Chapter Seven

Kian's POV

I lie silently on the bed, my arms resting over the thick comforter on either side of my body. The clock on the wall opposite the bed reads 2:15 AM and the moon shines brightly through the window despite the curtains being drawn. It's pitch black in the room besides the blue glow but the darkness doesn't feel as eery as it used to be. My lips are dry and my throat has that disgusting taste everyone gets when they first wake up, except I haven't fallen asleep at all. I had prepared for bed at around nine and now here I lie in the dark parts of the early morning.

Peyton is fast asleep. He fell asleep hours ago. I had tried listening to his steady breathing to get myself to sleep but my busy thoughts kept me awake up until now.

Beta Bridger wants to train me? Can omegas even be trained to fight? To stand up for ourselves? To be strong? Can we be trained like an eta and successfully perform like one as well? Zetas and etas are a pack's best warriors. They are at the front lines in war, they travel everywhere and know everything, and they dedicate their entire lives to protecting the pack. How on earth can an omega train as one?

We're supposed to serve and obey. Nothing else. How can Beta Bridger try to train me to do something that simply isn't part of who I am or supposed to be?

At a young age, my purpose as an omega was beaten into me by my parents before they gave me away. Then after that, it was beaten into me constantly by everyone in the pack. The marks run deeper than surface level, their hands and their words are embedded underneath my skin; tattooed in the walls of my brain. Every morning I woke to every night just before I slept, the pain was an incessant reminder of who I was and who I'll always be: an unwanted, unloveable, useless, worthless, filthy omega. Never would I amount to nothing more.

I think back to the zeta I used to live with: Zeta Nelson Calter. He was an evil man. Always abusing me when he had the chance. And his son. Goddess, his son... Jason was worse than his father. Jason was terrible, terrible, terrible. When I lived under his ownership, I used to cry myself to sleep so hard every night that at some point I couldn't cry anymore. So I'd just lie on the dirty mattress in the basement, silently sobbing with no tears. I'd wake up in the mornings with my face swollen. Living with the Calters is what made me stop believing in Goddess. How could She ever put me -- us -- through such torment and expect me to worship her still?

I remember the day I fell into labour with Ivory - Jason's daughter. He wouldn't let the medics care for me and the birth was traumatizing and so incredibly painful with nothing to dull the pain or professionals to help me through it. When I birthed Ava, the theta gave me special medication that allowed my body to better adjust and the iotas helped me through it so her birth went smoothly. I had been in the clinic, an iota held my head, the theta talked me through it.

With Ivory, I had given birth in the Calter's basement and I remember Jason's dark form standing against the wall with his arms crossed as he stared at me, no emotion written on his face not even anger, pleasure, or pity. His younger brother Leon had helped me the best he could but he had little medical experience and none with birthing pups. Jason had expected me to know how to do everything since I had birthed a pup before and because I'm an omega.

I remember sobbing, pleading to Jason to call an iota over. I was terrified for my pup's life and begged Goddess just to end mine. The pain had been nothing I had ever experienced in my life. Yet, I got through it and I even had the privilege to hold and clean Ivory. Ava was taken from me, I didn't even get to see her properly. I just remember her pink form crying with her little limbs spread stiffly as the iotas hastily carried her away. But Jason let me hold Ivory, he even let me kiss her. So maybe he wasn't as evil as the others. He let me spend time with one of my daughters.

I don't notice the tears in my eyes until one of them escapes and rolls down my face to wet my hair and my pillow. I hate thinking about my pups, I hate crying over them. But I am their father. Right? Well...I'm at least the person who carried them; I held them in me for five months yet I had to watch the mates of my alpha and Jason care for my pups as if they had birthed them. I remember the day Jason found his mate and kicked me out of the house. How his mate had held Ivory to her chest, shielding her face from my view as if looking at me would harm my own pup. It was shattering.

I lift up in my bed, placing my hand over my stomach and my other one over my mouth. I hate the turn my thoughts have taken. I try not to sob, swallowing down sob after sob as it burns the back of my throat. I shut my eyes tight and grip my shirt around my stomach tightly in my hands. My daughters are very much alive but Peyton has always preached that his pups are dead to him - it helps him cope. But I can't disown mine. I can't stop thinking about mine. I can't stop the feeling of emptiness every time their name crosses my brain. The trauma of everything I've been through clings to me and I feel like I'm sinking under hot water and my hands are shaking and I can't breathe and my throat burns and my stomach sucks in and my chest is tight and--

"What's wrong?"

