Alpha Family’s Regret After Omega Daughter Died

Everyone in my family is one of the strongest pureblood Alphas in the pack—except me. I’m an Omega. My brother and sister awakened their wolves at twelve. I'm fifteen, and mine still hasn't shown the slightest sign of waking. My family was convinced that the Mercer Alpha blood in me simply hadn't manifested yet—and that it was their duty to bring it out. To sharpen my senses, my brother dumped me in Nightwood Forest when I was still a child. When the tracking signal failed, he insisted that I find my own way out. I wandered for a day and a night before collapsing from dehydration. When my mother arrived, she comforted my guilt-stricken brother. “Daniel was only trying to help you,” she told me. Then she turned to him. “Just don't make it so difficult next time.” To provoke my wolf, my sister put me through nerve training using Alpha pressure. I knelt on the floor, trembling and begging her to stop as pain split my head apart. But she only stared at the line spiking across her screen and exclaimed that my Alpha blood was finally responding. My father carried me back to my room. “Vivian is only trying to help you. If your wolf awakens early too, no one will ever look down on you again.” Later, they designed an awakening experiment for me. They locked me in a room at forty-two degrees below zero, trying to recreate the extreme conditions in which my brother and sister had awakened. During the experiment, the thermal barrier failed, and every cry for help I sent through the mind-link was blocked. I watched the temperature keep falling as my eyes slowly closed. That was when I finally understood. My greatest mistake wasn't being ordinary. It was being born into an Alpha family that couldn't accept an ordinary child. Chapter 1 On Thanksgiving, when I was fifteen, they locked me in the dark room again. "Chloe's vitals have been flat for three hours." My sister Vivian sat by the fireplace, scrolling through the data on her tablet. "According to the juvenile Alpha model, she should be deep in dormancy by now. Once her wolf takes over her body, her heart rate will come right back up." At some point, my soul had come loose. I was up in the shadows beneath the vaulted ceiling of the great room, watching my family celebrate Thanksgiving. My corpse was curled up one door away. "Is she really going to be all right?" my mother asked. She couldn't hold it in any longer. My brother Daniel said, "Relax. When Vivian's wolf and mine awakened at twelve, our vitals plummeted too. Chloe carries Mercer blood. She'll get there. She's just slower than we were." "But she tested Omega at birth." "Blood tests can be wrong sometimes. Every other member of this family is an Alpha, yet she turned out to be an Omega? Doesn't that strike anyone as strange?" Daniel sounded certain. "She's three years away from eighteen. If we awaken her Alpha blood now, she could stand before the whole pack as an Alpha at her coming-of-age ceremony." My father kept nodding along. He was the Alpha of the Frostridge Pack, and nothing in the world mattered to him more than bloodline. And Daniel was the child he was proudest of. He raised his glass. "To Daniel, for passing the heir's trials. And to Vivian, whose new research was just approved by the Pack Council." I looked down at my half-transparent body, covered in frost, and gave a bitter little laugh. Without me, the four of them were having a lovely evening. Six hours earlier, they had shut me in the cold room. If my wolf awakened this year, they said, it would be the perfect Thanksgiving. They had been putting me through that kind of torture for three years. Daniel had set the room to forty-two below, ten degrees colder than last year. Forty minutes, he told me. If I held on for forty minutes, the equipment would detect the first sign of my wolf awakening. He said that every time. Last year, it was only thirty. The family mind-link was shut off. Vivian gave me another nerve stabilizer from her latest research. "Don't be scared. This is to protect you. The second your head starts hurting, take it." But this time, forty minutes came and went, and the door stayed shut. I wanted to crawl over and knock. But I was frozen in place in that corner, with my hair fused to the floor. Moving would have taken a layer of skin with it. This was not forty-two below anymore! I looked up. The thermal barrier had timed out and shut down. Nothing was limiting the cooling unit now. The temperature just kept dropping. Down into a cold I had never felt in my life. My head started to split open. With shaking hands, I swallowed the pill Vivian had given me. It did nothing for the headache. If anything, I got colder. Cold, until I stopped being able to feel anything at all. Cold enough to snuff out whatever wolf I had inside me. And then I was drifting near the ceiling, looking down at my own body. At a corpse. I had pressed the emergency call button on my