Marked By The Alpha I Was Sold To

Mei Lin POV "Everyone, thank you for coming tonight." Jun Wei's voice filled the hall, steady and warm, the voice I had fallen for two years ago behind the training grounds when he told me I was stronger than I believed. I stood near the back in my white dress, the one he had picked out himself last month, running his thumb along the fabric and telling me it would look perfect on the night he finally made me Luna. My hands would not stay still. I pressed them flat against my thighs and made myself breathe. Two years of waiting. Two years of proving myself in a pack that never wanted an Omega standing beside their Alpha. Tonight it would finally be worth it. The whole of Sembawang Pack had come out for this. Every family, every rank, packed shoulder to shoulder beneath the lanterns strung across the hall. Jun Wei stood on the raised platform in his ceremony robes, tall and sure of himself, looking exactly like the man who used to sneak into the kitchens with me at midnight just to steal mango sticky rice and laugh about nothing. "Two years ago, I found my mate," he said. His eyes moved through the crowd and landed on me. My chest went tight with something close to joy. A few heads turned to look at me, curious, and I kept my spine straight the way a future Luna should. I had trained for this. I had bled for this. Whatever doubts this pack carried about an Omega wearing the title, I had spent two years trying to burn them away one by one. "Mei Lin has given everything to this pack," Jun Wei continued. "She trained harder than anyone believed an Omega could. She never once complained, not when the others mocked her, not when I asked more of her than I had any right to." My throat tightened. This was it. This was the part where he said my name and made it official in front of everyone who had ever doubted me. "But," Jun Wei said, and something shifted in his voice, something I did not like, "being Luna takes more than heart. It takes someone strong enough to carry this pack's future in her body as well as her hands." I stopped breathing. The words did not make sense yet. I stood very still and waited for them to arrange themselves into something I could understand. "Which is why tonight," he said, "I am naming Xin Yi Goh as Luna of Sembawang." For a moment the hall went silent, and in that silence I heard my own heartbeat, loud and wrong. Then the cheering broke over the crowd like a wave. Xin Yi stepped out from the side of the platform in a deep red gown, smiling the way someone smiles when they already know they have won. She climbed the steps slowly, savoring every second, and Jun Wei took her hand and lifted it high for the whole pack to see. Not me. Her. I do not remember deciding to leave. One moment I was standing among the crowd with my nails cutting into my own palms, and the next my back was pressed against the cold stone wall of the corridor outside, both hands clamped over my mouth to keep the sound trapped inside my chest where no one could hear it break. Footsteps echoed against the stone. I looked up. Xin Yi stood there in her red dress, arms crossed loosely, her face arranged into something that was supposed to pass for concern. "Mei Lin," she said softly. "I wanted to see if you were all right." "Get away from me." "I understand this feels unfair. But Jun Wei is only doing what is right for the pack's future" "Get away from me." My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated myself for it. Something shifted behind her eyes. The concern dropped away like a mask taken off, and what was underneath was worse, colder, satisfied. "You should try to be graceful about this," she said, stepping closer. "You were never actually going to be Luna, Mei Lin. An Omega, standing over Sembawang? Even you had to know, somewhere in that heart of yours, that it was never going to be real." My claws pushed out on their own, sharp and sudden, and I forced them back down until my palms bled instead of hers. "He marked me," I whispered. "We are mates." "He marked a mistake." Xin Yi's smile turned thin and sharp as a blade. "But it is over now. It is time you accepted that." Her hand drifted down to rest against her stomach, slow, deliberate, and I felt the floor tilt beneath me before she even spoke again. "I am carrying his child," she said. "So tell me, Mei Lin, what exactly do you bring to this pack that I do not?" The corridor went utterly silent around me. My whole body turned cold from the inside out, as though someone had reached into my chest and pulled everything warm straight out of it. "You are lying." "Am I?" She shrugged, small and cruel, the movement of someone who had already counted her victory. "Ask him yourself, if you do not believe me. I am sure he was planning to tell you eventually, once the time felt right to him." She turned to walk back toward the music and the golden light spilling from the hall, then paused at the last moment, glancing back over her shoulder. "Oh, and Mei Lin. You should start packing tonight. It is going to get very awkward around here once I begin to show." Then she was gone, disappearing back into the celebration that had once been supposed to be mine, and I was left standing alone in that corridor with my back against the cold stone, trying to breathe, trying to understand how two years of my life had just been handed to someone else in the space of a single sentence.