Like I’m nothing.
Vale stops in front of me, raising an eyebrow in mocking disdain.
“I am your scent match,” I whisper as if I’ve been hit, bruised, dealt a blow that I will never recover from. A reporter hears and snags onto the word, throwing out a dozen questions that we both ignore.
“Bonnie!” I hear my dad shout, but he’s too far away. I’m going to die from this pain, even he can’t save me.
Vale smiles. Actually smiles, like he’s enjoying my torment.
“Go home, find an alpha who will take care of you and give you pretty babies. We don’t want a scent match.”
The words don’t make sense. When he steps around me, I turn, reaching out and grabbing his hand.
“Let go of me!” His acid hiss has me recoiling, frightened. My alpha looks like a monster.
“But-”
“Take a hint, Omega. Look at you. You’re what? Twelve?” He gestures towards Cyn, who is whispering in the actress's ear as they slide into the car while a thousand cameras flash. She’s everything I’m not. Flawlessly graceful and sexy. She’s part of their world, I’m not. “You think anything you could offer is better than her?”
My grip falters and slowly slips off his hand.
“Consider this your lucky day,” Vale says with a croon that makes my stomach tighten. “You dodged a bullet.”
I turn with him, watching as he walks away, watching as they drive away and destroy everything I am.
My entire world collapses with just a few of his careless words. It never occurred to me that my pack would be assholes. It never occurred to me that my pack wouldn’t want me.
Why didn’t it?
My knees buckle, and I drop to the red carpet, struggling for air. The pain is like nothing I have ever felt. The words play over and over. His expression, so cruel, their hands on her.
The cameras continue to flash, capturing my agony for the world to see, but it doesn’t matter. My alphas…they aren’t mine.
Rejection is a bitter acid in my mouth.
Security yanks me up and carries me back to the crowd, where I’m shoved into my father’s arms.
“Come on, Papa,” I say low through numb lips, trying to scrape together the shreds of my dignity.
I hold my peace in the car and throughout the two-hour drive home. I don’t break; I don’t make a sound. My silence is brittle and fraught with my growing pain. I hold it until I get inside my childhood bedroom, where I close the door, turn up the saddest song I can find. I wrap my arms around myself, hoping to hold me together, but it fixes nothing, and I break.
I tear that beautiful new dress off me and rip it into a million pieces. I tear out chunks of my hair trying to get the ribbons off. My makeup I smear on the rags of the white, my ruined innocence stained and torn. There will never be a moment I will ever be the same. I look into the omega’s eyes in the mirror, and I don’t know who she is. I hate her. A tiny part of me still can’t see what’s so wrong with me that they would reject me so quickly. I scream the question to her. When she doesn’t answer me, I shatter the mirror, sending the shards around my room. And in a way, it breaks me apart, too.
My silence gives way to screams that I can’t stop. My eyes fill with tears that won’t cease. I become my own enemy.
My brother comes in and holds me while I scream. They take the shards away from me. They remove everything with a reflection.
Only then do I calm down a little.
I crumple to the floor and lay there for hours, keening for my mates.
For a future I’d dreamed up.
It’s all gone.
It can’t get any worse than this.
It does.