bracelet again and again. I knew I had. So why had nobody come? Out in the living room, Daniel was pleased with himself. "The monitor alarm went off. That means her wolf is about to surface! The trial is working! We have to keep going!" When the second alarm sounded, Vivian said my body was entering dormancy and told everyone not to interrupt it. I stopped breathing altogether, and still not one of them came through that door. After dinner, my mother couldn't sit still any longer. She dug a cashmere blanket out of the closet. "I'm going to look in on her. She's not strong. Her temperature will rise more slowly than yours did." I hung there in the air and watched her walk toward my room, one step at a time. Open the door, Mom. Open it now, and you'll see that nothing that worked for them was ever going to work on me. "Mom! Give it twenty more minutes!" Vivian stepped in front of her. "The curve was still moving a second ago. That could be her wolf getting ready to respond. If you warm the room now, everything we've done will be wasted." My mother looked down at the blanket in her hands, then over at my door. My father patted her shoulder. "It's fine. The thermal barrier has a built-in lower limit, so the room can't get cold enough to hurt her. She's held on this long. Don't give up when she's this close." In the end, my mother put the blanket away. Chapter 2 The family sat around the fireplace and listened to Daniel tell the story of the blood wolf he'd faced in the heir's trials. Vivian glanced down at her tablet. "Why is the line showing her vitals still flat? Daniel, could something be wrong with the sensor?" Daniel scoffed. "No chance. That equipment has an error rate of less than a tenth of a percent. The flatter the line is, the more likely it is that her body is pouring everything it has into the wolf." "I can't even smell Chloe anymore." My mother frowned and looked up the stairs. "Cold dulls scent," Daniel reassured her. "When I went through this at twelve, I slept in my room all night. By morning, my wolf had awakened." "But you and Vivian come from the strongest Alpha line there is. Chloe..." Vivian considered that. "She just hasn't been pushed to the threshold yet. Mom, we're doing all of this so nobody gets to push her around later." My mother went quiet. She had been at a pack gathering once and overheard what people said when they thought she couldn't hear. "The Mercer family has produced nothing but Alphas for generations. How do you get an Omega daughter out of that? There must be something wrong with the Luna's genes..." "Exactly. None of the Lunas before her ever produced an Omega." The year I turned thirteen, she sent me to the best werewolf school in the territory. And because my wolf hadn't awakened early, Daniel and Vivian's classmates cornered me outside the training field and laughed at me. I came home crying and told her I didn't want to go back. My mother held me all night. I thought it meant she understood. Instead, the next morning she told Daniel and Vivian to awaken my Alpha blood, no matter what it took. She looked me straight in the eye. "Chloe, once you're strong, nothing will ever be able to hurt you again!" I was crying so hard I could barely see her. "But Mom, I have plenty of Omega classmates. They're all doing fine." My mother was furious. She slapped me. "How can you compare yourself to them? You're a Mercer!" I didn't understand. Why couldn't a Mercer child be an Omega? She crossed the room and gathered Daniel and Vivian into her arms. "Your sister is lucky the two of you are willing to spend so much time helping her." I watched all of it from up in the air, and I was calm. I should thank them, then. They finally set me free. This life had been too hard for too long. Before the Nightwood training, Daniel told me a rescue team would be right behind me the whole way. But my nose wasn't sharp enough. When I got lost, he wanted to see whether instinct alone would lead me out, so he held the team back for six full hours. The cries of the night bats and vampires in that forest haunted my dreams. After that, I rarely slept well. The first time Vivian used Alpha pressure on me, she said it would only last ten seconds. The pain drove me to my knees, and I begged her to stop. Her eyes stayed fixed on the line shooting up on her screen. One more minute, she said, and my wolf would be forced out. They truly believed they were helping me. No one ever asked whether I wanted any of it. "It's getting late." My mother stood up. "Call me the second the trial ends. I want to see her myself." Passing my room, she faltered for a second. My father came up behind her. "If it's bothering you, go in now." Her hand was already on the doorknob. Then she remembered what it had been like when Daniel and Vivian were twelve and their wolves awakened. Neither of them had answered anyone that night either. The next morning, the Frostridge Pack woke to two of the strongest