HER FATED MATE IS AN OMEGA

"Is there anything you regret at the moment?" The therapist asked.

Elara's eyes closed, the salt of her tears stinging the raw skin of her cheeks. Her heart bobbed up and down in her chest. She couldn't even say no. How could she? The memories were everywhere, clinging to the corners of her vision like a lewdity, greasy and unwanted. She ran a hand over the back of her neck, feeling the prickly, unfamiliar sensation of her hair, newly clipped short at a salon. A physical shedding of a skin that no longer fits.

She still couldn't believe it. Ten years. She had wasted the entirety of her twenties on a man who didn't care if she existed or not.

The irony was a bitter pill she'd been forced to swallow daily. Elara was the one with the money hidden in dormant accounts; she was the one with the command in her blood. Her father, President Alexander Vance, ruled the entire nation with an iron fist, yet she had lived for a decade as if he were a commoner in some nameless, dusty outskirts city.

Twelve years ago, she had run. At eighteen, she thought Greene was her sanctuary. She thought his smile was a promise, not a lure. To be his wife, she had suppressed every instinct. She had served him, his ungrateful mother, and his leeching siblings at their table every single day. She, a dominant Alpha of the most powerful lineage in the country, had masked her pheromones, stifled her power, and played the role of a submissive Omega until her soul felt paper-thin. All for the sake of a man who ultimately looked at her with nothing but bored disdain.

The final message he gave her before tossing the divorce papers onto the stained kitchen table played on a loop in her head: "I have finally found the woman suitable for my status."

"What do you mean, love?" she had asked, her voice steady even as her world cracked.

She remembered looking down at her hands as she picked up the documents. They were smeared with dirt from the garden, calloused and rough, hands that had scrubbed floors and sold drinks in neon-lit clubs just to pay for Greene's tuition. She had built him. She had carved a man out of a boy with her own blood and sweat, while her father watched from the White House, letting her drown in her own choices just to prove a point.

"What do you mean, divorce?" Her heart had trembled then. It was trembling now.

"I found the right person for me," Greene had said, straightening his expensive tie, the one she'd bought him. "She's an Alpha. I knew her from college and she's ready to turn my whole life around. She's the daughter of President Vance."

Elara had scoffed, a jagged, hysterical sound. The President had only one child. Him. Her. Greene was being played, or he was a fool, or perhaps some social climber had successfully draped themselves in her stolen shadow. Greene didn't even know her real last name. To him, she was just a rag, a pity project he was finally finishing.

"You're so pitiful," he'd added, sliding a check for alimony across the table like he was feeding a stray dog. "That's why I want you to take care of yourself. Move out by tomorrow."

"How annoying," she finally said, her face turning dark. "Someone I could feed his entire family at a whim telling me to move out of his rickety house." She broke into a jagged laugh that didn't reach her eyes. "My father was right about one thing: everyone is supposed to be treated according to their status. Why did I ever think everyone was equal to me? I must've watched too many movies to think that was even true."

"Well..." the therapist began, shifting uncomfortably as the air in the small room suddenly felt heavy, charged with a static he couldn't explain.

"No 'well,' Mr. Therapist. Thank you for your entertainment these past ten years. Even when I thought I was losing my senses, you helped me gather them. I should've known when to walk away instead of sucking it all up like a fool." She sprang to her feet, her posture shifting. Gone was the slumped, weary woman; in her place stood someone whose very shadow seemed to lengthen against the office walls. "It's time to go home, where I belong."

"Ms. Elara Greene," the therapist stammered, reaching for his notepad.

"It's Ms. Elara Vance now. The daughter of Alpha Alexander Vance, the most powerful man in all of America. I'm his heiress, the one who will have America passed down into her grip."

She didn't wait for a goodbye. She walked out of the office, the bell above the door chiming a funeral dirge for her old life. Outside, the humid air of the outskirts felt suffocating, but not for long.

