort.
He is with her . Fucking her . Kissing her . Nosing against her glandless neck the way he’s done with all his beta girlfriends since the onset of puberty.
Something sharp and jagged saws through my chest, splitting it open. The bond, stretching to its breaking point. A fraying rope rapidly unraveling. The cables suspending a bridge snapping down to the finest metal wires.
My soul feels stripped raw.
Alpha? My omega whimpers.
She hasn’t come to terms with how hopeless our situation is yet.
There are more angry voices outside the tent.
“His scent shouldn’t have been within a fucking mile of here if he wasn’t present. It’s the height of negligence.
“You broke the rules, Mac. The rules exist for a reason.” says another male voice.
“He promised me he’d be here. I don’t know where the fuck he is. Maybe something happened?—”
“We have to arrange a surrogate alpha for her.”
“What? She's my son’s mate!”
“Who abandoned her to suffer! She can't go through this alone.”
A surrogate alpha? My mind rebels at the idea.
I want Connor, not some stranger. I’m a virgin .
It’s my first heat. The most vulnerable time in an omega’s life.
I’ll be feral, unthinking. No more rational than an animal needing to be bred.
I have to get out of here before they bring some stranger to service me like a stallion at stud.
I press my sliced up fingers together, using the pain to bring some clarity. I could send him another text message—tell him plainly that he’s my mate and I’m going into heat—and hope he turns his phone back on and sees it in time.
But if he doesn’t?
His message about Cassandra glares up at me incriminatingly. He’s with another woman. Connor and I have been friends for years, and he's never shown romantic or sexual interest in me, going so far afield as to only date betas.
Will he even want me if I tell him? Will he resent me?
Or worse, would he only come out of a sense of obligation? Not love or desire.
His sense of duty to tradition runs deep. Defying his father by skipping the ceremony might be the single most rebellious thing Connor Masters has ever done.
Too bad it will be my undoing.
If I text him, I’ll be undermining his choice. Undermining his relationship with Cassandra, which he apparently cares about a lot more than he’s previously let on.
Something inside me fractures.
I need to get out of here. To find somewhere quiet, somewhere still. Somewhere to mourn.
Somewhere to die, the back of my mind whispers.
Bond sickness in newly paired alphas and omegas has a high fatality rate.
I spent the last ten years in close proximity to Connor.
If the wrenching pain in my chest and the solo heat doesn’t kill me, it'll take me all the way to death’s door and knock a few times.
People die of bond sickness two ways. Fast, from the shock to the system a severed bond creates. Or slow, when they lose the will to live, to eat. Either way, they’re dying of a broken heart.
I drop the phone. I can’t bring it with me. Soon, I’ll lose my rational mind, and contacting his silence will only hurt me more.
I pull up a stake at the back of the tent and duck under the loose flap. If they bring a surrogate alpha near me right now, I might not be able to control my reaction.
So I run toward the woods. The wind, chilly earlier, feels pleasantly brisk on my overheated skin. I’ll find a quiet, safe place, to make a nest and ride this out.
Alpha will come, my omega insists. But she’s stupid. Misguided by centuries of evolutionary drive and the inevitability of omega biology.
I run until I can’t anymore. The cramping in my abdomen sends me to my knees. My bare feet ache, and I just want to crawl into a ball and go back in time to this morning.
I find a mossy clearing and sink to my knees. I have no blankets or spare clothes—no endless supply of my alpha’s scent to craft a nest with—so I have to settle for dead leaves and sticks and stray fern fronds.
I half-heartedly arrange them around me, then strip off my jeans and the rest of my clothes and incorporate them into the nest. Everything but Connor’s shirt.
But it’s all wrong. I need Connor’s clothes, Connor’s scent. Blankets and pillows he’s slept on and saved for me.
My belly starts to cramp again, worse than any period I’ve ever had, and more slick floods out of me. There’s a gnawing, empty ache in my core getting worse by the minute.
I’m too empty. My cunt spasms around nothing, longing for an alpha’s knot.
The pain will intensify the longer I go without something filling me up.
I try fingering myself, even bringing myself to a clenching finish, but it barely takes the edge off.
My hand is a poor substitute for what I actually need.
Alpha will come!
I dig my fingers into the earth as another wave of cramps wracks me. I roll on the ground and groan.
An alpha’s purr would ease my pain and anxiety, but instead it goes unchecked.
My chest aches like something inside me is dying, the blood supply slowly being twisted off but refusing to go numb. Everything is a fog of pain and need.
I lose all sense of myself but for my aching center, my utter emptiness.
