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."

Silas stood frozen, his eyes raking over her with a hunger he couldn't mask, his breathing turning shallow as her dominant scent filled the room like a physical weight. He didn't look away; he couldn't.

"Mr. Greene Jones? The ordinary Alpha who works in one of the lower companies that belongs to Mr. Prime Minister, Arthur Sterling?"

"You know him?"

"Yes, he's been quite a ruse since he started dating the prime minister's daughter, Beatrice Sterling."

Oh, that was the girl she was replaced with? But why did the girl lie that she was the President's daughter? Perhaps Greene was so desperate for power that he had hallucinated the title, or Beatrice was so desperate for status that she had stolen a crown that didn't belong to her. Either way, the irony was delicious.

"Okay, but can you locate him?" She asked while Silas fought to keep his eyes away from her body as she walked across the room to fetch her neatly tucked robe.

"Yeah, he was invited to the party too. Beatrice Sterling insisted on bringing her 'new find' to the Vance homecoming gala. She wants to show him off to the elite."

"Invited?" She asked, her mouth releasing into a smirk. Looks like things just got more interesting. The man who had kicked her out of a "rickety house" hours ago was now a guest in her palace. He was coming here to worship at the altar of her father, probably hoping to shake the hand of the man whose daughter he had just discarded like trash.

"Do I have new clothes and good ones in my wardrobe?"

"I sent the maids to get you new ones, they will be here soon."

As if on cue, the heavy doors groaned open. A procession of six maids entered, their heads bowed so low their chins nearly touched their chests. They carried garment bags of opaque silk, they laid them down in the bed and her eyes ran through that dress. She remembered herself in dresses like these, she remembered herself adorned in jewelry that were specifically made for her. No one wore her kind of dress or clothes. They even had a brand made in her name, for clothes, shoes, perfumes, makeup, everything was in her name. 

It's almost like a trend when people dress in the president's daughter's name even when they haven't seen her, but they know her brand name, "Elara". Everything she did was a lifestyle but twelve year age gap seemed to rip it all away. She must've been so stupid to think running away was the best option. If only her father stopped her, locked her up instead of letting her walk free, he could have gotten to her and chosen not to. 

She slipped the robe over her shoulders, tying the silk cord with a sharp, decisive tug. She turned to the mirrors, watching the maids begin to lay out the options.

The maids swarmed around her, making up her face, changing her entire look, until she was a whole new person. Someone she'd craved to be twelve years ago was finally staring at her as she looked in the mirror. Where had she hidden all this beauty? Behind suffering, when she mopped floors and cleaned dirt like a slave, even omegas were never treated the way she was treated. Was she treated so badly because she claimed to be an omega simply to gain Greene's love? Well, did she gain that in the end?

She walked out of her room, the heavy doors thudding shut behind her. Silas was there, leaning against the far wall, but as she emerged, he straightened as if struck. His breath hitched, his eyes traveling from her sharp, short hair down to the lethal curve of her silhouette. 

"Lead me down the stairs," she said, stretching out her hand. Silas nodded, his throat bobbing as he took her hand in a firm, protective grip.

They walked down the stairs, and the atmospheric pressure in the ballroom shifted instantly. Every head turned. The hum of a thousand elite voices died down into a series of jagged whispers.

"Wow, truly, the heiress is back," she heard a woman breathe.

"Wow, she's so beautiful. How can she be so beautiful even after all these years?" 

"Is this how she looks? No one has seen her since she was a child. She's beautiful."

"Do you think Calvin will like this development?" a man muttered near the banister. "He's been the heir apparent for twelve years. If she's back to claim the prize after he did all the labor... the White House will be torn apart."

"I heard they were supposed to be mates," another whispered. "Why would she run from this?"

"Careful," a stern voice warned. "She's a dominant Alpha. Her pheromones can shut yours down forever if she catches you gossiping."

At the bottom of the stairs, President Vance was waiting. He didn't waste time with sentiment. He tucked her arm into his, leading her straight into a circle of the most powerful men in the country.

"Arthur," the President said, nodding to the Prime Minister. "You remember my daughter, Elara."

Arthur Sterling leaned in, his eyes narrowed. "I remember a rebellious girl. I see a woman who looks like she's been to war and won. Tell me, Elara, where does a Vance hide for twelve years?"

"In the places men like you are too afraid to look, Mr. Prime Minister," Elara replied, her voice smooth as glass. "How have you been your honor?" 

"She has your bite, Alexander," laughed a man with silver stars on his shoulders, General Ross. Calvin's father, "Have you seen Calvin yet? I think he's been looking for you since he heard you're back."

Calvin? She furrowed her brows as that name bit into her memory, her fated mate..the alternative her father offered if she didn't want to change her sex. 

"I haven't seen him" she said, letting a flicker of her pheromones flare. The General blinked, his bravado momentarily faltering.

"A dominant indeed," noted the Chief Justice, sipping his wine. "What are we to do when we have two strong alpha males in this environment? I mean one has to topple the order in my opinion"

So many references to Calvin again. And where the hell is he? It's been so long since she's seen him. The last time was when he helped her climb over the walls of her father's house twelve years ago.

Her father chuckled, a sound like grinding stones. "She's had enough of you old wolves for one night. Go, Elara. Mingle, the party is made for you."

She drifted away, her eyes scanning the sea of faces looking for two people, she bumped into old faces, gave a smile, still searching, still... until she found them. Greene and Beatrice had just walked in, looking smug, until Greene saw her. He stormed over, his face twisting with a fury that looked pathetic in this room.

"What are you doing here, you lowly being!" he hissed. "Are you determined to follow me everywhere? We're divorced! Where did you get this makeup? These clothes? You think it makes you less of a swine? A pig is a pig, even in silk."

"Do you know who you're speaking with?" she asked, feeling a dark amusement.

"And who am I speaking with?" Greene sneered, leaning in.

"I'm the President's daughter," she said clearly like she'd been waiting twelve years to finally let him know that. 

Greene's laughter rang through the room, attracting every eye. "You're the President's daughter? What an irony! If you're the President's daughter, then I'm nothing but the god of birth!"

" What did you just say?" Came Silas' voice from behind me as he approached.