Alpha Family’s Regret After Omega Daughter Died

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.