The Bully Alpha's Fake Alpha Mate (BL)-Chapter 85: The Call

REED

Two weeks.

Fourteen fucking days and I was losing my mind one hour at a time.

I stood at the east wing window with my shoulder against the frame and watched Asher cross the courtyard below and felt everything in me pull towards him with a force that had nothing subtle about it anymore. My hands were pressed flat against the frame on either side of the glass and I was gripping it like letting go would mean something I wasn’t ready for.

I wanted to go down there, that was the simple, maddening, and inescapable truth that had been living in my chest for fourteen days without relief. I wanted to cross that courtyard and take that cart out of his hands and pull him somewhere quiet, close and mine.

I wanted his scent surrounding me properly, not this diluted version that reached me through glass and distance. I wanted his hands in my hair and his weight against me and I wanted to hear him say my name the way he said it when everything else fell away.

I wanted to make love to him, slowly and thoroughly. The way you do when you have been kept from something long enough that patience has curdled into a different kind of hunger entirely. I wanted to take my time mapping every change the last three weeks had made to him, every softness and warmth that had emerged now that he had stopped suppressing everything.

I wanted to feel him come apart and hold him through it and keep him there until the exhaustion living in his shoulders had no choice but to dissolve.

I wanted to hear him moan my name until there was nothing else left in his head.

Instead I stood at this window, and gripped the frame, and just watched.

The evenings were the worst of it. Before all this he had come to my room, not always willingly, not always without something complicated happening first, not without me commanding him to but he had come and I had grown accustomed to his presence in my space in a way I hadn’t noticed until it stopped.

The weight of him on my mattress, the warmth of the bond when he was close enough to touch. The way he smelled in the dark when his guard was finally down and he stopped performing anything for anyone.

Now his room was his room and my room was mine and the corridor between them might as well have been Voss’s desk because the result was identical.

He didn’t come anymore, not because he was building new walls. I understood that. After the five AM starts and the grounds work and the kitchen detail and the isolated meals and the supervised academics there was simply nothing left of him by evening. The bond went quiet and deep the moment he reached his room, unconscious within minutes of lying down, and I lay in my own bed and felt him sleeping on the other side of the building and stared at my ceiling and did nothing useful with any of the things moving through my chest.

I missed him, Goddess knows I missed him so fucking much.

The thought arrived without ceremony and sat there without apology. I missed him. Reed Jackson, who had spent a year plus treating him like a problem to be managed, missed Asher Scott with a specific and inconvenient and completely undeniable ache that had been getting louder every day for two weeks and showed absolutely no signs of quieting down.

He turned the corner below and disappeared from view without once looking up at the window.

’Look up,’ I thought. ’Just once, just let me see your face.’ I prayed silently but he didn’t look up.

The courtyard was empty and I was standing at a window like an idiot and the bond was carrying the faint warm thread of him somewhere below and to the left, still moving, still working, and still not stopping.

My phone rang suddenly, snapping me out of my thoughts and I pulled it from my pocket without looking and pressed it to my ear.

"Yeah."

One second of silence and then something made me look at the screen. Everything in my face went still and my jaw locked. My grip on the phone tightened. I put it back to my ear and stood very straight and looked at nothing.

"Father."

"Have you broken it?" No greeting, no warmth, just that question sitting in the air like something that had been loaded for a long time and had finally been fired. "The bond between you and that Omega. Have you ended it? Have you come to your senses now?"

Something moved through me from the chest outward and then I laughed.

It came out completely beyond my control, rising from somewhere genuine and deep that found the question so fundamentally wrong that nothing else was possible. I heard my father go completely still on the other end and I laughed until my eyes stung and the empty corridor threw the sound back at me and I pressed two fingers hard against the bridge of my nose and breathed through it.

I laughed for a few more seconds before complete silence.

My father’s voice came through the line like something being dragged over stone.

"Reed." He growled my name out and I went quiet.

My chest was still moving too fast. I pressed my back against the corridor wall and closed my eyes for one second and felt the bond pulse steadily beneath everything.