She reached into her bag and pulled out a small, metallic device no larger than a coin, a distress beacon she hadn't touched since the night she climbed out of the White House window twelve years ago. With a decisive click, she activated it.

She stood on the cracked sidewalk, her cheap, worn-out shoes a stark contrast to the fire burning in her golden-flecked eyes. She looked at her phone one last time. A text from Greene's mother sat on the screen: Don't forget to scrub the porch before you leave, you useless girl. My son's new Alpha girlfriend shouldn't see such a mess.

Elara's lip curled. She deleted the thread and tossed the phone into a nearby trash can.

Within minutes, the distant hum of rotors began to vibrate in the pavement. People stopped in their tracks, looking up as three sleek, black V-22 Ospreys tore through the clouds, their flight path direct and unapologetic. They weren't headed for the city center; they were descending right into this nameless, dusty neighborhood.

The helicopters hovered, the downdraft kicking up a storm of grit and debris that forced the onlookers to shield their eyes. Soldiers in tactical gear, bearing the unmistakable crest of the Presidential Guard, rappelled down with precision.

The lead commander, a man Elara remembered as a young lieutenant, hit the ground and snapped into a rigid salute.

"Alpha Vance," he shouted over the roar of the engines. "The President has been tracking your signal. He says your vacation has lasted long enough."

He stood right in front of her, "Elara..." He called with a distant familiarity that she was no longer aware of.

She looked into his eyes, she remembered him as a child, but she couldn't place his face though he was strikingly handsome especially in his suit, his physique was quite striking. His blue eyes were drowning... She didn't have the time to admire him as she walked past and set onto the helicopter. The roaring blades overhead drowned out the quiet chaos of her thoughts, the wind whipping her short-cropped hair into a frenzy.

"Do you remember me?" He asked as soon as they sat in the helicopter, "It's me Elara..."

She looked at him coldly, her expression a mask of indifference she had spent a decade perfecting. She averted her gaze almost immediately, staring out at the receding landscape of the life she was abandoning.

"Does my father know that I'm coming back?"

"Yes er... He sent me to pick you. I'm now his personal assistant, but he has assigned me to you from today."

She frowned, her lips thinning into a line of pure distaste. "Then I will have to get you removed once we get home." She said it flatly, not liking his striking features at all. In her experience, people with good faces were the problem; they were the ones who hid the sharpest knives behind the brightest smiles.

The disappointment on his face was lethal. It was a silent, crushing blow that shifted the air in the cabin. He turned his face away, his jaw tight, as the helicopter began its steep ascent, flying so high into the sky.

As the altitude increased, the pressure in her ears triggered a sudden, unbidden surge of memory. It was a "sweet" memory, or at least, she had tried to label it as such at the time.

Five years ago. The kitchen of that cramped, leaky house. She had been holding a plastic stick, her heart hammering against her ribs with so much surge of happiness.

"Greene! Look!" she had cried, her face radiant, her calloused hands trembling as she held it out to him. "I'm pregnant. We're finally going to have a family."

Greene hadn't jumped for joy. He hadn't even looked up from the laptop she had worked three jobs to buy him. He only frowned, his handsome face contorting into a mask of irritation.

"Are you serious, Elara?" he had snapped, finally looking at her as if she were a bill he couldn't afford to pay. "I'm in the middle of my finals. I told you I didn't want to have a baby with you just yet. It's a distraction. How are we supposed to afford a kid when you're just hawking drinks at a club?"

"I'll work more hours, Greene. I'll-"

"No. Just... handle it. I can't deal with this right now."

She had handled it. Nature, perhaps sensing the lack of welcome, had handled it for her a week later in a burst of pain and blood she had suffered through alone while he was out "studying" with his college friends.

The irony was a jagged stone in her throat. After that, her mother-in-law had spent years turning around and calling her "barren" to anyone who would listen. It was a mockery she didn't understand. Alphas always had difficulties having children, their biology was complex and demanding, and she had tried, she had actually tried once but Greene didn't want it.

