After My Alpha Marked the Omega, I Walked Away

Seven years.

That was how long I had waited for the bare spot on my neck to stop being bare.

I stood at the altar in a white ceremonial gown, the moon high and full above the Shadowridge clearing, and for the first time in a long time I let myself believe it. The candles around the stone circle burned steady. Every allied pack within two states had sent ranked wolves to witness this. The Crescent Pack. The Ironbark. The Northpine elders in their dark coats, watching from the front row with that quiet, evaluating gaze old wolves get at ceremonies like this.

My father stood off to the side, hands folded. My mother had her fingers pressed to her mouth.

Across the altar, Zane looked at me the way he used to look at me before Cassandra arrived. His dark hair was combed back. His Alpha tones were dressed in formal black. For a moment, I let the doubt I had been carrying for months go quiet.

My wolf, Sela, paced once inside my chest and settled.

He is here, she said. He is finally here.

The officiant began the words. My pulse moved into my throat. Zane reached for my hand and his palm was warm. I felt the bond hum between us, thin but present, the way it had hummed for seven years. I tilted my head to bare the side of my neck. The skin there had never been touched by another wolf. It had been waiting.

Then Zane's head snapped to the left.

It was small. A flinch. Anyone who did not know him would have missed it. But I had spent seven years learning his face, and I knew what it looked like when something came through the mind-link.

His nostrils flared. His eyes went unfocused.

"Zane," I said.

He did not look at me.

He let go of my hand.

He turned, he stepped down off the altar, and he ran. Not walked. Ran. Across the moonlit grass, past the Northpine elders, past my father, past every ranked wolf who had flown across the country for this night, in the direction of the Omega quarters at the edge of the territory.

The officiant's mouth was still open on a word he had not finished.

The candles kept burning.

I stood there in my white dress with my neck still tilted, and I listened to the murmurs begin in the back rows like a wind moving through dry leaves.

Someone whispered, "What was that?"

Someone else whispered, "The Omega girl. The new one."

My mother made a sound I will never forget.

I did not move. Sela had gone very still inside me. We both knew. We had both known for months, I think, and we had both kept choosing to wait.

I lowered my chin. I straightened my spine. I stepped down off the altar without help, gathered the skirt of my gown, and walked back across the clearing the way Zane had run, except slower, and in the opposite direction, and without looking at a single face.

The pack house was dark when I reached it.

I walked the long hall to our bedroom. I had walked that hall in my head a thousand times, in a hundred small daydreams, always imagining the night I would walk it as his marked Luna. The carpet was soft under my bare feet. I had left the heels somewhere on the lawn.

I pushed the door open.

The smell hit me first. Sweat and sex and Cassandra's vanilla shampoo, the kind she wore too much of, and underneath all of it, the iron note of fresh blood.

Zane was asleep on his side, one arm thrown across her waist, his breathing slow and satisfied. Cassandra was curled into him, her brown hair fanned across his pillow. My pillow.

On her neck, dark and wet and still raw at the edges, bloomed his mark.

The mark that had been promised to me in front of the Moon Goddess for seven years.

Given to her before the ceremony candles had gone cold.

I did not scream. I noticed that, in a distant, clinical way. I had always wondered what I would do, if it ever came to it, and now I knew. I just stood in the doorway with my hand on the frame and waited.

Zane's eyes opened.

He saw me. I watched him remember, in real time, that he had a mate. I watched the color leave his face.

"Ayla," he said. "Ayla, I can explain."

"No," I said. My voice came out quiet. Steadier than I expected. "You will not explain. You will call Beta Marcus. You will call Gamma Reid. They will stand in this room as witnesses, in accordance with pack law. And you will reject me formally."

Cassandra stirred. Made a small whimper into his shoulder.

Zane's mouth opened. Closed.

"Ayla, please \u2014"

"Now, Alpha."

The word Alpha came out cold. He flinched.

He called them. They came in pajamas. Marcus would not look at Cassandra. Reid kept his eyes on the floor. Both of them knew what this room was. Both of them knew what was about to be spoken.

Zane stood. He was naked. He pulled on a pair of sweatpants with shaking hands. Cassandra sat up in the sheets and did not bother to cover herself, and I felt Sela's lip curl inside me, and I did not let it show on my face.

"Speak the words," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment. I think he was waiting for me to cry. To beg. To give him a reason to stop.

I gave him nothing.

"I, Zane Hollister, Alpha of the Shadowridge Pack," he said, and his voice cracked in the middle, "reject you, Ayla Crane, as my mate, and as my Luna, and as my chosen."

The bond snapped.

It did not feel the way I had imagined. It felt like a bone breaking inside my chest, and then a second bone, and then a third, all of them in places I had not known had bones. My knees hit the floor. My hands went out to catch me. I heard Sela howl somewhere far away, the sound of a wolf being torn in half.

Marcus stepped forward.

I lifted one hand. Not high. Just enough.

He stopped.

I breathed in. I breathed out. I stood up under my own power, with my own legs, and I walked out of that bedroom and down the long hall and out the front door of the pack house with my chin level and the bare spot on my neck still bare.

I did not look back.

The morning came anyway.

I woke in a guest room down the east wing, where I had no memory of putting myself, and the sun was coming in flat and white through a window I had never noticed before. Sela was howling inside my skull. She had not stopped all night. I let her. I did not try to soothe her. She had earned the right.

My hands, when I held them up to the light, were steady.

I had a notebook in my overnight bag. Leather cover, plain. I had bought it for wedding lists.

I opened it to the first blank page. I picked up a pen.

From the Luna quarters down the hall, I could hear Cassandra's voice already, giving orders in that soft helpless lilt she used on Zane, and I could hear the silence of the pack receiving them. It was the kind of silence that has weight. The kind ranked wolves use when they are watching something unravel and have not yet decided what to do about it.

I listened for a moment.

Then I wrote the date at the top of the page, and underneath it, in clean block letters, I wrote:

INSTANCES OF ALPHA AUTHORITY ABUSE \u2014 SHADOWRIDGE PACK.

And I began the list.