wolves it had ever seen. In the end, my mother took her hand off the door. "Give her a little more time. Chloe has always wanted us to be proud of her. Maybe this trial will be the one that works." My father put an arm around her shoulders. "Whether she comes out of there an Alpha or an Omega, she's still our youngest. Once this is over, we'll make it up to her properly." I followed them down the hall and shouted, "I don't want you to make it up to me! I want you to open the door! Come look at what you've done!" The only answer I got was my own voice echoing off the empty walls. Late that night, my father pulled an old photo album from a drawer in his study. In the picture, I was five, riding on his shoulders with a scruffy gray stuffed wolf under one arm, grinning like the world was mine. "She used to follow me everywhere." My father ran a thumb across the photo. "Marie, have we been pushing her too hard? She's only fifteen." My mother looked away. It was a long time before she said quietly, "One more night. If her wolf still hasn't awakened by morning, we'll stop pushing her." My father nodded and set the album down beside him. He didn't slide it back into the drawer the way he always did. Chapter 3 My mother went to bed and never fell asleep. At two in the morning, she got up, heated a bowl of soup, gathered the cashmere blanket into her arms, and carried both to my door. "Chloe, Mom is ending the trial now, okay?" Nothing moved on the other side. My body lay against the freezing floor, and the distress light on my wrist was still blinking, one slow pulse after another. She tried to reach me through the family mind-link and got nothing back but dead silence. Her expression changed. She turned and pounded on Daniel's door. Daniel checked the terminal, half asleep. "The trial's isolation protocol is still active, so of course the mind-link won't go through. The curve isn't showing any dangerous fluctuations. She's still in dormancy." "You said the isolation was only forty minutes." "You can't interrupt an awakening," Daniel explained patiently. "Mom, no one cares more about keeping Chloe safe than I do. If her wolf really awakens early, no one will ever call her worthless again." That last line landed, and my mother went quiet. She set the soup and the blanket down outside the door and told Daniel, "This ends before sunrise." The next morning, a strange, cold, damp smell hung in the hallway. Mrs. Anderson came over from next door to borrow a baking pan and wrinkled her nose the second she stepped in. "Marie, was there some kind of chemical spill in here? It smells so strange." Vivian smiled. "That's the awakening compound I made for Chloe. It does have a bit of a smell to it." Mrs. Anderson lit up. "Chloe's wolf is awakening early too? Your whole family really is full of prodigies." My mother didn't put on the proud smile she always did. That day was supposed to be Daniel's. He was being honored as heir. His suit was pressed. The car from the Pack Council was already idling outside. Daniel checked the time. "The ceremony's about to start. We can finish the trial when we get back. There's still time." For the first time, my father didn't agree with him. "Let the Council wait. Nobody leaves this house until we know what's going on with your sister." My mother's eyes went red the moment she heard it. If they had put me ahead of all those honors the night before, would any of this have happened? Once the neighbor was gone, she went straight to my room. "Open it. Alpha or Omega, I don't care anymore. I'll accept her either way." Daniel frowned at the tablet in his hand. "Something's off. The latest readings are abnormal. They aren't rising. Let's give it another half hour." "Move." Vivian shouted as if something had just clicked into place. "I get it! I get it! It's the plateau before the breakthrough, isn't it? There's a long flat stretch right before it happens, and Chloe is about to break through any second now. Right, Daniel?" Then she turned to my mother. "Mom, Daniel spent a lot of money on this equipment, and Chloe has already held out for over seventeen hours. If we quit now, she'll blame us for letting all of it go to waste the moment she wakes up. "You know how she is. She always finds something to resent." My mother stared at Vivian. For the first time, she doubted the whole thing. My father checked his watch. His voice came out cold. "Fine. Half an hour. When the time is up, that door opens no matter what the numbers say." My mother sat down outside my door with the blanket in her lap, frowning. Something about what Vivian had said didn't sit right. She kept thinking back to the day they carried me out of that forest. The first thing I said when I woke wasn't a complaint. I asked whether Daniel had gotten in trouble for not coming to get me sooner. After Vivian used Alpha pressure on me, I spent three days in the hospital. And I was the one who told my mother to leave her