The Alpha Regrets: She's Now the Lycan Queen

Chapter 3: The Wolfless Omega

Sera woke up in the infirmary and immediately wished she hadn't.

The ceiling was water-stained. She knew this ceiling—she'd stared at it before, at seven, when her collarbone had been broken and the Pack doctor had set it without anesthesia because "Omegas heal fast enough." The stain was shaped like a boot. She'd spent three hours memorizing it that time.

The stain hadn't changed. She had.

Pain came in layers. The surface stuff first—scraped palms, bruised knees, the raw ache in her cheek where she'd hit the floor. Then the deeper layer, the one that lived behind her ribs: a ragged hole where the bond had been. It felt like someone had reached into her chest, grabbed something vital, and torn it out with both hands. Left the edges open. The wound hadn't closed. She wasn't sure it would.

"You're awake." Dr. Harmon appeared at the side of the bed. He was Pack born, sixty-something, with a gray beard and the permanent squint of a man who'd treated too many wounds and asked too few questions about where they came from. He picked up her wrist, checked her pulse, let it drop. "Your vitals stabilized around dawn. Frankly, I'm surprised."

"Surprised I'm alive?"

He didn't answer that directly, which was answer enough.

"The rejection caused severe internal hemorrhaging. Mate Bond severance puts enormous strain on the body, especially the—" He stopped. Looked at her chart. Looked back at her. "When was the last time you shifted?"

Sera stared at the boot stain. "I've never shifted."

"Never?"

"My wolf's been dormant since I turned eighteen. You know that. Everyone knows that."

Dr. Harmon sat down on the metal stool beside the bed. It squeaked under his weight. He folded his hands in his lap the way doctors do when they're about to say something they'd rather write in a file and leave for someone else to explain.

"Seraphina, I'm going to be straightforward with you."

She almost laughed. Nobody in Silver Moon Pack had ever been straightforward with her about anything.

"The bond severance appears to have damaged whatever remained of your wolf connection. The readings I'm getting—" He tapped his pen against his clipboard. "There's no wolf signature. At all. It's possible she was weakened to begin with, and the trauma of the rejection pushed her into a state that... I don't want to say death, but—"

"You're saying she's dead."

"I'm saying I can't detect her."

Same thing. They both knew it was the same thing.

Inside her, in the place where Nyx had spoken last night—had it only been last night?—there was nothing. Not silence, because silence implied something choosing not to speak. This was absence. A room with the furniture removed.

Sera pressed her hand flat against her sternum. Pushed. Like trying to find a heartbeat in a body that had already been carried out.

Nothing.

"A wolfless werewolf," she said. The words came out hollow.

Dr. Harmon looked at his clipboard again. "It's rare, but it happens. There are documented cases of—"

"I know what happens to them."

She did know. Everyone knew. A werewolf without a wolf was a body without a shadow—wrong in a way that made people uncomfortable. Omegas were the bottom of the hierarchy, but they still had their wolves. They could still shift, still fight, still contribute to the Pack in the most basic way that mattered. A wolfless wolf was something else. Something less. A rounding error in the Pack's headcount.

Dr. Harmon stood up. The stool squeaked again. "You should rest. I'll check on you this evening."

He left. The infirmary door closed with a soft click that sounded final.

Sera lay in the narrow bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to feel Nyx. Reached down inside herself, into the quiet dark space where her wolf had slept for years, where Nyx had woken up just long enough to say two words—MATE, he's our mate—before the world ripped itself apart.

There was nothing there. Not a whisper, not a breath, not a flicker.

She reached deeper. Pushed past the pain, past the raw edges of the severed bond, past the numb fog that was settling over everything like a sheet thrown over furniture in a house no one lived in anymore.

Nothing.

Sera pulled her hand away from her chest and placed it on the mattress beside her. She looked at the ceiling. She breathed in. She breathed out.

She did not allow herself to think about what came next.

---

He didn't come.

That first day, Sera told herself she wasn't expecting him to. She was an Omega he'd rejected. There was no reason for the Alpha of Silver Moon Pack to visit the infirmary for a girl he'd publicly thrown away. That was logical. That made sense.

The second day, she stopped telling herself anything and just watched the door.

It never opened for him.

Caleb, the Beta, came once. He stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and the expression of a man who'd drawn the short straw. He asked if she needed anything. She said no. He left. The whole interaction took maybe forty seconds.

Harriet sent food—two trays a day, left outside the infirmary door by whoever was running kitchen duty. The food was fine. It was the same food she'd always gotten, which meant small portions of whatever was left after the ranked wolves had eaten. She ate some of it. She wasn't hungry, but she understood, in a distant, mechanical way, that her body needed fuel to repair the damage, and dying quietly in the infirmary would inconvenience Dr. Harmon.

The third day. Victoria came.

Sera heard the heels first. Click-click-click down the corridor, quick and purposeful, the sound of someone who had somewhere to be and wanted everyone within earshot to know it. The door opened without a knock.

Victoria Sinclair filled a room the way perfume fills an elevator—aggressively, unavoidably, leaving no air for anyone else. She was wearing a white sundress that probably cost more than every piece of clothing Sera had ever owned combined. Her blond hair was down, curled at the ends, catching the infirmary's fluorescent light in a way that should have looked clinical but somehow didn't. She was carrying a bouquet of lilies.

"Oh, sweetheart." Victoria's voice dripped with the kind of sweetness that gave you cavities. She sat on the edge of the bed without being invited and placed the lilies on Sera's lap. "I heard you were still in here. I had to come check on you."

