The Bully Alpha's Fake Alpha Mate (BL)-Chapter 76: THE REJECTION HE’LL NEVER HAVE

REED

Goodbye.

Not goodnight, not I need space or we’ll talk tomorrow or any of the hundred things people say when they mean this isn’t over. Just goodbye. Clean and complete and final as a door swinging shut.

My vision went strange at the edges. His hand closed around the doorknob and something inside me snapped clean in half.

I don’t remember deciding to move. I was just moving, crossing the room in two strides, and my palm hit the door so hard the frame cracked and the bang of it tore through the room like a gunshot.

Asher flinched and I grabbed his shoulder and spun him and his back hit the wall hard enough to drive the breath out of him and then I was in his face and there was nowhere left for either of us to go.

My chest was heaving and my hands were shaking against the wall on either side of him.

I looked at him, really looked at him. The careful blankness he’d been wearing all night had cracked at the impact, a hairline fracture spreading out from the center, and underneath it his eyes were wide and wet and scared and something savage and broken twisted through me at the sight of it.

Feel it, feel what you’re doing, feel what you’re throwing away.

"You must be insane."

My voice didn’t sound like mine. It was too quiet, too controlled, the way a fire looks like nothing right before it takes everything in the room.

"You actually think—" Something came out of my throat, not a laugh. It is airless and broken. "You think you can walk into my room and let me make love to you and then stand there and reject me and just walk away? You think I’m going to stand here and let you do that?"

Asher’s jaw was set. His chest was rising and falling too fast. His back was flat against the wall and there was nowhere for him to go and his eyes were steady and terrified all at once.

"You are my Omega." The words ground out of me one at a time, dragged over gravel, each one costing something. "You are my mate and you walked in here tonight and you let me—"

I stopped and my jaw clenched. The image of him looking up at me in the dark, tears running silently into his hair, hands gripping my shoulders like he was trying to hold on to something he already knew he was losing, hit me somewhere completely unguarded and I had to look away, had to stare at the wall for two full seconds and breathe through my nose before I could continue.

"You let me make love to you," I said, and my voice cracked on the last word, actually cracked, and I hated it and couldn’t stop it. "Already knowing you were going to do this. You looked me in the eye and you let me—"

I stopped again because I couldn’t finish that sentence without losing something I was not prepared to lose in front of him but I pressed forward instead.

"And now you think you’re just walking away."

My voice dropped. Dropped somewhere deep and cold and entirely beyond reason.

Somewhere that had stopped being about pride and started being about survival.

"Don’t forget something." I told him and his chin lifted, bracing and preparing for what I would say next.

"I still hold your secret."

The quality of his stillness changed instantly. It went from defiant to something older and colder and more frightened, and I watched it happen and felt sick in my stomach and kept going anyway because the alternative was watching him leave and something in me would rather be exactly the monster he’d always believed I was than survive that.

"Every person on this campus." My voice dropped lower still. "Every wolf, every human and everyone who has ever looked at you and made an assumption, I will burn every single one of those assumptions to the ground. I will open my mouth and I will make sure there is not one corner of this school where you can exist without everyone knowing exactly what you are."

Asher’s throat moved.

"You won’t dare," he said and the words came out quieter than he meant them to. I could hear the fracture running straight through the center of them but I held his gaze and said nothing.

Let the silence grow until it had weight. Until he could feel the full measure of it pressing against him. Until his eyes moved across my face looking for a bluff and found nothing, found only the cold, furious, completely serious truth of me staring back at him.

"Try me," I said softly.

Something shifted in his face and I straightened. I took the smallest step back and gave him just enough air to breathe but nowhere near enough to move.

"As long as I exist," I said, each word falling separately and finally, "and as long as you are mine, you will never break this bond."

My wolf was still slamming itself against my ribs. My hands were still shaking. The bond between us was throbbing like a wound that refused to clot, raw and furious and stubbornly, impossibly alive despite everything he’d tried to do to it.

"You will never reject me." I told him as I looked straight into his eyes.

"So let me be very clear. I, Reed Jackson, reject your rejection."

The words came out cold and absolute and carrying the same ceremonial weight he’d used when he’d tried to sever us, turned back on him like a door slammed in his face, like a key turned in a lock from the other side.

"And I am binding this mate bond tighter than it has ever been." My voice dropped to almost nothing. "Tighter than either of us can break."

Silence.

His chest rose and fell, mine did too, fast, hard, and everything I was made of pushing against the surface trying to get out and I held it back through sheer stubbornness because I would not break in front of him. I would not let him see the full damage of what he’d done. Not tonight.

"Now get lost."

I turned away before I could see his face change. I walked to the window, putting my back to him and slowly wrapped both hands around the windowsill and stared down at the dark quad below, at the empty lamplit paths, at the world going on completely indifferently while my chest felt like something had been torn out of it and left a hole that the cold air kept rushing through.

I heard him peel himself off the wall.

His footsteps crossed the floor. The soft drag of his shoes. I tracked every single step without turning around, my knuckles going white against the wood, my jaw clenched so tight it ached. The door hinges creaked.

"Asher." I spoke out and the footsteps stopped.

I kept my eyes on the quad below. On the lamplight. On the empty paths and the dark buildings and the ordinary quiet world that had no idea what was happening in this room.

I kept my voice very, very quiet.

"When you pull a stunt like this again."

A beat of silence so complete I could hear both of us breathing.

"I won’t be calm the way I was tonight."

My knuckles had gone white against the sill. I loosened them finger by finger, deliberately, the way you release your grip on something you have decided not to destroy.

"I will make absolutely sure," I said, "that you wish you were never born."

The words fell into the room and didn’t echo. They didn’t need to. They simply landed and stayed, heavy and permanent, the way the truest things always do.

Not a performance. Not rage showing off for an audience, just a promise. Quiet and certain and coming from somewhere so deep inside me I hadn’t known it was there until tonight.

The door opened and closed. His footsteps moved down the hallway, growing quieter, and then disappearing entirely, and then there was nothing. Just the hum of the lamp and the distant sounds of the building settling and the cold coming off the glass and my own hands pressed flat against the windowsill so I wouldn’t put them through it.

I stood there for a long time.

The bond still burned in my chest. Hot and wounded, furious and alive. A fire that refused to go out no matter how hard he’d tried to smother it.

My wolf had gone quiet at last, not calm, just exhausted. It lay against my ribs like something that had fought until it had nothing left and was now simply waiting.

I pressed my forehead against the cold glass.

Outside, the campus was still and dark and entirely unbothered. The world going on as if nothing had ended tonight. As if everything was exactly the same as it had been this morning.

My reflection stared back at me from the glass. Eyes bright, jaw tight. The face of someone holding themselves together through nothing but force of will and the absolute refusal to fall apart until they were alone.

I was alone now, he was gone, he was still mine. Both of those things were true simultaneously and I didn’t know how to hold them both. I didn’t know which one was going to be the thing that finally broke me open. I didn’t know if I was going to stand here at this window until morning or turn around and look at the empty bed or go back to running laps in the dark trying to outrun a feeling that lived inside my own chest and had absolutely nowhere else to go.

What I knew was this.

He had walked in here tonight already decided and let me love him anyway and I had let him.

And the worst part, the part that was going to follow me into every sleepless hour between now and whatever came next, wasn’t the rejection.

It was that even knowing how it ended, I wouldn’t have changed a single second of it and somewhere down that hallway, I was almost certain Asher Scott knew that too.