Obsessed With My Alpha

Gema's Regret

Gema's POV

"Damn it, Gemma. You complete and total idiot."

I mutter it under my breath as I walk, faster than necessary, the cold air stinging my face and doing absolutely nothing to cool the shame burning up my neck. My heels crunch against the gravel path and every step feels like a punctuation mark on the worst decision I've ever made.

"Tell him. It'll be freeing. You'll finally have your answer."

Right. My answer. I had it now, didn't I? Tucked neatly beneath my ribs like a splinter — small, invisible, and quietly unbearable.

I make it maybe forty feet before I hear him.

"Gemma. Wait."

I stop walking.

I don't know why I stopped. Every functioning brain cell I have is screaming at me to keep moving, to get far enough away that he can't see the wreckage on my face. But my feet won't cooperate. They never do when it comes to Jonah Snow.

His footsteps close the distance between us, and then he's there — beside me, slightly breathless, like he jogged to catch up. Like it mattered to him that he caught up. I stare straight ahead at the dark tree line and wait.

"Why did you stop me?" I ask. My voice comes out quieter than I want it to, stripped of the cool indifference I'd been rehearsing. "You gave me your answer. I accepted it. You could have just let me go."

He doesn't respond right away. I feel him shift beside me — that restless, barely-contained energy he always carries, like his body is too big for the stillness he's trying to perform.

"I don't know," he admits finally.

I turn to look at him then, because I can't help it, because *I don't know* is the most honest thing he's said all night and it catches me off guard. He's watching me with that expression I've never been able to decode — brow furrowed, jaw set, something working behind his eyes that he keeps locked just below the surface. His hand lifts slightly, then drops, like he started to reach for me and thought better of it.

"You don't know," I repeat.

"I just—" He exhales. Looks away, then back. "I don't want tonight to be the thing that ruins us."

Something in my chest cracks open a little. Not in a good way. In the way of a wound that hadn't fully closed.

"Jonah." I wrap my arms around myself, not from the cold. "You not feeling the same way doesn't ruin us. That's just life. What ruins us is *this* — you chasing me down the path because you can't let me walk away, but you also can't give me a reason to stay."

He flinches. Barely — most people wouldn't catch it. But I'd spent eleven years learning the vocabulary of Jonah Snow's face.

"You mean so much to me," he said. The words were low, genuine, and completely, devastatingly insufficient.

"I know I do." I held his gaze so he'd understand I meant it. "But meaning a lot to someone isn't the same as being chosen by them. I need you to understand that difference, because I don't think you do."

He was quiet for a moment. The wind moved through the oaks above us and somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled — long and mournful, fading into the dark.

Then his hand found my arm. Just below the shoulder, his fingers curling with a pressure that was gentle but certain, like he needed the contact to anchor something in himself. The warmth of it bled through my jacket sleeve, and I hated my own nerve endings for noticing.

"Don't disappear on me," he said. Rough-edged. Almost urgent. "Please. I can't—" He stopped himself, jaw working like he'd caught the rest of the sentence before it escaped. His grip on my arm loosened, then released entirely. He stepped back, running a hand through his hair, and the shutters came down — I could see it happening, that careful blankness settling over his features like a mask being fitted into place.

"I'm not disappearing," I said. "I'm just... recalibrating."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I love you enough to still want you in my life." I took a step back, putting space between us. "But I love myself enough to stop making that the only thing I want."

He looked at me for a long moment — really looked, the way he rarely did, like he was trying to find something in my face that he couldn't name. Whatever he was searching for, I wasn't sure he found it. Or maybe he did, and it scared him.

Either way, he didn't stop me when I turned and walked away.

This time, I kept going.

I didn't sleep.

I lay in bed staring at the ceiling of my childhood room with dry eyes and a chest full of lead, replaying the night on a loop I couldn't switch off. Not the rejection — I'd braced for that, had been bracing for it for years if I was honest with myself. It was the "afterward" that kept snagging me.

"Why did he chase me?"

"Why did he grab my arm like that — like something in him couldn't bear the distance?"

I pressed a pillow over my face and groaned into it.

The worst part wasn't that he'd said no. The worst part was that he hadn't been able to explain why. *I don't see you that way* — fine. That was a sentence with a clear ending. But *I don't know* was a sentence with a door still cracked open, and I was exactly the kind of fool who would stand in the cold staring at the light underneath it.

"Stop it," I told myself. "He was being kind. He felt guilty. That's all that was."

But kindness didn't make you run after someone. Guilt didn't make your hand linger on someone's arm like it was the last solid thing in the world.

I flipped onto my side, pulling the blanket up over my shoulder.

The thing no one tells you about loving someone who doesn't love you back is that it doesn't immediately stop. It doesn't switch off the moment they say the words. You carry it out of the conversation like luggage, all the weight still yours, and you stand at the door of the rest of your life, wondering what to do with it.

I thought about my wolf — or rather, the absence of her. The hollow quiet inside me where every other girl my age had something alive and instinctual, something that guided them, connected them to the pack in ways I could only observe from the outside. My eighteenth birthday was less than a year away. If I didn't shift by then, I likely never would. And then what?

"Then what" had always been the question my family refused to answer directly.

"Then you find a good match," my dad would say. "Then you make yourself useful."

Useful. Like I was furniture. Like I was a solution to someone else's problem.

I pressed my face into the pillow again.

Jonah had never made me feel like that. Even tonight — even saying no — he hadn't made me feel small. He'd looked at me like I was something worth protecting from himself, which was infuriating and devastating and somehow worse than being dismissed.

"Don't disappear on me."

I squeezed my eyes shut.

"I'm not the one who's disappearing, Jonah," I whispered to the dark.

You are. You've been disappearing for years, piece by piece, behind every wall you've ever built. And one day, I'm going to stop waiting for you to find your way back out.

I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling until the sky outside my window went from black to grey to the thin, reluctant blue of early morning.

And somewhere in that long, wakeful night, between the ache and the resolve, I made my first real decision:

I was going to stop shrinking.

Not for him. Not to make him notice, not to become some idealized version of herself that finally cleared his bar. For *me.* Because I was seventeen years old and rankless and wolfless and desperately in love with a boy who didn't know what to do with it — and none of that meant I was without value.

It just meant I'd been looking for it in the wrong place.

I let out a long, slow breath, feeling something in my chest loosen by a fraction.

"Get up," I told myself. "Get up, and start becoming someone you actually like."

Tomorrow, I decided, I'd call my uncle about training.

The day after that, I'd figure out the rest.