Sera looked at the lilies. Funeral flowers. She was fairly certain Victoria knew that.

"I brought you some good news, though." Victoria crossed her legs and smiled. Her teeth were very white. "Damon and I had a long talk last night. About the future of the Pack. About us."

Sera said nothing.

"He's going to announce it at the next full moon gathering. We're getting mated." Victoria paused, letting the words settle like poison dropped into still water. "He asked me to be his Luna. Can you believe it? Well—of course you can believe it. Everyone saw it coming. Everyone except..."

She let the sentence trail off. Her eyes moved to Sera's face, reading it the way a hunter reads tracks—looking for the flinch, the crack, the moment the prey stumbles.

Sera gave her nothing. Nineteen years of practice. Her face was a closed door.

Victoria's smile tightened a fraction. She didn't like it when her punches didn't land.

"I just wanted you to hear it from me first. Girl to girl." She reached over and patted Sera's hand. Her fingers were cold. "I know you had your little... moment. At the ceremony. But you understand, right? An Omega as Luna?" She laughed, a bright, tinkling sound like glass breaking. "The Pack would never accept it. Damon would never accept it. It's just... it's not how things work."

"Are you finished?" Sera's voice came out flat. Not cold, not angry—flat. Like a surface with nothing on it.

Victoria blinked. For a half-second, something flickered behind her eyes—surprise, maybe, or irritation that the script wasn't playing out the way she'd rehearsed.

"I'm just trying to help you, Sera. So you can move on."

"Thank you for the flowers."

Victoria stood. Smoothed her dress. Picked an invisible piece of lint off her sleeve. "I hope you feel better soon. Really." She walked to the door, heels clicking, and paused with her hand on the frame. "Oh, and Dr. Harmon mentioned your wolf is... gone? That must be awful. I can't even imagine."

She could imagine. She was imagining it right now, savoring it, rolling it around in her mouth like hard candy.

"But hey—maybe it's for the best. Less painful for everyone, right? To just... know where you stand."

The door closed behind her. The click of her heels faded down the corridor.

Sera looked at the lilies on her lap. White petals, waxy and thick, the smell of them cloying and too sweet. She picked them up, leaned over the side of the bed, and dropped them in the trash can. They landed with a soft, papery thud.

She lay back down. Stared at the boot stain.

Nyx?

Nothing.

Nyx, if you're there—if any part of you can hear me—

The silence was absolute.

---

She left the infirmary that evening, against Dr. Harmon's recommendation. He said something about observation periods and monitoring. She thanked him and walked out.

Her closet-room was exactly as she'd left it. The thin mattress. The bare bulb overhead. The single shelf with three books, a hairbrush with missing teeth, and a photograph of a woman she didn't remember—her mother, supposedly, though the photo was so faded and creased the face was more suggestion than portrait.

Sera sat on the mattress and looked around the room. Four walls and a door. She could touch both walls if she stretched her arms out. She'd lived here for twelve years.

She started packing.

There wasn't much. Two changes of clothes, both secondhand. A toothbrush. The hairbrush. The books. The photograph. Everything fit into a canvas bag that had once held potatoes—she'd taken it from the kitchen two years ago and Harriet had pretended not to notice.

She was folding the last shirt when she lifted the pillow.

Something small fell onto the mattress. A glint of metal against the gray sheets.

Sera picked it up. A pendant, on a thin silver chain. She'd never seen it before—she was certain. She hadn't put it there, and she couldn't think of anyone who would have. It was old—the chain was tarnished, the clasp slightly bent—but the pendant itself was in perfect condition, as if something had preserved it from the wear that had touched everything else.

She held it up to the bare bulb.

It was a crest. A wolf, mid-howl, encircled by a crown of thorns and crescent moons. The engraving was incredibly fine—she could see individual strands of fur on the wolf's body, individual thorns on the crown. At the bottom, two words in a language she didn't recognize, etched in script so small she had to squint.

She didn't know the crest. But something in her chest—some ghost of the place where Nyx used to live—pulsed once when she touched it.

Just once. Like a heartbeat in an empty room.

Sera turned the pendant over. On the back, scratched into the metal with something sharp—a knife, maybe, or a fingernail—were four words in English:

Keep this. Stay hidden.

The handwriting was desperate. Rushed. The letters dug deep, like whoever carved them was running out of time.

Sera closed her fist around the pendant. The metal was warm against her palm—warmer than it should have been, warmer than the room, warmer than her own skin.

She didn't know what it meant. She didn't know who had left it, or when, or how it had ended up under a pillow she'd slept on for twelve years without once feeling it there.

But she knew one thing: she couldn't stay here.

A wolfless Omega in a Pack that had never wanted her, led by an Alpha who had broken her in front of everyone who'd ever looked through her—there was nothing left. The math was simple. Stay, and she'd become a thing. Not a person, not even an Omega, but a cautionary tale the ranked wolves told their children: See what happens when the moon makes a mistake.

Sera put the pendant around her neck. Tucked it under her shirt where no one could see. Picked up the potato sack bag. Looked at her closet-room one last time.

Twelve years. Nothing she'd miss.

She waited until three in the morning, when the patrols were thinnest. Then she opened the window—well, it was more of a vent, really, barely wider than her shoulders—and squeezed through.

The night air hit her face and she breathed in for what felt like the first time in three days.

She didn't look back.