The Rejected plump omega becomes his obsession

Chapter 1

Maeve

"Look at her," Zayne said, loud enough for the whole festival square to hear, and he laughed like I was a joke someone had told him at a party. "Really look at her. You want me to carry that across the threshold? I'd need a forklift."

The laughter started at the front of the crowd and rolled backward like a wave, and I stood there in front of the altar in the emerald dress my mother had spent three nights altering by hand and felt every single person in the square turn to look at my body.

Five seconds ago the Moon Priestess had said my name. Maeve Carter. And then she'd turned and said his. Zayne Ashcroft. The Alpha heir. The boy I'd had a crush on since I was fifteen, the one who used to smile at me in the hospital cafeteria when he came in to visit his grandmother, the one who asked me once how I could stand all that blood and actually listened to the answer.

For five seconds, I had been the luckiest girl in the whole territory.

Now he was standing three feet away from me making forklift jokes.

"Zayne," the Priestess said, very quietly. "The Goddess has spoken."

"Then the Goddess needs glasses." He spread his arms out wide to the crowd like a performer, and some of them laughed again, the drunk ones near the food stalls mostly. "No offense to the Goddess. But come on. I'm going to be Alpha. I need a Luna people look up to. Not one they need to look around."

I should have walked away. I know that. Every self-respecting woman in every book I've ever read would have lifted her chin and walked away. But my feet were stuck to the stones like somebody had nailed them down, and all I could do was stand there and feel my face burning and try not to cry in front of a thousand people.

"You talked to me," I said. My voice came out so small I hated it. "At the hospital. For two years. You asked about my shifts. You remembered my patients' names."

"I was being polite."

"You brought me gift."

"I bring everybody gifts, Maeve. It's called manners." He looked at me with something close to pity, which was so much worse than the jokes. "You're a nice girl. You're a good nurse. I'm sure some guy out there is going to be really happy to have you. Somebody with a strong back."

More laughter.

And that was when I saw the phone.

My twin sister Mia was standing at the edge of the front row, right next to the rope line, in a silver dress that probably cost more than my car. Same face as mine. Same eyes, same nose, same birthday. The only thing different about us was everything else. Mia was the thin one, the pretty one, the one with a hundred thousand followers who posted her breakfast every morning and got paid for it.

She was holding her phone up at chest level, angled right at me.

And on the screen, in the little corner where it shows your viewers, there was a red dot and a number. Live. 21,403 watching.

She was streaming it.

My own sister was standing in front of the altar of the Moon Goddess, on the most important night of my life, broadcasting me getting torn apart to twenty thousand strangers. And when she saw me looking, she didn't lower the phone. She didn't look embarrassed. She just tilted her head a little, the way she does when she's trying to find a better angle.

"Mia," I said. "Turn it off."

"Turn what off?" she said sweetly, and the phone stayed exactly where it was.

"Turn it off, Mia!"

"Wow, okay, calm down." She glanced down at the screen and back up at me with a little smile. "People are asking if you're okay. That's sweet, right?"

Somebody in the crowd yelled something about my thighs. Somebody else yelled back at him to shut up. A woman near the front was shaking her head at Zayne, and an old man at the back was turning to leave like he was ashamed to be there. But most of them were just watching. Holding their drinks. Waiting to see if I'd cry.

I didn't cry. Not yet. I turned back to Zayne, and something hot and sharp came up from the middle of my chest, the part of me that had held pressure on bleeding wounds for twelve hours straight on Saturday nights while drunk men screamed at me, and it came out of my mouth before I could stop it.

"You're a coward," I said.

The square went quiet.

Zayne's smile slipped. "What did you just say to me?"

"You heard me. You're a coward. You couldn't even do this privately. You had to make it a show so everybody would laugh with you, because if they're laughing, nobody notices that you didn't have the guts to just say no." My hands were shaking at my sides. "The Goddess picked me. And you're scared of what people will say. That's all this is. You're scared."

For one second, something crossed his face that I didn't understand. Not anger. Not embarrassment. It looked almost like confusion, like he was looking at me and trying to find something that wasn't there. His hand went to the middle of his chest and rubbed at it, absently, like a man checking his pocket for keys he knew he'd lost.

Then it was gone, and he was cold again.

"I reject you," he said.

Three words. That was all it took. I felt something snap in my chest, sharp and quick like a rubber band breaking, and I put my hand on the stone altar to stay standing.