"No," I said. My voice came out low and steady and final. "I haven’t broken it. I’m not going to break it. Asher is mine. He will be the Luna of my pack."

The sound that came through the phone from my father’s chest traveled through the line and landed in my spine. A growl compressed to its barest minimum, barely human, vibrating with everything he was keeping controlled.

"Do you care nothing for the Omega’s future?" The control in his voice was costing him. I could hear the price of it in every word. "Do you not care about his reputation? Do you not care about your future or that of the Omega? The omega would be doomed, and his life finished. A mere call would ruin the omega life and what he has been building. Do you want to loose that? And what will become of you when the pack finds out you are handing with a worthless being like that. The shame and humiliation you would face." He paused for a brief moment.

"You think binding yourself to that is protecting him." A pause that had a shape to it. Heavy and deliberate. "You are dooming him, Reed. You are taking something already broken and breaking it further and calling it love. If you don’t end it yourself, I am calling the school and ending it all."

My eyes opened, something hot moved through my chest and I laughed again. This one was different, shorter, sharper and coming from somewhere that wasn’t surprising, only furious.

"Go ahead," I said and my father stopped.

"Your next move. Whatever it is. Go ahead and make it." I was moving now without deciding to, walking the length of the corridor with the phone pressed hard against my ear and the heat in my chest finding nowhere to go. "It won’t touch him, not anymore. Your weapon is gone. He took it himself. He walked into a classroom full of Alphas and let go of everything, knowing exactly what it would cost him, knowing exactly what would happen, and he did it anyway." My voice dropped into something rougher than I intended. "What are you going to use against him now? Tell me. I genuinely want to know."

Silence, real silence. The kind with no answer behind it.

"That one thing he did." Something broke open in my chest that I had been holding closed for two weeks and I let it. I stopped walking and stood in the middle of the corridor and pressed my fist against the wall and felt the bond burn steady and hot through every layer of me. "I cannot get it out of my head. Not for one hour, and not for one minute. It only made me like him more." My voice had lost its steadiness and I didn’t try to get it back. "I have never wanted to protect anything in my life. Not once. I thought I wasn’t built that way. I thought that part of me simply didn’t exist." The back of my eyes was doing something I refused to acknowledge in any more detail than that. "And then he did that. Stood there alone and took everything on himself and asked me for nothing and now I cannot stop. I watch him go through that punishment every single day and every part of me wants to tear Voss’s conditions apart just to stand next to him while he does it. Just to stand next to him. That’s all. Just so he knows he is not alone in it." My jaw was so tight it ached.

"I lie in my room every night and feel him fall asleep on the other side of this building and I miss him. I miss him and I cannot touch him and he hasn’t been to my room in two weeks and my room feels wrong without him and I don’t know what to do with any of that except stand at windows like an idiot and watch him push a cart around a courtyard." I exhaled hard. "I don’t think I can let him go. I don’t think I’m capable of it and I don’t want to be capable of it. That’s the truth. That’s the whole truth."

My father was quiet for a very long time.

When he spoke his voice had lost its shape entirely.

"Reed. What you’re feeling is the bond. The mate instinct. It isn’t—"

"Bless us." I cut through everything else. Clean and final and without room for anything to follow. "Or watch me walk away from all of it. The pack, the title and the future you built. Everything." I pushed off the wall and stood straight. "Those are the only two options that exist. I am not offering a third one. Choose."

The silence stretched so long I counted it but he didn’t choose. The bond pulsed in my chest. Warm, steady and patient in a way I was not.

"Goodbye, Father."

I ended the call. I stood in the corridor with the phone in my hand and something in my chest that felt like putting down a weight I had been carrying for so long I had forgotten what standing upright felt like without it.

The words sat in the air around me, said out loud, given shape and made permanent by the fact of having been spoken to the one person who needed to hear them.

I pocketed the phone, rolled my shoulders once and went to find him not to violate Voss’s conditions but just to stand somewhere near him so he knew that he wasn’t alone.