Chapter 82: The Weight of What I Chose

ASHER

The mop bucket was heavier than it looked. I found that out on the first morning when I dragged it across the east corridor at five fifteen AM with my arms already aching and the sky outside the windows still completely dark and the whole building silent except for the sound of wheels on the stone floor.

By day three I’d stopped noticing the weight and by day five I’d stopped noticing most things.

I moved through the punishment the way I’d learned to move through everything difficult in my life. Put your head down. Set a rhythm. Don’t think too far ahead. Just the next section of floor. Just the next row of hedges. Just the next stack of trays in the kitchen that needed scrubbing before the breakfast service started.

Don’t think because thinking was the dangerous part.

The hateful glances were constant. I had expected that. I’d stood in the main hall four days ago in front of every student and faculty member at Stone Claw Academy and said out loud what I was and what I had done and how long I had done it for, and I had kept my voice steady through the entire thing and when it was finished I had walked back to my place and stood straight and stared at the wall ahead of me and not looked at a single face.

I didn’t need to look at the faces because I could feel them. The anger was a physical thing in a room full of Alphas. It had texture and temperature and direction, and all of that direction was pointed at me.

Reed had announced it two days before the assembly. Stood in the middle of the main hall during the dinner hour and said it in that quiet, final voice of his that had the same effect on a room as a door being bolted shut. ’He is my Omega, my fated mate. Marked and bonded. Anyone who has a problem with his presence here has a problem with me.’

Nobody had a problem with him. So nobody did anything but doing nothing and accepting something were entirely different things, and the distinction lived in every set of eyes that tracked me across a room and in every Alpha who stepped back slightly when I passed like proximity itself was an offense.

I understood it. An Omega in an all-Alpha school wasn’t just an administrative violation. It was a biological complication. During heat I would affect every unmated Alpha in range whether I wanted to or not and during a full moon the collective instincts in this building would pull in directions that suppressants couldn’t fully counter.

I was a variable in an environment that had been built on the assumption of my non-existence and every person here felt that in their blood even if they couldn’t articulate it in words.

I knew that when I enrolled. I had chosen it anyway and then I had tried to undo it by doing the one thing guaranteed to make it permanent.

’You tried to leave me.’

Reed’s voice in my head, low and rough and barely held together.

’You rejected me and when that didn’t work. You did this.’

I pressed the mop across another section of corridor and stared at the wet stone floor and thought about the particular cruelty of cause and effect.

I had exposed myself to get free of him but instead I had given him a reason to hold on tighter than he ever had before. He was everywhere now. Not always visible but always present, a warmth at the edge of my awareness that the bond translated faithfully whether I wanted the information or not. I could feel when he was close. I could feel when he was watching and he was almost always watching.

Not close enough to violate Voss’s conditions but close enough.

I wrung out the mop and moved to the next section and told myself that was fine. That I could work with that. That I was used to Reed’s orbit by now and this was just a tighter version of something I’d been navigating for a year plus. I almost believed it.

The hand on my shoulder came from nowhere and I spun around so fast the mop handle clattered against the wall and my heart was already in my throat before my brain caught up and identified the hand and the face attached to it.

Julian, standing two feet away with his palm still raised and his eyes wide.

“Sorry—” I started.

“Don’t apologize to me,” Julian said. “I’m the one who just gave you a heart attack.”

He looked at me for a moment with that expression he had, the one that saw more than it let on and never made a production of it. Then I registered the figure standing slightly behind him and to the left. Scott.

He was standing at a careful distance. Not far enough to be obviously deliberate but far enough to be noticed. His arms were crossed loosely over his chest and his expression was doing something complicated that he wasn’t quite managing to keep off his face.

Something shifted in my chest and I turned back to the mop and moved it across the floor.

It’s fine, I thought. It’s not his fault.

It wasn’t Scott’s fault that the first time he’d learned what I was, it had been in a hallway full of Alphas trying to drag me through it. It wasn’t his fault that everything he’d believed about me for however long we’d occupied the same spaces had turned out to be lies and it especially wasn’t his fault that somewhere in the back of his mind he was probably sitting with the knowledge that an Omega had done what he couldn’t. Had stood betweecqn Reed and whatever Reed was going to do, had taken every consequence of that without flinching, and had kept a secret so complete that it had fooled everyone including Scott himself.

I knew that pride. I understood it. Alpha pride was a specific and tender thing and I had apparently managed to bruise his simply by existing near him.

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