Rejected by My Alpha Mate: My Alpha's Regret

The moon hadn't even reached its peak when Ivy Sorensen felt her whole body turn toward him, like a compass needle finding north. She hated it instantly. The clearing was packed, every member of the Blackwood pack gathered in a wide circle around the ceremonial stone, torches throwing long shadows across the grass. Tonight, Kai Sterling would be confirmed as Alpha. Tonight, the pack bond would settle fully into him, and every wolf here would feel the shift the moment it happened. Nobody had told Ivy she'd feel something else too. Her hands went cold first. Then her chest, tight and full at once, like something inside her had been asleep for seventeen years and had just opened its eyes. She looked up, searching without meaning to, and found him already looking back. Kai stood at the center of the circle in his ceremonial black, broad-shouldered, jaw set, eyes the pale gold of a wolf barely holding his human shape. He was supposed to be looking at his father. At the pack elders. At anyone but her. He wasn't. "Kai." His father's voice cut low and warning from the front row. Alpha Marcus Sterling didn't raise his voice often. He didn't have to. Kai's throat moved. Ivy watched him swallow, watched something flicker behind his eyes; recognition, maybe panic, maybe both; and she realized with a sick, plummeting certainty exactly what was happening. Mate. The word rose in her like a bell struck once, low and resonant, and around them she felt the pack's attention shift, wolves turning their heads, scenting the air, picking up on what their new Alpha's body had already confirmed before his mouth said a single word. Ivy Sorensen. Seventeen years old. Omega-ranked, low in the pack hierarchy, the kind of girl nobody in this clearing had looked at twice before tonight. And apparently, fate's cruelest joke. "Say something," she whispered to herself, not sure if she meant it as a plea or a warning. Kai's eyes stayed on her a moment longer. She would remember that moment for years, the way his jaw tightened, the way his hands, loose at his sides, curled slowly into fists. Not from anger. From restraint. Then he looked away. "I, Kai Sterling," he said, his voice pitched to carry, steady in a way that made the betrayal worse, "reject Ivy Sorensen as my mate." The clearing didn't gasp. It went silent, the specific silence of a hundred people trying very hard not to look at the girl standing alone at the edge of the crowd. Ivy felt it hit her like a physical blow, a wrongness deep in her chest, a tearing sensation just under her ribs where the bond had bloomed seconds earlier and now folded in on itself, half-formed and rejected. Omegas weren't supposed to survive that feeling easily. She locked her knees and stayed upright out of pure spite. Marcus Sterling's mouth curved, satisfied, and Ivy understood then that this hadn't been a choice. Not really. She'd seen the way Marcus looked at the Hale girl standing two rows back, the daughter of an Alpha from a pack twice Blackwood's size. She understood, in the space of a single humiliating breath, exactly what her rejection had just purchased. An alliance. A merger. Everything except her. "Ivy." Someone touched her elbow, her mother, Dana, her face pale with fury she didn't dare show here, in front of everyone. "Ivy, we're leaving." "I know." Ivy's voice came out steadier than she felt. She didn't look at Kai again. She refused to give him that. She turned instead, and the crowd parted for her the way crowds do for something they'd rather not touch. Whispers followed her out of the clearing, soft and vicious. Rejected. Poor thing. Did you see her face. She kept her chin up until she was past the tree line, until the torchlight no longer reached her, and only then did her hands start shaking. Behind her, she heard the ceremony resume. Heard Marcus's voice announcing his son's ascension in full, the words landing like nails into a coffin she hadn't asked to be buried in. She didn't look back. Dana didn't say anything until they reached the house, small and set at the edge of pack territory, the kind of place low-ranked families were given without complaint. She shut the door, checked the latch twice like it could keep tonight out, and turned to her daughter with red-rimmed eyes. "He had no right," Dana said. "He had every right." Ivy sat down hard on the edge of the couch, because her legs had finally decided they were done pretending. "He's Alpha. He can reject whoever he wants." "That's not what I mean and you know it." Dana crouched in front of her, took both her hands. They were still cold. "Marcus pushed him into it. Everyone saw it. That doesn't make it right, it makes it worse." Ivy laughed, short and humorless. "Does it matter? I still felt it. I still have to live with it." She pressed a hand flat against her sternum, where the ache hadn't faded, where it throbbed low and constant like a bruise she couldn't stop pressing. "I still have to see him every day for the rest of my life, unless—" She stopped. Dana went very still. "Unless what?" Ivy looked at her mother, and for the first time all night, something other than grief moved through her. Something clearer. Colder. "Unless I don't," she said. "Unless I leave." "Ivy—" "I'm not asking you to come." Ivy stood, and the room tilted for a second before settling. "I mean it, Mom. I can't stay here and watch him marry the Hale girl. I can't stay here and be the pack's favorite story to whisper about. I won't." Dana's face crumpled, just for a second, before she nodded once, sharp. "Then you go before sunrise. I'll pack what I can carry. Territory law says once you cross the boundary line without an Alpha's blessing, the bond registry marks you as—" "Unclaimed and unprotected. I know the law." Ivy managed a small, humorless smile. "Good. I'd rather be unprotected than owned by a pack that never wanted me." She didn't sleep that night. She sat by her window instead, watching the tree line, waiting for the ache in her chest to fade into something bearable. It never quite did. She left before dawn, one bag over her shoulder, her mother's voice cracking as she said goodbye at the door because Dana had responsibilities here that Ivy refused to let her abandon. The walk to the boundary line took forty minutes. It felt like forty years. The marker was a simple stone, half-buried in moss, easy to miss unless you knew what it meant. Ivy stood in front of it for a long moment, the last thread of the pack bond humming faint and unwilling under her skin, and thought about turning back. She didn't. She stepped over the line. The pain that followed nearly took her to her knees; the bond didn't just weaken, it tore, sudden and vicious, like something reaching back to hold on even as she pulled away. She gasped, pressed a hand to the stone marker to keep herself upright, and somewhere far behind her, miles deep in Blackwood territory, she could have sworn she felt an answering flinch. As if somewhere, asleep in his bed or awake and staring at the ceiling, Kai Sterling had felt it too. Good, she thought, savage and raw. Let it hurt him too. She didn't look back at the trees. She turned instead toward the road that led into the human world, into a life with no pack, no rank, no bond dragging at her chest every time she breathed. Three years, she told herself. Give it three years, and this will stop mattering. She had no idea, yet, how wrong she was.