Omega No More: The White Wolf of Wintermoon

I was the unshifted Omega of the Blood Moon Pack, treated like a servant by my family. But I thought I at least had the love of my betrothed, Kaelen, our future Alpha.

That was until I found the secret letters hidden in his combat scrolls.

He wrote that claiming a useless Omega like me was just a temporary gambit to make Seraphina, the Gamma's golden daughter, jealous.

At the pack's celebratory feast, Kaelen publicly humiliated me. He handed the sacred stag's heart-a symbol meant for his Luna-directly to Seraphina, while the high-ranking wolves laughed at my starving, frail body.

When I tried to walk away, he unleashed his crushing Alpha Command to force me to my knees.

Worse, my own father grabbed a heavy hunting whip and lashed my back, furious that I couldn't keep my mate's favor and ruined our family's chance to rise in rank.

For eighteen years, I endured their beatings and Kaelen's poisonous lies, believing my bones were simply too broken to Shift.

I didn't understand why my own blood treated me like a contagion, or why the male who promised to protect me threw me away like garbage.

But as the whip tore through my skin, something ancient and freezing woke up inside my blood.

On the day of the military blood pact, I secretly crossed out the elite Vanguard and bound my soul to the freezing, brutal North.

When Kaelen finally realized his mistake and came begging in the snow, I looked down at him with the glowing silver eyes of a legendary White Wolf.

"I, Elara, reject you as my mate."

Chapter 1

Elara POV

The damp air of our stone cottage smelled of old parchment and my mother's burning ambition.

She stood by the flickering fireplace, her hands trembling with a contained excitement as she presented a stack of ancient combat scrolls to my younger brother, Thorne.

In the eyes of our family, Thorne, a Beta, was a whetstone upon which their hopes were sharpened-a future warrior of repute.

I was the Omega. The servant. The late-bloomer whose bones had refused the agony of the first Shift.

Because I had not undergone the transfiguration, had not felt my marrow crack and reform into the shape of a wolf, my own blood treated me as something diseased.

Thorne snatched the scrolls with a greedy grin, his fingers tearing through the fragile leather bindings.

Suddenly, a small bundle of folded letters, bound by a frayed string, fell from the center of the scrolls, striking the floorboards with a muffled thud.

The paper was a heavy vellum, sealed with the dark red wax of the Alpha's bloodline.

A cold, metallic certainty settled in my stomach; I knew that seal.

It belonged to Kaelen, the future Alpha of our Blood Moon Pack, and my betrothed mate.

An Alpha's voice was said to carry a resonance that could compel the bones of lesser wolves, but I had believed Kaelen's letters were a quiet rebellion, a secret meant only for me.

Thorne picked up the letters, his sharp Beta eyes scanning the fractured wax.

A cruel little smile tightened the corners of his mouth, exposing the tips of his canines.

He did not hand them to me.

Tilting his head, Thorne angled himself so his voice would carry, his enhanced hearing confirming our parents were within earshot in the kitchen.

Then, he began to read the letters aloud, his voice a resonant instrument of humiliation in the small room.

The words were written in a secret pack cipher, but Thorne had always possessed a talent for such puzzles.

My chest tightened as I listened to the first few sentences, anticipating the delicate promises of our future together.

But the words were not for me.

They were for Seraphina.

Seraphina, the Gamma's daughter, a high-ranking female whose coat, they said, was the colour of spun gold.

Thorne's voice became a performance as he read of Kaelen's three-year obsession. How he had secretly tracked a rare snow fox for a week, just to have a winter cloak made for her. How he had broken a sacred pack taboo to take her to the hidden moonlit spring.

My breathing grew shallow, and a film of cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck.

Then, Thorne reached the final letter, dated just one week before Kaelen had accepted my submission ritual.

Thorne paused, his eyes gleaming with a focused malice as they settled on me.

He read the final lines with deliberate slowness, letting each syllable hang in the air like a poisoned dart.

Kaelen wrote that he only accepted the 'useless Omega, Elara,' because Seraphina had spurned his courtship.

He wrote that taking me as a mate was a gambit to incite her jealousy, a temporary arrangement until she recognized his true worth.

Thorne threw his head back and laughed, the sound harsh and grating against the stone walls.

He tossed the letters at my feet, mocking the scent of damp earth and weak herbs that clung to my skin, the scent, he said, of low-born servitude.

He told me I was nothing but a dull bronze mirror, meant only to reflect back to Seraphina the dazzling value of a future Alpha.

The humiliation burned in my throat like bile, but I dug my fingernails into my palms, the sharp pain a necessary anchor to keep the tears from falling.

I refused to let him smell my sorrow.

I turned around in silence, my bare feet cold against the floorboards, and descended the narrow stairs to my room in the cellar.

The cellar was dark and smelled of rotting potatoes, my home for the past eighteen years.

I sat on my lumpy straw mattress and pulled out my own piece of official pack parchment.

It was the military contract for the Royal Vanguard, the elite warrior camp Kaelen and I had pledged to join together.

With a steady hand, I picked up a quill and dipped it in black ink.

I crossed out the words 'Royal Vanguard' with a thick, unforgiving line.

Footsteps echoed on the stairs, and Thorne appeared at my door, his chest puffed out as he released a wave of Beta dominance.

The air in the cellar seemed to thicken, to become a semi-congealed resin, and each inhalation required my chest to fight against a viscous, unseen resistance.

I did not kneel.

Instead, I reached under my pillow and pulled out a small, gleaming silver dagger.

It was a metal that whispered sickness into our blood, leaving wounds that festered and refused to close.

Thorne's jaw went slack, his pupils contracting to pinpricks. The arrogant rhythm of his breathing hitched in his throat, and he made a short, sharp sound, like a man sucking air through a straw. He scrambled back up the stairs.

Left alone, I closed my eyes and reached out through the Mind-Link.

Kaelen, I called out in my mind, my mental voice flat and empty. I have something of yours. I need to return it.

Silence answered me.

I waited for ten hours in the damp cold of my cellar, feeling the mental wall Kaelen had erected to block my voice.

It was a form of quiet cruelty, a declaration that I was not worth his time.

I remembered the letters, how he had promised Seraphina he would come to her the moment she called.

My heart did not so much break as turn to ice. In my mind, the tether of blind obedience that had bound me for eighteen years, damp and frayed from this final humiliation, silently extinguished itself.

If he would not answer my mind, I would deliver his dirty secrets to his doorstep myself.