I flinch when Peyton'a voice pierces through the silence. I feel like I've been zapped back to reality. I notice how loud and hard my heart is beating.

"Peyton," I whisper. It comes out like a plea. "Peyton, I-I can't sleep."

I don't know what else to say. If I tell him that I'm thinking of my pups, he'll scoff and tell me to forget about them. If I tell him I'm thinking of the horrors I went through in our pack, he'll tell me to get over it. But I can't do that. I can't stop thinking about everything I went through no matter how hard I try to suppress the memory. It's as though the harder I try to suppress it, the easier it slithers back.

"What else is wrong?" Peyton asks. I don't answer for a while because I don't know how to answer. I don't know how or why my thoughts shifted so dramatically. One minute I was thinking about how Beta Bridger wants to train me and the next minute, I'm thinking about my life in our old pack.

I hear Peyton sigh before he shuffles in his bed. For a second, I begin to believe he's fallen asleep as his breathing slows to a steady rhythm but then he shuffles again.

"You can sleep with me if that'll make you feel better," he says.

I'm out of my bed before he can finish his sentence. My bare feet hit the cold floor and I quickly make my way across the small space between our beds. I slip into his bed, sighing in contentment as heat from his body quickly wraps around me as I settle behind him.

I throw my leg over his smaller body enticing an annoyed groan as I proceed to wrap my arms underneath his and around him. He doesn't fight me off which makes me smile.

Sometimes I think Peyton likes being cuddled but he disguises it.

"Thank you," I whisper as I shut my eyes tight.

He only hums in response.

- - -

I stand in front of Beta Bridger's door with my hand balled in a fist, ready to knock. Before I can, the door swings open and my eyes widen as they meet a pair of cold blue ones. I quickly back away until my back hits the wall opposite Beta Bridger's office.

Alpha Arron stands before me with his face changing from annoyance to disgust as soon as he sees me. I stare down at the door between my shoes and hope that he just leaves without talking to me. He doesn't. I hope that if I just imagine myself blending into the wall I will. I don't.

"What are you doing here, Omega?" he asks. I glance into his beta's office, watching him raise his eyes from his desk. His eyes catch mine before they land on his alpha's back.

"The omega has a name," he says but Alpha Arron doesn't turn to face him as he glares down at me. "It's Kian. And he's here for me."

I glance up at Alpha Arron. The disgust never leaves his face so I look back down, praying that he would just hurry up and leave. I hear him scoff before his shoes turn away from me and walk away. I wait until he disappears around the corner before I peel myself away from the wall. I walk towards Beta Bridger's office and stand just before the threshold, waiting for him to permit me to come in.

He looks up at me and a confused smile spreads across his face. "You can come in, Kian, you don't have to wait for me to say so."

"This is your private space," I say. I have to constantly remind myself that the wolves here aren't like my old pack If I were to walk into any of Jason's private spaces without permission, there was no doubt that I'd face heavy and painful consequences for it.

"Yes, but I've invited you into it," he says, "but I digress."

I take a seat in the chair I sat in yesterday. I glance down at the books he has on his desk today. They look like the fantasy books Peyton likes to read. Peyton is lucky he learned how to read before our old pack took him. He had even taught me a little before they took his books and writing things away. Some of the omegas in our pack never learned how to read nor did they want to. Peyton told me how important it was to read and I was excited to have just an ounce of freedom, something the higher-ups couldn't take away from me. While they took our books, they couldn't take my knowledge. Reading is still very important to me.

If it weren't for Peyton, I probably wouldn't even be able to talk like someone my age more or less read.

"So I've made a schedule for us," Beta Bridger says, bringing me out of my thoughts. He gestures for me to come around his desk to his side and I quickly do so. I shimmy beside him so I can see his computer screen better but I'm careful not to touch him.

He pulls up a screen with a bunch of lines that make up little boxes. In each box in one column are a bunch of numbers that look like times and the other boxes are coloured in. Looking at it makes my head hurt.

"This is a spreadsheet. The reds equal training," Beta Bridger points at the red boxes. "This is 8 AM to 12 PM. It will soon go for 12 hours - I just want to test what you can do right now because I'm 100% positive you don't know your full potential. Omegas can easily go for 12 hours a day in training but we will build up to that. Then the green boxes equal reading and stuff like that: 1 PM to 5 PM."

I'm already exhausted just looking at these blocks and knowing what they mean. Twelve hours?! How could he expect me to train for even four?!

