All Chapters of Reject Me, Alpha Tate: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Tate pov She said it simply. There was no anger or drama in her voice. It was just a fact she had already accepted. She didn't need my guilt to make her feel better; she had already moved on.It was so different from what I expected. Especially after I told her I kept birth control pills in her food. For weeks, I had imagined a big fight—something raw and sharp but she didn't give me that. She gave me honesty, she spoke like a woman who had already finished grieving the man I used to be and had become someone else.I don't know who that "someone else" is yet. I stop walking for a moment. She said it was just a night.I’ve been thinking about that all day. Nicole thinks sex is just a casual thing now. The Nicole I knew three years ago couldn't have said that to me. She didn't have the words for it then, or the freedom. But Nicole now—has decided her body is hers. I understand that, I can’t even argue with it. I was the one who made choices for her for years. I have no right to comp

Nicole's POVI tell myself on the walk over that today will be manageable.I am back. I took yesterday off—my first in months—so I’m rested and my head is clear. But heading to Tracy's room is not an easy task. She’s difficult, but I’ve handled her for months. I know how she thinks, and I know how to be in a room with her cruelty without letting it get to me.I tell myself this all the way up to her floor as I knock and open the door.Tracy is sitting in the chair by the window. Sophia and Lily aren't there. It’s just the two of us. I’ve learned that this can go two ways: sometimes she is softer without an audience, and sometimes she is worse because she doesn't have to perform—she can just say exactly what she means.Today she looks at me when I come in and she says, "So you decided to come back."I set the medication tray on the table. "Good morning, Mrs Tracy""You took a day off," she says."I wasn't feeling well," I said as I picked up the chart."Wasn't feeling well," Tracy rep

Nicole's POVThe rooftop lab at midnight is a different place than the rooftop lab in daylight.During the day it is functional—the good equipment, the clean lines, the view of the campus that I look at when I need perspective and then look away from when perspective is not what I want. At midnight it is something else. The campus below is dark except for the path lights, the sky above is clear, and the air has that cold late-autumn feel that reminds you, usefully, that the world is large and your problems are not the only things in it.I am sitting on the counter by the window when Marlon arrives. He takes the chair. He sets his coffee down and doesn't say anything yet, because he reads the tone of my text and knows me well enough to let me set the pace.Professor Parkville's face fills the screen on the far bench at twelve-fifteen. His reading glasses are pushed up on his head, and he looks out at us from his bright apartment study. He has the look he gets when he has been worried a

Nicole's POV A few days later, I arrived at the conference room twenty minutes early. This is deliberate. I need to be seated when he walks in. It doesn't give me a real advantage, but being the one who is already waiting changes the feel of the moment. I have walked into too many rooms defenseless in the past, and I am not doing it today. The room Marlon arranged is on the second floor of the main building. There is a long table, six chairs, and a water jug with glasses that no one will touch. The clean morning light comes straight through the east windows. I sit at the head of the table, because that is where Dr. Carter sits when she meets an alpha about her research. Today, I am Dr. Carter. Completely. There is no screen or cover between that name and this face. My hair is pulled back into its tight, platinum-blonde knot, the way I wear it in the lab to keep it out of my face. I am wearing plain dark clothes and my white research director badge. No green contact lenses. My

Tate's POV She is still at the table when I finally turn back from the window. I don't know how long I was standing there. Long enough for the room to quiet down from what it was—Marlon against the wall, Jonathan at the door, my control somewhere on the floor in pieces. It is back now. Barely. It is held together with the kind of discipline that was drilled into me before I was old enough to understand what discipline was for. Never let them see the full extent of what you feel, Tate. That is where they get in. Nicole is watching me the way she has watched me for weeks. Except I know now that she is unreadable because she built herself that way. Every hallway. Every morning in Tracy's doorway with that blonde wig, those green contacts, and that careful professional distance. Every meeting I sat through on the other side of a screen, genuinely believing I couldn't reach Dr. Carter, while she sat feet away, spoke to me through a voice modifier, and watched me fail to recognize her.