Page 10 of The Rejected Omega

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.

CHAPTER THREE

I fellin love with Connor Masters over a series of moments.

When I was placed in a foster home in Crestwood during middle school, it was too far to walk to school, so I started taking the bus. The route was crowded, and the seats were packed the first time I rode it home. Nametags with peeling laminate and faded Sharpie adorned the walls. The first seat with room belonged to a sulky, dark-haired boy staring out the grimy window, his heavy bookbag taking up the space beside him. Above his head, several names had been crossed out.

I paused, scoping out the back of the bus. The way-back was usually reserved for the older students, but I’d sit there and endure their ribbing if I had to. When I made to move further back, the boy reached out and pulled his bag into his lap.

I eyed the empty space before sliding into it.

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