REJECTED AND PREGNANT, I FLED THE PARK

CHAPTER 004

SEBASTIAN'S POV

As soon as the door slammed behind me, my wolf was the one to turn against me as if I were its enemy.

He was quiet, through the entire exchange with Adeline, too quiet, coiled tight in my chest, I knew he was but I chose to ignore it. The moment I hit the hallway, his growl was deep, angry and it vibrated through my ribs and was all for me.

You marked her. If a wolf's instinct could be called a voice then it was in his voice it came. You marked her and then you touched her with another woman who isn't your mate.

Well, that's not as easy as it sounds," I said under my breath, knowing that I looked completely mad trying to talk to the empty hall, the empty hallway. A pack member rounded the corner and saw me, before rapidly turning his head away and running off.One of the younger warriors of the pack, Liam, spotted me as I came around the corner and quickly looked over his shoulder before running off. There was apparently a lot of word. Of course it had. Adeline's tears and the bare bottom of her feet slapping her up and down the compound dirt had not been subtle.

I returned to my own room, and sat heavily on the edge of my bed, the same bed that twenty-four hours ago Adeline's mark had bloomed fresh and raw under my teeth, and an hour ago before, Victoria had been curled against my side.

My wolf growled again, down, but not up, it was an accusation.

That's what alphas do, I told him, told myself, the same excuse I've been spitting for three weeks since I first picked up Victoria when she climbed into my lap, and I hadn't pushed her out of my arms. All the alpha's up to me have done this. My father did it. His father did it. It's tradition. It's what is the reason the power in the pack remains intact with more heirs, more loyalty, more....

It was obvious that you were hated by her. My excuses were cut the same as a blade through my voice, that of my wolf. You sensed it via the bond. Her heart broke within her, and You said it was “dramatic”?

I put my head in the palms of my hands.

Well, I actually felt it, I just didn't know where. The bit I couldn't rationalize was the resentment I felt toward them and the need to assert my alpha status, as I’d said it a thousand times before, that was the way of a pack. For me it wasn't some figment of imagination; it was a person, fitting between Adeline and me right now, threading its way through my chest when she's standing at my door, looking at me like that, and I feel like my chest cracked along with hers.

I already knew she didn't believe me. Then the horror. Then the worst of all, when it turned into hatred, raw and irrefutable, set on me. It was the first time ever that I felt that. But, even an hour later, there was still a hint of her pain in the connection, as if the old bruise were being squeezed.

And I'd been there, saying to her, "No, you're being dramatic, scratched both hands across my face. How did I get to be such a coward? For years, I'd seen my own father bring a succession of women home to the pack house, my mother sitting silently by his side quietly grieving a little more with each new woman, until at sixteen she could barely be heard. As a youngster I had vowed never to do that to a friend of my own. I recalled the very instant when I was twelve and my mother sobbed alone in the garden, when her friend, another of my father's boys, had come to live in the west wing, and I had vowed, most sturdily as a child can vow, that I would never allow anyone to feel this small.

And yet here I was.

I assured myself that it wasn't like with Victoria. That it was not really about her at all, that it was about Victoria and what had become so obvious after all these years of being interested in her that it seemed like a punishment to not accept it. I told myself that Adeline didn't need to know, really, not if I was careful, and that when she did her first reaction would be very similar to that of all the other Lunas I'd been with: understanding and knowing what it means to be mated to an alpha.

But I hadn't thought of the feelings I would have when she discovered. I hadn't realized how it felt to see the person I had marked as my mate, the one I had tasted less than a day ago and felt the bond, the rightness, with, looking at me like she was going to scrape me off the bottom of her shoe.

I knew this was going to happen, you did, I'd said. But that wasn't enough to make it better. So I try to sound like I'm not only repeating the same excuses I used to use when I was a kid, but I am saying them in the exact clinical, detached, tone that I used to.If I'm going to throw her the same excuses that I throw at him, I might as well throw them at him in the same clinical and detached tone I used to.

I did not quite mean to say that! I had meant to explain, to reason with her – but the words were cold and final, alpha authority creeping into my voice – not totally under my control – some instinct of mine, that it was my right and I was being made to feel guilty for doing it.

I was left with my wolf huffing and disgusted and turning his head away from the thought, slinking into a dark corner in my mind, where he seemed determined to sulk until I got it sorted out.

If at all I can fix this.

I remembered how she'd been standing in that bathroom, toothbrush in hand, all of her trembling with something more than just anger. I remembered her voice cracking on the word mated, as if the memory of our bonding ceremony was something to be felt in my mind as it was brought up. I remembered the mark on her neck, she was so proud of less than 2 days ago and wondered whether she was right now hating the look of that same mark in her mirror. Hating me.

Before I could delve deeper and deeper into my thoughts, a knock had been heard at my door. I was familiar with the knock, the rhythm of it; and my stomach knotted in a way that wasn't fright and wasn't anticipation either.

Come in," I said, and Victoria came in, her hair still in disheartenment from earlier, wrapped in one of my old shirts. She seemed too well at ease; too relaxed; in a room that somehow did not feel like a good fit.

Will she be an issue? Crossing the room, Victoria came to sit down by me, next to my shoulder.

I recoiled at the question, the way she said it, even as Adeline's broken heart was an inconvenient logistical detail and not a person I'd sworn myself to less than a couple days ago.

I said it a little sharper than I meant to, "Don't.

This scared Victoria, she did not expect me to be so loud. "Don't what? I wonder, can you tell me...

Not a problem, Victoria, She's my mate, I marked her. I stood up abruptly, keeping a distance between us, give myself enough space for thinking clearly, away from her familiar scent that still lingers on my skin. I have to ask you to go away.

"Sebastian—"

"Please." My voice was more gravelly than I intended, and perhaps it wasn't because I looked at her with a face that I could not quite understand, she slowly got up from the bed. Hurt, maybe. Confusion. As if it were not the first time I hadn't thought I'd see that Adeline was in pain and that it truly meant something to me.

Silently she stopped at the door, "I thought this was what you wanted.

I couldn't give her a reply. Well, I did, but I hadn't quite faced it yet, that, somewhere between the time Adeline was in my door way and now, some part of me knew what I'd done, and how bad it was.

I sat alone in the dark for a long time, the harmonies of Adeline and I, now muted and further, than they had been an hour prior. As if she was trying to get away from it. As if she has built walls inside her which only the mark could not penetrate.

My wolf was awake again, agitated.

Fix it, he urged. Go to her. Explain. Beg if you have to.

But for some reason, a cold certainty settled in my gut, that it would not be that easy. Gave me to understand that whatever I'd broken tonight, would never be righted by a few well placed apologies in the morning.

I simply had no notion of the correctness of that impulse. Or how far Adeline would already be by the time I worked up the courage to try.