"I, Zayne Ashcroft, Alpha heir of this pack, reject Maeve Carter as my mate." He said it loud and formal, to the whole square, the way it's supposed to be said. Then he turned around, away from me, toward the rope line. "And I choose my own Luna."

He walked straight to Mia.

She lowered the phone just enough to keep filming while he put his hand on her waist. And I watched the way his hand found her waist. I watched it slide right into place like it had been there a hundred times before, like it knew exactly where to go. And Mia leaned into him the same way, easy and practiced, her head tipping toward his shoulder before he'd even pulled her close.

He kissed her. In front of everyone. In front of me.

And it wasn't a first kiss. I've seen first kisses. In hospital waiting rooms, at weddings, at the bus stop outside my apartment. First kisses are clumsy and careful. This was a kiss between two people who'd done it so many times they didn't have to think about it.

The crowd cheered. Mia's free hand was still holding the phone, pointed at me, catching my face over Zayne's shoulder while he kissed her.

"How long," I said. Nobody heard me. I said it louder. "How long, Mia?"

She pulled back from Zayne and looked at me with her lipstick smudged and a little shine in her eyes. "Does it matter?"

"How long?"

"A year," she said. "Give or take. Since his birthday party. You remember. You brought him that ugly sweater you knitted."

The whole year flashed through my head at once. Every time she'd been out late and said she was at the gym. Every time Zayne had come into the hospital cafeteria and asked about my shifts, and Mia had texted me right after asking what we talked about. Every time I'd told her I thought he might like me, sitting on the end of her bed, and she'd smiled and said you never know, Maeve, you never know.

She'd known. The whole time. She'd been sleeping with him and letting me hope.

I reached down and pulled the silver bracelet off my wrist.

I'd worn it since I was seven years old. Every girl in the pack gets one when her wolf first stirs, a thin silver chain with a little crescent moon, to wear until the Goddess names her mate. Mine had never come off. Not in the shower, not at work, not when the nurses told me it wasn't sterile. I'd taped over it with medical tape for six years rather than take it off.

I set it down on the stone altar in front of the Priestess. It made a tiny click that I swear I heard over the whole crowd.

Then I turned around and walked away.

The crowd split in front of me like I was something they didn't want to touch. Somebody bumped my shoulder on purpose. Somebody said poor thing. Somebody else said poor thing my ass, did you hear what she called him. I kept my eyes straight ahead and walked toward the gate at the far end of the square and didn't let a single tear fall, because Mia's phone was still on me, I could feel it on the back of my neck, and I would rather have died than give her twenty thousand people watching me cry.

Near the back of the crowd, by the beer tent, a tall man in a dark hockey jacket was standing with his arms crossed. He wasn't laughing. He was staring past me at Zayne, and his jaw was clenched so tight I could see it from ten feet away. I didn't know him. I didn't have room in my head to wonder.

I was almost to the gate when a hand closed around my wrist.

It was cold and thin and very strong, and I jerked around ready to scream at whoever it was, and stopped.

The Moon Priestess.

She must have come all the way through the crowd behind me, an old woman in a silver robe pushing past a thousand people, and nobody had noticed her because everyone was still watching Zayne and Mia at the altar. Her gray braid had come half loose. She was breathing hard. Her fingers dug into my wrist right where the bracelet used to be.

She pulled me close, so close I could smell candle smoke on her robe, and her eyes were wet and frightened.

"Listen to me, child," she whispered. "He was not the one the Goddess showed me."

I stared at her. "What?"

"He was not the one." Her grip tightened. "I spoke the name I was told to speak. But that is not the face I saw."

"Then whose face..."

"Priestess!"

Two men in dark coats were pushing through the crowd toward us. Alpha guards, the kind who stood behind the Ashcroft family at every ceremony. The Priestess's face went white. She let go of my wrist so fast it was like I'd burned her.

"Don't trust the name," she breathed. "Whatever they tell you. Don't trust the name."

The guards reached her. One of them took her elbow, gently, the way you'd take the elbow of a confused old woman at a wedding.

"Come along, Priestess. You've had a long night."

They turned her around and walked her back toward the altar, one on each side, and she looked over her shoulder at me the whole way, her lips still moving. I couldn't hear what she was saying anymore.

I stood at the gate with the cold winter air on my face and my wrist still aching where her fingers had been, and behind me, a thousand people were cheering for the man who'd just thrown me away.