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Alpha Family’s Regret After Omega Daughter Died
Alpha Family’s Regret After Omega Daughter Died
Autor: Fox C

Chapter 1

Autor: Fox C
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.
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  • Alpha Family’s Regret After Omega Daughter Died   Chapter 10

    Five years later, my parents, who had once had everything, lived in a remote coastal town.My father had lost his position as Alpha and every asset he owned. Hauling cargo at the docks was the only work left to him.His once-straight back was now stooped, and his hands were rough and deeply cracked.My mother's hair had gone white.She sat by the window every day, sewing one cashmere blanket after another, but she no longer had a daughter to wrap in any of them.She offered every blanket she finished to the Omega children in town.Before offering each one, she stitched my name into a corner.The town knew who they were. Nobody wanted kindness that had come this late.So my mother folded the blankets into a neat stack by the door and sat beside them all night.On the fifteenth of every month, they carried the old blanket and the moonstone wolf onto the first bus out to see me.My father knelt at the headstone and wiped the dust off it carefully."Chloe, Dad brought the pendant."He gent

  • Alpha Family’s Regret After Omega Daughter Died   Chapter 9

    Daniel and Vivian went to Blackstone Prison.Under the Council's ruling, silver binding rings suppressed their Alpha pressure and all their wolves' abilities.The moment they passed through the gate, every advantage their blood, talent, and name had ever given them disappeared.Daniel still tried to bring up his energy models and his standing as heir. All he got in response was "Nobody here needs an heir. Mop the floor."Even in prison, Vivian refused to fall behind anyone. Gritting her teeth, she finished her share of the hard labor faster than anyone else, until both hands were covered in blisters.Every time the pain made her shake, she saw me on my knees in front of her, begging her to stop using her Alpha pressure.Before the family mind-link was cut for good, Rourke let them place one last call."Dad, Mom, help us." For the first time, Daniel's voice held none of his usual arrogance. "Without my wolf, I'm nothing in here."Vivian could barely get the words out through her sobs. "

  • Alpha Family’s Regret After Omega Daughter Died   Chapter 8

    By the next day, the story had spread across every territory."Strongest Alpha Bloodline Ran Awakening Experiments on Underage Omega Daughter" was the top headline on every platform.Reporters and furious pack members filled the road outside the Mercer estate."She was fifteen!""Isn't an Omega still their child?""Were you trying to help her, or could you just not stand having somebody ordinary in the house?"The Council seized the estate and the lab, and all the auction proceeds went toward protecting underage Omegas and helping victims of such experiments.Overnight, the Mercer crest vanished from the Alpha council chamber where my father had served for years.The Omega aid program my mother used to run issued a public statement cutting ties with her.People who used to fawn over my parents now pulled their own children back behind them at the sight of either one.Nobody was going to trust an Alpha and a Luna who couldn't keep their own daughter alive.Before Daniel and Vivian were

  • Alpha Family’s Regret After Omega Daughter Died   Chapter 7

    A month later, after an emergency investigation and a public hearing, all four were found guilty.In the hall of the Pack Council, the four of them knelt on cold marble.Rourke handed a thick case file to the Elder."The project registered by the Mercer lab was approved only for noninvasive bloodline observation. Daniel and Vivian concealed the subject's status as a minor and an Omega, along with the true intensity of the stimulation. Without authorization, they added forest training, Alpha pressure, and a cold trial."The Elder went through the file one page at a time.At the bottom of every application page were my father's Alpha seal of approval and my mother's confirmation as guardian.But each time, Daniel and Vivian pushed the actual intensity beyond the safety limit.[Nightwood sensory awakening training. Subject: Chloe, fifteen, wolf not yet awakened.][After the tracking signal was lost, the subject requested extraction. Daniel believed fear would sharpen the subject's sense o

  • Alpha Family’s Regret After Omega Daughter Died   Chapter 6

    The pack medical team and Enforcer Rourke arrived and sealed off the room.After inspecting my body, the medical examiner collected the blue pill bottle and the emergency bracelet."The cause of death is organ failure from prolonged exposure to cold."She pulled up the room's back-end log. "The trial was set to run for forty minutes, with a safety cutoff of minus forty-two degrees. After the central heating and thermal barrier both failed, the room's temperature dropped below minus one hundred twenty-two degrees. Then the sensor went offline, so there's no way to determine the final temperature."My mother swayed on her feet.The medical examiner went on. "The system issued three stop alarms. After the first, Daniel manually extended the trial. After the second, he switched off the audio alert. By the third, the temperature sensor was already offline."Rourke turned sharply toward Daniel. "Why didn't you go in and check?"Daniel's lips had turned white. "Because when my wolf awakened a

  • Alpha Family’s Regret After Omega Daughter Died   Chapter 5

    Cold poured out of the room, the kind that goes straight through you.The moonstone wolf fell out of my father's hand, and the velvet box rolled to a stop by my feet.In the dim room, I lay curled beside the cold-air vent, frost crusting my lashes and hair.My skin had turned blue-purple from lack of oxygen, and my fingers were locked around the emergency bracelet, which had been bent out of shape.My other hand still held the blue pill bottle Vivian had given me.There were more than a dozen claw marks on the inside of the door.The last few were so faint you could barely see them.Until the very end, I must still have believed that if I knocked one more time—if they heard me just once—someone would open that door."Chloe..."My father's legs gave out, and he dropped hard to his knees.He reached out to pick me up, but what he touched was stiff and cold."Baby girl!"My mother threw herself down beside me as if something inside her had torn loose, then wrapped the cashmere blanket aro

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