I’m more creature than human. I get on all fours and present, desperately working my fingers over my dripping pussy until my skin is raw.
I try to materialize Connor with my mind.
Imagine him following my scent through the woods to this clearing and sinking his thick knot into me.
I would forgive him for all of it if he came.
Alpha doesn’t want us. Alpha chose another. Alpha isn’t coming.
Everything aches. My lips are cracked and dry, and there’s a large puddle of slick beneath me, mixing with the dirt.
Wasted. Wasted.
More slick and cramps come in waves. I lose track of the passage of time. I whine and beg, calling out for someone to help me. Calling out for him .
I rub at my aching clit until it’s bruised, seeking relief that never comes.
I curl up against the cold earth and cry. The fall air begins to bite at my naked flesh, and I’m wracked with shivers.
It hurts to even think his name.
Why didn’t he come for me? Am I not good enough? Have I been a bad omega? Will he ever like me, accept me?
The rift in my chest cracks wider.
Hours pass in a fog of pain and unquenched lust.
I’m a hollow, aching wound. I want to bury the shirt with his rapidly fading scent, to fling it away. But I hold onto it like a lifeline, inhaling like a deep sea diver desperate for air.
Alpha.
With his shirt, I can almost pretend he’s here, lingering at the edge of my vision, his scent drifting forward on the wind.
It’s agonizing. I wish I never came to the ceremony, wish I never went near his fucking shirt. I’ve been reduced to a pitiful creature brutalized by my own biology.
I want it to end.
The sun rises twice before my slick begins to dry up, turning tacky between my legs.
I’m broken, balled up on the cold earth, a mess of slick and blood from my battered hands and torn flesh.
My nails are ragged and split. I clawed furrows into the earth, my skin—anything to try and distract myself from the pain.
It feels like someone yanked my heart out of my chest and didn’t bother to stitch up the wound.
I try to stand and discover I can’t. My limbs won’t respond to me. My body’s one big mass of aching muscle. My fingers are numb, all the tips of me icy and red from the cold.
The clearing smells wrong . Like pain.
There’s a distant sound. Someone calling my name. I burrow tighter in on myself. This is the most vulnerable and exposed I’ve ever been. No one can see me like this.
My first instinct is to stay silent. To hide here and fade away. Surely that would be easier than confronting the aftermath of this and risk ever having to repeat it.
But survival is a hard instinct to quell, and I let out a feeble cry.
My throat feels like daggers.
A crunch of leaves, and a familiar figure appears.
My omega pricks up immediately. Alpha?!
Some naive, animal part of my brain still expects Connor to appear out of nowhere. To come for me, find me, save me.
But it isn’t Connor.
He is familiar, though. Connor’s father—Mac Masters. It hurts to look at him. They resemble each other too much.
Mac rushes forward and slides to his knees in front of me. He begins yanking off his jacket and wraps it around my tender skin.
I hiss.
“Alanna. Fuck, I’ve been looking for you for three days.”
“Connor?” I curse myself as soon as his name leaves my lips.
Mac ignores me.
"We've got to get you out of here. Get you warm. We’re miles from the ceremony site."
He feels my face with the back of his palm, then begins rubbing me down through the jacket. My skin throbs from the pressure.
There’s stark fear on his face. I wonder if he’s remembering losing his own mate.
This isn’t the same. It never will be.
I bat weakly at his chest. "Leave me. Better this way." The bond is an aching, ragged wound in my chest. Living like this would mean suffering every day.
Mac curses. "I'm going to fucking kill him."
“Hurts.”
“We’ll get you help. We'll make it better.”
We’ll. Right. He sounds so foolish. There’s no making it better. No healing from this spreading rot in my chest.
A bond so strained it’s choking the life out of me.
Mac picks me up off the ground and cradles me in his arms. I’m too weak to resist him. I clutch Connor’s shirt to my naked chest with bloody fingers, the base, animal part of me refusing to leave it here.
Then I seize the front of Mac’s shirt in a desperate surge of strength and clarity. “Don’t tell him.”
“What?”
I grip harder, scraping his skin with ragged nails. “ You can’t. I can’t go through that again.”
“We’ll talk about this later.”
He half-runs through the woods. Connor’s father came for me, but not Connor. It’s a cruel joke, and I’m the punchline.
I writhe, fighting his hold on me.
Mac swears. “Stop it. You’ll hurt yourself.”
“Promise me!”
“Goddamnit, Lana. Okay, I promise. Now let me get you out of here before you fucking die.”
Mac tightens his grip on me and begins to run faster, and consciousness bleeds out of me like rain.