Chapter 3 Three

"Yes, sir," he replied, turning toward her.

Elara masked her surprise, forcing her face to remain a sheet of ice. Up close, the contrast was jarring. How had that small, fragile boy grown so fast? He was tall now, his frame bulky and filled out beneath the expensive fabric of his suit. Time had been generous to him, molding those soft, childhood features into something dangerously striking.

The memory of him at twelve flashed vividly in her mind. Twelve was the age of judgment, the year the secondary gender manifested, and determined your worth in the eyes of the Republic. Your fate was written in your pheromones. If you were an orphan raised by the Vance family, one of the hundred lucky or unlucky souls they took in each year, your only hope for survival was to emerge as something useful. To be a dominant Alpha was to be reborn; you became a Vance automatically, a weapon for the state.

In the entire history of their lineage, after her father, the President, Elara was the only one who had truly stunned the nation. She hadn't just become an Alpha; she had emerged as a dominant. It was a statistical anomaly. Most female Alphas were recessive, destined to eventually mate with a dominant male Alpha to balance their power. But Elara was a predator in her own right.

She could still hear her father's voice echoing in the marble halls the day her results came back. He hadn't been proud; he had been practical.

"She will get surgery," he had stated to his council, as if she weren't standing right there. "She was clearly supposed to be a boy but was born in the wrong body. When she turns eighteen, she will get surgery to change her sex. She is supposed to be a man. No one will ever mate with a dominant Alpha female. It is a biological dead end."

The memory made her stomach churn. That was the real reason she had fled at eighteen. She was tired of the dictatorial rule, tired of being a shadow treated like a princess only to be told her very identity was an error to be corrected by a scalpel.

It was the night of her planned escape that she found him.

She had been creeping through the servants' quarters, her bags packed, when she heard the sound. A little boy, barely twelve, was tucked into a dark corner of the gardens, whimpering. His pheromones were leaking into the cool night air-sweet, floral, and terrifyingly recognizable. He was crying profusely, his small hands clamped over his mouth to stifle the agonizing whimpers that escaped him.

Elara had paused, stunned. She knew what that scent meant. The boy was an Omega.

It was a death sentence in this house. Her father loathed the "weakness" of Omegas. Betas were tolerated as staff, Alphas were groomed for power, but an Omega orphan would be discarded, sent to the slums, or worse.

The boy had looked up at her then, his eyes wide and drowning in tears, smelling the predatory strength of the girl standing over him.

"Please save me..." he had whispered, his voice cracking with a terror that mirrored her own. "Save me..."

She had been a girl about to lose her womanhood to her father's ambition, and he was a boy about to lose his life to her father's prejudice.

Now, that same boy stood before her right now taking orders from his father as if he were an alpha.

"This way, Alpha Vance," Silas said softly as he gestured toward the grand staircase, but as he stepped closer to lead the way, Elara caught the scent of him. It wasn't the sweet, cloying odor of an Omega child. It was something deeper, masked by heavy suppressants.

She followed him up the stairs, her eyes fixed on his broad back.

She walked into her room, her eyes taking in the entire space she had once rejected twelve years ago. The room was sprawling, a museum of a life she had tried to erase. The high ceilings were adorned with intricate gold molding, and the heavy velvet curtains were pulled back to reveal the sweeping views of the capital she used to dream of escaping.

Every space her eyes landed on felt like a ghost. There was her mahogany desk where she'd hidden her travel maps, and the bookshelf was still lined with tactical manuals and history books. The air was thick with her own scent, a suffocating blanket of nostalgia that made her heart quake terribly. She felt like an intruder in her own skin. Without a word, she crashed into the massive, silk-sheeted bed, the softness felt alien against her back, which had grown used to the lumpy, spring-punctured mattress she'd shared with Greene.

She closed her eyes, and like a dam breaking, the last ten years began to replay in a jagged, cruel loop.

"You're nothing but a weakling!" Her mother-in-law's voice echoed in her skull, shrill and poisonous. "You're nothing but something Greene decided to help! Who do you think you are if not some orphan Greene is housing? Why did he even marry you?"

"I'm sorry, mother," she heard her own voice whisper in the memory. It sounded pathetic. She remembered how she would cower, bending her neck, suppressing the Alpha fire in her blood until it nearly choked her. Someone like her, who was born to lead nations, had spent a decade bowing to lowly beings who weren't fit to scrub her boots.

The memory shifted, turning colder.

"Let's throw her out of this house!" Her sister-in-law's voice pierced through. "She's going to sleep in the streets until Greene comes back!"

Elara felt the phantom shove against her shoulders. She remembered the sensation of her knees hitting the wet pavement, the rain lashing down on a night of the full blood moon. It was her Alpha rut, a time when her body was a furnace of power and need and she had been forced to endure it in a dark alley, shivering in the mud, nearly killed by the cold while her "family" sat inside the house she paid for.

She gasped, her eyes snapping open as she tossed over on the bed, only to find Silas still standing there, his silhouette dark against the opulent wallpaper, watching her with an unreadable expression.

"Aren't you going to leave?" she snapped, her voice trembling with the leftovers of her nightmare.

"I am to keep watch over you," he replied, his voice steady, not budging an inch from where he stood near the door.

She sat up, her short hair messy, "Send in the maids. I don't want to see you. So leave."

"Alpha Vance..." Silas started, his blue eyes dropping for a fraction of a second.

"Just leave. Send the maids. I'm okay," she replied sharply.

She got down from the bed and headed toward the bathroom, her footsteps silent on the plush carpet. Pushing open the heavy marble doors, she found everything sparkling clean. It was haunting; nothing had changed. The bathroom was a sea of white Carrara marble and gold fixtures, centered by a sunken tub that looked more like a small pool.

She peeled off her worn, cheap clothes and sank into the already prepared bath. The water was perfectly heated, infused with oils that smelled of jasmine and cedar. She submerged herself up to her chin, the heat beginning to soak into her tired muscles, soothing her skin like a long-lost lover. She can't believe that divorce was a way of saying goodbye to suffering. How could she compare a life in a sprawling home like this to what she gave herself with Greene?

She suddenly rose, and stepped out of the bath, her gaze hitting Silas as she walked into her own room naked,

"I need you to find someone for me, his name is Greene."