She snorted out loud, the sound harsh against the hum of the engine. How had she put up with such an idiot like Greene for so long? How had she stayed, serving his family, letting them rot her spirit, and never breaking even once? She felt a sudden, violent urge to laugh at her own stupidity.

The man sitting across from her didn't miss the sound. His blue eyes flickered towards her now and then, tracing the shadow of the snort on her face, but he remained silent.

Eventually, the sprawling, high-security gates of the Vance estate appeared beneath them. This was the fortress she had fled, the cage of gold she had thought was a prison.

Now they ushered her out of the helicopter, the elite guards flanking her with a reverence she hadn't felt in twelve years. They led her in to where her father was standing, waiting for her on the pristine marble steps of the entrance.

She paused in her tracks when she saw him.

For ten years, she hadn't seen him in the flesh. She had only seen him in the news, a distant figure of power and resolve. Whenever Greene tuned on the TV to see the news, he would watch the President with an almost pathetic hunger. Greene was a crazy fan of Mr. President; he always talked about him like he was the son of the president, dissecting his speeches, explaining his policies to Elara as if she were a child who would never understand.

"You see, Elara," Greene would say, leaning back in his chair, "That's what real power looks like. You wouldn't get it. You're just a high school graduate."

He never knew. He never guessed that the woman scrubbing his grease-stained stove was the very blood of the man he worshipped from afar. She had never gone to college because when her mates were running off to school, she was chasing Greene, throwing her future into a fire that only warmed him.

Now she was standing in front of her father and she did nothing but feel little again. Standing under the shadow of the most powerful man in America, she felt eighteen again and not thirty. The weight of her wasted decade crashed down on her. Tears brewed around her eyes, stinging and hot.

Her father's brow furrowed. He looked at the moisture in her eyes with a stark, cold disapproval.

Of course, she remembered. Alphas never cried no matter what happened. They were the storm, not the rain. They don't show weakness, they embrace it and mold it into a weapon. Life lessons were engraved into the bones of Vance: revenges are meted out, but no tears should be shed. No one, no man, no lover, no enemy is ever worth shedding tears over.

And it was true. It would be such a waste shedding even a cup of her tears for a man like Greene. All she was filled with now was a dark, viscous resentment for all men. Not just Greene, but especially those who were not in her status, the social climbers and the leeches, and for those men with striking features who thought they could navigate the world on a smile.

She forced the tears back, her eyes turning into flint.

She walked up to her father. He didn't offer a gentle embrace. He forced her into his arms, his hold firm and commanding. He gave three distinct, rhythmic pats at her back, a signal of acknowledgment rather than affection, and then pushed her away to inspect her.

"Welcome home," He said as he raised his brow, his sharp eyes scanning her face, her short hair, and her calloused hands, calculating how far his daughter-like son had aged in twelve years.

"Thank you, father."

"How was the journey? Smooth or rocky?"

"Well, it was nice," she replied, her voice steadying, the Alpha in her blood beginning to stir at the familiarity of his command.

"Your old room is still the same," he said, turning slightly toward the grand staircase. "You could wash up. I had the maid servants help clean it up for you. Then join us; we are having a party to celebrate your return. Silas..."

He suddenly called, and that name struck her at first. She turned, trying to find out who bore the name.

And it was him.

The man from the helicopter. The one who had asked if she remembered him. Those blue eyes were staring at her again, begging for recognition. That strikingly handsome face she couldn't place suddenly felt like a ghost stepping out of the fog. A sharp, electric jolt hit her chest, making her breath hitch.

Silas??

He stepped forward and bowed before her father. "Yes, Mr. President."

"Assist her upstairs and make sure she's comfortable."

Silas... The memories flooded back, not of the man in the suit, but of a boy. The quiet, beautiful boy. The Omega whose heat cycle she had helped take care of twelve years ago in the dead of the night.

"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."