The Alpha’s Rejected Omega

By five in the morning, the pack-house kitchen floor was the only thing in Crestview I could say I had made better. I wrung the mop out over the bucket and watched gray water run down my wrists. My shift at the restaurant had ended at two-thirty. Miguel kept the bar open until four now, and Luna Helen’s chore list didn’t care what time I got home. Kitchen. Hallways. Three bathrooms. Then Jackie would knock on my door, and I would pretend I had slept. Eleven years of other people’s floors. Nobody had ever said it was a job. It was just what Omegas were for. I ate what the pack house left on the plates, slept where there was a bed no one wanted, and answered to whatever name the person calling me felt like using. Luna Helen had never once called me a member. Nothing in Crestview said I belonged to it. I had a different life once. I know I did, because I can still hear the sound of a blanket tearing. I was seven. My mother leaned over the back seat to hand me my binkie, and the corner caught on my father’s tool bag and ripped. I screamed that she had ruined it. I kicked the seat. My father shouted my full name, my mother grabbed for the wheel, and then there was glass, and a truck, and my mother lying very still on the road. I woke up in a hospital bed with a stranger’s arms around me. Luna Helen told me my parents couldn’t be with me anymore, and I cried myself to sleep on her shoulder, grateful that someone had come. She put me in a temporary home for girls the next week. I have been paying for that kindness ever since. Alpha Markus signed whatever needed signing and never looked at me again, except to point at something I had missed. The last thing I ever said to my mother was that she had ripped my blanket. I shoved the mop into the bucket harder than I needed to. “Watch where the f**k you’re going.” I had been so deep in my head that I walked straight into him. Jared Falcone, soon-to-be Beta of Crestview, stood in the hallway with a coffee in his hand and a look on his face like I was something he had stepped in. “I-I’m sorry, Jared,” I said, and dropped my eyes to his shoes. “Beta,” he said. “Practice it.” He stood there long enough to make sure I understood that he could, then shouldered past me, close enough that his arm dragged across mine. Eleven years, and I still couldn’t tell you what I had done to him. I had asked myself so many times that I had stopped expecting an answer. When he was gone, I realized I was gripping the mop handle hard enough to hurt, and I made myself let go one finger at a time. Jackie was waiting in the kitchen with two mugs, one hip against the counter. Her father had killed her mother when she was five, and the pack had exiled him and kept her. We had met in that home for girls, two orphans who liked the same music and hated the same floors. She waited tables part-time around her college classes and still found the energy to make me laugh before sunrise, which I considered a kind of magic. “Your face,” she said. “Jared.” “What is his problem with you?” “You’re asking me?” She laughed and handed me my coffee, and for about thirty seconds I forgot to be afraid of the house I lived in. Then Luna Helen walked in, already dressed, already holding her phone. Her eyes went to the floor, then to me, as though she were checking the shine of a spoon. “You missed a corner by the pantry,” she said, and I nodded, because there was nothing else to do. “Girls. The Alpha ceremony is in two days, and five thousand guests have confirmed. Call the caterer and the planner this morning. You will both be working that night.” She was gone before either of us answered. “There goes our summer,” Jackie said. “We don’t get a summer.” “Then there goes the part where we pretend we do.” I rinsed our mugs and told her I would grab my jacket. We had a shift in an hour, and Miguel had already warned me once about being late. The restaurant was where my father had worked before the crash, and some mornings I let myself believe the grease on the grill still held a trace of him. I needed every dollar Miguel paid me. In two days I would turn eighteen, and my plan was to be gone before anyone thought to count the years. Every folded bill in the sock at the back of my drawer was a mile between me and Crestview. I wanted to see the places I had only seen in magazines. More than that, I wanted somewhere to belong, somewhere nobody handed me a mop at the door. When I couldn’t breathe in that house, I walked to the far end of the western border, crossed the stream, and climbed a little hill nobody else bothered with. From the top, I could see for miles, and for an hour I belonged to nobody. I had told Jackie my plan and asked her to come. She said no, and I didn’t blame her. This was her home. I was just someone the pack had taken in, and I would be leaving without a single paper saying I had ever lived there. Love, I had decided a long time ago, was a story other people got to tell. If the Moon Goddess had one set aside for me, she had misplaced it with everything else I had ever loved. My room was at the end of the servants’ hall, a storage space someone had put a bed in. I pushed the door open and reached for my jacket on the hook. The door closed behind me. I hadn’t heard it open. I hadn’t heard anything. But the air in the room had changed, the way it does before a storm, and my body knew before I did. My shoulders were already up around my ears. My hand had stopped on the sleeve of the jacket. I turned my head just far enough to see him. Jared leaned against the door with his arms crossed, the coffee gone, nothing in his hands at all. He wasn’t looking at my face. He looked at me the way he did when he had already decided what he was going to take, slowly, as if the hours before the pack woke up belonged to him. I thought of the hill. I thought of the sock in my drawer. Neither of them had ever been farther away. Down the hall, a cabinet shut in the kitchen where Jackie was waiting. She was forty feet away and might as well have been in another state. He reached behind him and turned the lock. The click was small, and it was the loudest thing I had ever heard. I winced. I couldn’t stop it. And Jared smiled, because he knew I had understood.