YOU'RE MINE, LITTLE MATE

2: I Reject You

BROOKS

This was a nightmare. It has to be. But the loud whispers and hostile glances didn't feel like it. Everybody in the auditorium was staring at me with so much hatred that I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.

“Can Brooks Beauregard come up here?” the alpha king continued, and my body automatically followed his alpha command. The walk from my seat to the podium went on for miles, and the eyes on my body felt like needles. My heart was hammering loudly in my chest, my whole body was trembling, and my hands were shaking so hard that it was a miracle I made it to the podium.

“Young lady, I'm not going to ask you to confess to your crimes because I understand how an orphan and a misguided omega like you could have easily gotten swayed by the promises of an enemy faction,” the alpha king started. Still, I wasn't even looking at him. I could only look at Levi, who was standing in between us in what I'd have thought was a protective move, but he still wasn't looking at me.

“Your punishment is an expulsion from this royal academy, and of course, you'll be exiled from the city. That's a considerate punishment, given the enormity of your crimes.”

“But I didn't…” I was struggling to speak because I was in the presence of the most powerful man in the country and because my heart was hurting so badly it felt like a hammer was being beaten against it.

“I didn't commit any crime,” I managed to voice out, and I focused on Levi, “we are actual mates. I don't know… I’m not a part of any enemy faction. Levi knows. Say something, Levi. Is this a joke? Is this…”

“Come on, son.” The alpha king nudged his son, and he stepped away from us, “put her in her place.”

“Levi,” I called out, lips trembling from the force of my repressed tears, “say something. We had a plan. You promised to make me your Luna. You promised…”

“For f***s sake, Brooks,” he snapped as his voice thundered and echoed through the auditorium, “come on, do you really think I was going to make you my Luna?”

My mouth parted in shock, and I had to grab my chest at the sudden pain that tightened like a vice around my heart.

“It was just for fun, sleeping with you, sweet-talking you, all of that,” he continued, voice bitter and eyes wide with anger, hurt, and disgust.

I took a step back.

“Even if the mate bond between us was real, I'd never honor it. I'd never make someone like you my Luna.”

“Levi…”

“And in case I wasn't clear enough, this is me rejecting the mate bond, if it really does exist between us.” He completed and my heart dropped completely. The whole auditorium was silent and in its silence, I could hear the sound of my heart breaking and an alien pain that made me want to double up in pain coursing through my veins. I staggered backwards from the intensity of the pain.

I looked at Levi, but there was no trace of the boy who had loved me and treated me like I hung the moon over the last month. He looked like a vicious alpha prince who couldn't believe the audacity of an omega to think that she could mean something to him.

I tried to blink back my tears, but they ran down my cheeks in torrents. I took a step back from him, from the boy who promised me eternity.

“In that case, I'm just going to accept your…”

“Get out!” he yelled maniacally like a demon just possessed his body and his eyes, morphed with his wolf’s look, just as demonic. The force in his voice made me stumble back.

“Get the f**k out of my sight. I never want to see you again.”

I stumbled further back as the whispers started again. I dared a look at the crowd, and it was like staring into a gaping hole. They made me recoil, and when I looked at Levi again, he looked wounded, and his hands were halfway raised as if he wanted to pull me into his arms.

“Go!” he yelled again, betraying whatever I thought his body and eyes were trying to communicate, “get the f**k out of my sight, Brooks.”

I waited for him to say that this was a mistake, that it was a prank or something, but his eyes held the finality that this was real, that whatever I thought we had was over.

And so I turned and ran.

And I never stopped running.