"I-I don't know..." I start, "I don't know if I can even go for four."

"Trust me," Beta Bridger looks me right in the eye, "you can."

I stare at him, expecting to see a smile break his serious expression. I expect him to laugh at me and joke about how gullible I am. But he doesn't. He just stares me in the eye with a straight face and I can't help but wonder if he's lying or not.

Do they try to gain our trust only to hurt us?

"Do you want me to prove it?"

I don't say anything but he takes that as a yes. He pulls out the book he had shown me yesterday and opens it to the page he had wanted me to read. He points at the top of the page and looks up at me.

"Follow along."

I stay standing beside him before slowly leaning over him a bit to see the words on the page as he began reading aloud.

"The werewolf population suffered a massive drop during the Infinite War. Morte Azul wiped out large numbers of our species. Transcribed meetings among the biggest packs suggest we thought that we were about to face a mass extinction. Surrender was considered, but to surrender meant to give up everything we fought for - the Merpeople would take everything-"

"What happened during Morte Azul?" I ask, way too invested in what I'm being told. I've always been interested in history, but I've never gotten the chance to hear about it in such depth.

"The Infinite War is called that because it's still ongoing today but with no casualties, we just never won and neither did our foes, there's no treaty, no one has surrendered - nothing. But it started when Mermaids developed the Land Gene. They were fucking around with witches, warlocks, and pixies and then a merwoman ate an enchanted leaf from some tree and bam she grew legs and could breathe oxygen,

"After they mastered their ability to transform into a human, they started ravaging the land, killing thousands of humans. Werewolves back then never knew how strong those bastards were especially since they had Pixies on their side - Pixies love Merblood and they love war even more. This was basically another territory war but vampires came to our aid and we fought and fought but those bastards were incredibly agile on land. They looked and acted just like pixies so it was hard to tell. Their bite was basically fatal to us. It's called Morte Azul or Blue Death because after they bit us, our skin would turn blue. We had to dig mass graves so...so many wolves and vampires died. Mermaid venom is the only poison known that works against vampires. It was like a sea of dead bodies for years."

My eyes go wide at the information. Beta Bridger knows so much about history. It must be so nice to be so intelligent that you can recall such things as he does.

"Are we immune to their bite now?" I ask.

"Vampires are...kind of. But we have medicine," he points at the book again and I lean in to follow him as he reads.

Goddess answered our prayers in 1905 - the newest and last genetically identifiable member of Werewolf packs. The first omega was born in Okinawa, Japan in 1905 to an alpha and his luna. Ayato Kaneko was a medical mystery, possessing absolutely zero Alpha and Zeta genes. He was a new werewolf species. The term Omega (meaning Extreme End) wouldn't be introduced until 12 years later.

Not long after Kaneko was born, the next Omega was born in Porto, Portugal. Her name: Maria Pereira. Twenty more Omegas were reported across the globe following Maria in the year 1905. These were the first Omegas known to modern society.

Several nations suffered a significant loss of female wolves following the Infinite War. Werewolves desperately needed a solution or face extinction. When Kaneko turned 12, his body developed a separate reproductive system never seen before by scientists. Upon research, it became clear that Kaneko would become the first male werewolf to be able to get pregnant. This made many believe Omegas were a blessing from Goddess as a way to alleviate the worries about how long our species would live with such a loss of women. This caused the attempted breeding of more omegas - all of which failed.

At the young age of 13, Pereira began to show exceptional skills in the medical field. In a country with hardly any thetas or iotas, she surprised the world when she traveled to France and lead the project to develop a cure for Morte Azul. She was successful and saved thousands having never taken a medicine-related lesson. Somehow, she just knew.

It is believed that Omegas weren't given to us by Goddess solely for growing the population, to stop diseases, or to successfully wipe out a good chunk of the mermaid population (Areif Perbesi, Indonesia 1925). But instead, they were put here to do it all.

It is now widely believed that the more Omegas a pack produces, the more prosperous the pack will be. They're a sign of good luck, faith, and high morale. Omegas are peaceful and empathetic by nature which makes them great caretakers but also great mediators, but they're also the fastest with the most sensitive senses and that makes them great hunters. They can learn anything remarkably fast, they're adaptable, and with the right training, one can argue they can do any job within the pack as though they trained their whole life.

But another thing to remember about Omegas is they're not to be taken advantage of. They are Her chosen ones. Any disrespect towards them is blatant disrespect toward Her.

- - -

Word Count: 3041

Sorry for the info dump 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