The Bully Alpha's Fake Alpha Mate (BL)-Chapter 78: THE EXPOSURE

ASHER

I didn’t sleep, not even for a minute. I sat on the floor of my room the entire night with my back against the bed frame and my knees pulled to my chest and my eyes fixed on the middle distance while the bond pulsed in my chest like a second heartbeat that refused to stop no matter how many times I willed it to.

Every time I closed my eyes I saw his face, the way his eyes had gone red, the way his hands had been shaking against the wall on either side of my head.

The way his voice had dropped into something quiet and certain and completely without mercy.

As long as I exist and as long as you are mine.

I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum and breathed through it.

The bond was still there. Stronger than before, if anything. Whatever he’d done when he said those words, whatever it meant to reject a rejection and bind the bond tighter, I could feel it. Like a thread that had been fraying had been rewound and knotted and pulled taut.

Rejecting him hadn’t worked.

I had walked into his room last night already decided on what to do. I’d let him hold me and love me and look at me like I was something worth keeping, and I’d said goodbye in every way I knew how except out loud, and then I’d said it out loud too, and it hadn’t mattered.

He hadn’t let me go.

Which meant there was only one option left.

The one I’d been avoiding since the beginning. The one that would cost me everything.

I sat on that floor until the sky outside my window went from black to grey to the pale, indifferent blue of early morning. Then I got up. I washed my face, changed my clothes and stood in front of my mirror for a long moment and looked at myself.

I’m sorry, Mom.

Then I walked out the door to end it all.

The hallways were already filling by the time I arrived at the building. Laughter, footsteps and the ordinary noise of a morning that had no idea what was coming. I moved through it like a ghost, keeping my head down, my suppressants still doing their job, my scent still locked tight behind the wall I’d spent years learning to build. I walked into the classroom.

The room was already full. Alphas everywhere. Sitting, standing, and arguing loudly over nothing. The smell of dominant pheromones thick in the air the way it always was, the way I’d learned to breathe through without reacting, without giving anything away.

No one looked at me, no one dared ever look at me, not unless Reed was making them look, not unless I was the subject of something but with his threat, I was now a furniture, a background and a body that occupied a seat and caused no disruption but that was about to change.

I walked to my seat and sat down and placed my hands flat on the desk in front of me. My heart was going too fast. I could feel it in my throat, in my fingertips, and in the base of my skull.

This is it.

The professor walked in and the room settled. Pens moved, pages turned and the lecture began and I sat there through the opening minutes with my hands flat on the desk and my eyes forward and the most important decision of my life sitting quietly in my chest waiting for me to make it.

There was no version of this that ended well for me. I knew that. I’d known it since the moment I understood what I was and what world I’d been dropped into. An Omega in an Alpha academy. A lie so complete it had become my entire identity. Every suppressant, every careful movement, every year of performance had been building toward the moment someone found out, and I’d always known that moment was coming.

I’d just always assumed it would be taken from me. I hadn’t imagined I’d be the one to do it. If this is the price of ending things with Reed. Then I’ll pay for it.

I closed my eyes.

’I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry I couldn’t hold on longer. I’m sorry this is how it ends.’

Then I let go.

Every wall, every layer, every day of careful, exhausting, and meticulous control. I dropped all of it at once.

My Omega pheromones didn’t leak out gradually, they exploded. Sweet, soft, warm and completely, unmistakably, irreversibly Omega. The scent hit the air like something set free after years of captivity, flooding the classroom in seconds, rolling outward through the vents and under the door and into the hallway beyond.

For one strange, suspended moment, nothing happened. The professor kept talking, pens kept moving. Then suddenly one student near the front lifted his head and sniffed. His pen stopped moving. Then followed by another head coming up, then another.

The confusion moved through the room like a current. I watched it from my seat, perfectly still, hands flat on the desk, scent still pouring out of me without restraint. I watched the moment the comprehension hit them. I watched it travel from face to face like fire jumping between dry things.

"What the hell is that smell?"

"Is that—"

"That’s an Omega scent."

The words fell into the room and the room fell apart. Chairs scraped, students stood, heads swiveled, hunting for the source, and then someone pointed, and then every pair of eyes in the room landed on me at the same time and the silence that followed lasted exactly one second before it shattered completely.

"Him?"

"That’s Scott—"

"He’s an Omega?"

The shock was genuine. I could see it. That was the part none of them had been prepared for, not just that there was an Omega in the room but that it was me. Someone they’d seen every day. Someone who had sat beside them in class and eaten in the same cafeteria and walked the same hallways. Someone they’d never suspected.

