Page 20 of The Rejected Omega

“Alanna, please…”

His phone rings again. I take advantage of his distraction and duck under his arm, and this time he doesn't stop me.

It’s a struggle not to break into a run. To turn back around and fight with him. To see if he’s following.

I hear him say "Hey, Cassandra," as the gym door swings shut behind me, and something inside me dies.

When several weeksgo by without Connor seeking me out again, I start to trust the suppressants.

He doesn’t text.

He doesn’t call.

He doesn’t come to my house to pick me up in the mornings or wait for me in the parking lot after school.

When I bother to eat lunch, I do it in the library, hiding in the stacks upstairs.

I’m a shadow of my former self, haunting the halls of the high school until I can fade out of existence entirely.

Part of me resents him for giving up so quickly.

Part of me is grateful, because I probably would have caved by now.

I spend my final months of high school focusing on my studies. I inject my suppressants. I nod and smile at my peers. I apply to several new colleges.

I’ve never been so productive.

I’ve never been so lonely.

Senior yearbooks come out, and Connor and Cassandra win cutest couple for senior superlatives; even their names sound cute together. I didn’t waste my meager savings on one—the academy goes all out with the pricey 100-page, full-color hardbacks—but one arrives on my desk anyway. Mac’s doing, no doubt.

My peers scour the pages for pictures of themselves. Any shots the yearbook staff managed to take of me after the ceremony are dead-eyed, vacant. I’ve lost weight, and there are persistent dark shadows under my eyes.

A friend—an acquaintance, really—named Molly asks me to sign her yearbook. When she hands it to me, it’s open to the glossy student-sponsored pages in the back. A full-color photo of me and Connor sitting on the hood of his car greets me. I’m mid-laugh, and he’s beaming at me. Looking at me like I’msomething.The page is full of photos of him throughout the years, and I’m in several. They’re all memories he was a core part of. I helped Mac pick out the photos a month before the ceremony.

I snap the book closed and shove it back to Molly without signing.

I don’t walk at graduation, even when a cap and gown I didn’t order is delivered to the house. I opt to receive my diploma in the mail.

Connor and Cassandra keep dating.

I should be more pleased by these things than I am. At least I lost my mate over something more than a fling, right?

I stop worrying that someone will out me to Connor. The unmatched omegas and alphas left the ceremony grounds before I was in the full throes of heat. And the elders will keep my secret. An experience like mine was a black stain on the whole tradition—the kind of thing that made people swear off attending claiming ceremonies at all. Invested parties were alltoo eager to sweep my experience under the rug. Mac Masters is the only weak link, and the guilt eating him alive has secured his silence.

Besides, no one with a designation would believe an alpha wrote off an omega—theiromega— for a beta. It was simply unheard of.

There must be something wrong with me, for such a thing to occur.

He doesn’t want you. He wants another. A beta, of all things. What a terrible omega you must be. You must be defective.

Mac begged me to reconsider once, on one of our drives into the city to see Kanata.

“He’s not the same without you. You didn’t know him before you moved here…but you lit something up inside him that all but extinguished when his mother passed. He’s sinking back into that darkness, Lana.”

I ignored him.

“His grades have plummeted. He’s getting into fights.”

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