The Rejection-b

She reached the double doors at the back of the hall. Pushed one open into the cold night air. Let it swing shut behind her.

Only then did she let herself stop.

She stood on the top step, one hand braced against the wooden post, and looked out at the dark tree line beyond the pack houses, and waited for the ground to feel solid again. It didn't. Her legs were shaking now that no one could see them shake. Her breath was coming too fast, too shallow, and she pressed her free hand flat against her sternum like she could hold the torn place together by force.

Behind her, through the doors, she heard the hall come back to life—voices rising, the low murmur of two hundred people processing what they'd just witnessed, someone's chair scraping back. Life continuing. The pack moving on already, the way packs did, because one omega's ruined night wasn't going to stop the world from turning.

She made it three streets before she broke.

It happened in the alley behind the old mill house, in the dark, where nobody would see. She pressed her back against the brick wall and slid down until she was sitting on the cold ground, knees drawn up, and she cried the way she hadn't let herself cry in the hall—ugly, gasping, both hands pressed over her mouth so the sound wouldn't carry. She cried until her chest ached from it, until the torn place under her ribs had stopped feeling like an open wound and started feeling like something duller. Something that would still be there tomorrow, and the day after that, but wouldn't kill her outright.

She thought about her aunt, waiting up for her at home, who'd know the second Elena walked through the door that something had gone wrong, because Elena had never once in her life been able to hide anything from that woman.

She thought about the dress she was wearing, chosen so carefully, and how stupid it felt now, sitting in an alley with her knees pulled to her chest.

She thought about Kane's face in that half-second before he'd looked away—that flicker of something that wasn't rejection at all, that looked almost like a man watching himself do something he didn't want to do.

You know why, he'd said.

She didn't. And some small, stubborn part of her—the part that had survived losing her parents at nine years old, the part that had learned to stretch a paycheck and patch a roof and never once ask for help she couldn't pay back—that part of her decided, sitting in the cold alley with her face still wet, that she was going to find out.

Not because it would fix anything. The bond was severed. Whatever they'd had, whatever she'd let herself believe in for four months, was gone in a way that couldn't be undone by an explanation.

But she refused to spend the rest of her life not knowing why.

She stood eventually. Wiped her face with the heel of her hand. Smoothed down the front of the dress that had been meant for a claiming and instead had witnessed the opposite.