The shock lasted about four seconds, then it curdled into rage.

"He deceived us."

"He tricked the entire academy."

"He infiltrated—"

"That’s illegal—"

More students were crowding into the doorway now. The scent had already spread into the hallway, drawn people in from other classrooms, and the doorway filled with bodies and the bodies brought their anger with them, and the anger was loud and it was growing and it was all pointed directly at me.

Someone shoved my chair from behind.

I didn’t react.

An Alpha I didn’t know grabbed my arm and yanked me to my feet and I went without resistance, without pulling back, without making a single sound. I kept my chin slightly lowered. My hands loose at my sides. This is what I came here for.

More hands grabbed me. They were rough, careless, grabbing my collar, my shoulders, shoving me toward the door and then through it into the hallway where the crowd had grown thick and furious and loud with the kind of righteous, collective anger that needs a target more than it needs a reason.

"Expose him!"

"He lied to all of us!"

"Omega trash!"

Someone spat and I felt it land on the side of my face and I didn’t wipe it away. This is the price. I knew the price.

The hands kept pushing me forward and I kept moving with them and I kept my eyes down and breathed through the burning in my chest that had nothing to do with the pheromones still pouring out of me and everything to do with the bond, which was going absolutely haywire now, screaming at me through every nerve ending I had, recognizing the danger and reacting to it with a terror I couldn’t afford to feel.

I had expected this.

I had chosen this.

Across the hallway, pressed against the opposite wall, completely frozen, was Scott. He was staring at me with his mouth open and something in his eyes that wasn’t anger.

It was devastating like he’d just watched something he loved get destroyed and hadn’t been fast enough to stop it.

I had expected him to feel that way, the betrayal running through him now and the thought that a mere Omega would stand before Reed and challenge him while an Alpha like him couldn’t do it. He must be hating himself and hating me too. But what was done was done. I should have told him the truth when I had the chance but now seeing the look on his face hurt me even more than I had expected it.

"Get him outside!"

"Make an example—"

"Drag him across campus—"

Then I heard Julian, his voice cut through the noise from somewhere to my left, sharp and high with panic.

"Stop — stop, don’t touch him, get off—"

I turned my head just enough to see him trying to push through the crowd toward me, his face white, his eyes wide and wild. Julian, who had known. Julian, who had kept my secret without a word, without leverage, without asking for anything in return, simply because he was Julian and that was the kind of person he was.

Julian, who had protected and was by my side despite the treat from Reed. The one who had ignored Reed and stood with me now looked like he was going to be sick.

Our eyes met for half a second and his mouth formed words without sound.

’Asher, what did you do?’

I looked away. I couldn’t hold his gaze. Not because I was ashamed of the choice, but because seeing his face made it real in a way the anger of a hundred strangers couldn’t.

Julian had known me, really known me and watching him look at me like that — like I’d just stepped in front of something he couldn’t stop — was the closest I’d come to breaking since I walked out of Reed’s room last night.

The crowd shoved me forward again and I stumbled. I caught myself and kept walking.

Someone grabbed a fistful of my shirt from behind and I closed my eyes.

This is fine, this is what needed to happen. Reed will be free. His father will have no reason to come after him. The bond will dissolve eventually, it has to, and he’ll go back to his life and his pack and everything he worked for and none of this will—

The pheromones in the hallway shifted. All at once like a weather system reversing direction without warning.

Something dominant and furious and enormous rolled through the corridor from behind the crowd and every single body in that hallway felt it at the same time. The shouts died. The shoving stopped. The hands that had been grabbing at me went still.

The silence was instantaneous and absolute and then a voice. Not loud but somehow that made it worse.

"Get your hands off him."

The crowd split like something had walked through the middle of it and the middle had simply ceased to exist.

And through the opening—

Reed.

His eyes were blazing, not red yet but something worse than red. The particular color of someone who had not slept and had not calmed down and had arrived here already past the point where reason lived.

His gaze found me immediately. It moved across me the way you check something for damage. The spit on my face, the hands that had been on my collar, the stumble marks, all of it registered in his expression in sequence, each one landing visibly, each one tightening something in his jaw and his hands and the set of his shoulders.

The hallway was so quiet I could hear my own breathing. Reed looked at the crowd, then he looked at me and I understood with absolute certainty that whatever came next, whatever he was about to do, I had caused it.

I had walked in here this morning and struck the match myself, the fire was Reed Jackson and it was already burning.