alone. "Vivian is smart," I said. "She hates to lose at anything. Don't say a word to her." My mother had stroked my hair. "Chloe is the reasonable one. She knows her brother and sister are only trying to help her." Still turning it over, she said to my father, "Maybe Chloe would be perfectly happy as an Omega." My father nodded. "You're right. She missed Thanksgiving. I'm going to go get her something." He pulled on his coat. "I'm buying Chloe that moonstone wolf pendant she loves. She's been talking about it forever. It'll be sitting there when she comes out, and it'll make her whole year." I hovered by the door and watched him hurry off. Most moonstone is silver or gray. Gold is rare. That particular pendant was the one I'd wanted since I was twelve. My father always said he would fasten it around my neck himself the day my wolf awakened. I would never live to see that day. Chapter 4 Half an hour passed, and the monitor still showed a flat line. Vivian kept refreshing the terminal, and for the first time, her confidence began to crack. "Daniel, why did the room temperature reading turn red? Why is it showing a question mark?" "It's been holding at the setpoint this whole time, hasn't it?" "It's probably the snow outside. There's no way the room temperature hasn't changed at all." Daniel took the tablet and quickly scrolled through the back-end logs. A line of red text flashed across the screen: [Temperature sensor offline. Current reading is the last cached value.] The hallway went quiet. The color drained from Vivian's face all at once. She crouched and pressed her palm flat over the gap beneath the door. White frost was creeping through the gap from the other side. "Daniel, open the door." Her voice began to shake. "The temperature in there could have been below the safety threshold for hours." Daniel went still, his hand on the terminal. He had seen the frost too, of course. But admitting he'd lost control of the equipment meant admitting that the model he'd built to prove the strength of the Mercer bloodline had been wrong from the very beginning. "Check it one more time," he said through gritted teeth. "The cold could be coming from her wolf as it awakens, couldn't it?" But the certainty had gone out of his voice. I watched him and thought about the day I got lost in the Nightwood. He had stood in front of a screen exactly like this one, telling everyone over and over to wait a little longer because I was going to find my own way out. He always trusted his own judgment. My mother shoved past both of them. "Open it!" Daniel still refused to believe anything was wrong. "It's probably just an equipment malfunction! If Chloe were really in danger, the emergency bracelet would have—" He didn't get to finish. Another error message flashed across the screen. [Family mind-link isolation duration: seventeen hours, forty-seven minutes.] [Distress signals not delivered: twenty-six.] The bowl of soup fell from my mother's hands and shattered on the floor. "Twenty-six times..." She was shaking all over, hammering on the door as if she'd lost her mind. "Chloe! My baby, answer me!" No sound came from inside. My mother put her ear to the door. A werewolf could pick up the faintest breath through two walls. But right then, there was nothing at all behind that door. No heartbeat. No footsteps. Not even the muffled sobs I used to stifle when I was sulking. Only the cold-air vent, still running, still making the same flat sound. I looked at her hand pressed against the door, and everything inside me was calm. Frozen over. I had pounded on that same door just like that, over and over, the night before. That was when my father got back. He was holding a dark blue velvet box in both hands and was still catching his breath. "Chloe, Dad brought you the moonstone pendant." Inside the open box lay a small wolf carved from gold moonstone, with fur so finely detailed it looked real and a blue stone set into one eye. But the shop owner had said it was only an ordinary pup. The first time I saw it as a child, I thought it looked like me. We were ordinary, but we could still shine. But my father said I would only be worthy of a Mercer gift once my wolf awakened and proved strong enough. Nobody answered him. My mother grabbed his arm, crying. "She called for help twenty-six times... Michael, twenty-six times... Open the door!" The smile slowly faded from my father's face. He pushed the velvet box into her hands and rounded on Daniel. "Release the lock." "Dad, forcing the door will interrupt—" "I told you to release the lock!" My father grabbed Daniel by the collar. "She's your sister, not a problem for you to solve just to prove you're always right!" Daniel opened his mouth and, for the first time in his life, nothing came out. My father's Alpha pressure burst through the hallway. Daniel staggered back and the terminal hit the floor. The next second, my father put his fist through the lock. The door flew open.