Alpha's Regret After He Killed Me for Omega

My betrothed, Damien Thorne the Alpha heir was ambushed during a hunt and rescued by a girl.

To save him, the girl transferred every ounce of her wolf's power into Damien. Her own wolf withered and died.

Damien was dead set on breaking our betrothal.

That same night, I caught Faye Vale shifting under the moonlight. Her wolf was perfectly intact stronger, even, than most rogues.

The moment she returned to human form, she dialed a black-market dealer. "Get me those long-term shift suppressants. As long as I never shift, Damien will spend the rest of his life believing he owes me everything."

I sent word through a messenger, warning Damien to look into the truth before making any decisions.

Three days later, Faye was dead.

Three years after that, Damien officially took the Alpha seat. The first thing he did was drive a silver spike through the mark on the back of my neck during our mating ceremony.

Then he destroyed the entire Silver Moon Pack.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back at my first shift ceremony. I was eighteen.

You love that Omega so much? Fine. I'll make sure you get exactly what you deserve.

I died at my own mating ceremony killed by my Alpha mate, Damien Thorne.

He didn't waste a single word before he did it.

A silver spike pressed against the back of my neck the place where a wolf marks its mate.

He drove it in.

The moment the silver burned through my nerves, my entire body seized like I'd been struck by lightning. Feeling drained from my limbs one joint at a time.

First my fingers. Then my forearms. Then my knees.

I collapsed onto the altar. I didn't even have the strength to struggle.

Damien grabbed a fistful of my hair and wrenched my face up toward his.

Pure hatred.

"Your family owes her a debt. I'm collecting it with your life."

Owed who?

I stared at his twisted expression, my mind a haze.

The Thorne family and our Silver Moon Pack had been bound by alliance for ten years. My father had poured every resource the pack had into helping the Thornes secure the Alpha seat.

In all the years Damien served as Alpha, the Silver Moon Pack never once asked for anything in return.

And yet here he was dragging me onto the Blood Moon Altar, executing his own betrothed like a traitor.

"Who the hell are you talking about?" I ground the words out through clenched teeth, forcing them past my throat.

Damien didn't answer.

He didn't need to.

The memory surfaced from somewhere deep Faye Vale. The rogue who had died eight years ago.

The girl who once took a beast's claw for him during a surge.

For eight full years, he had turned that woman's death into a blood debt worthy of annihilating an entire pack.

And the ones who owed it? Me, and every last member of the Silver Moon Pack.

I wanted to laugh.

Before my lips could even twitch, Damien ripped out the silver spike and plunged it straight into my heart.

A mist of blood swallowed my vision whole.

"Miss, don't listen to those rumors going around." My Omega attendant, Lina, said.

The altar was gone. The silver spike was gone. The hole in my chest was gone.

The ancestral shrine blazed with candlelight.

I had been reborn back to my first shift ceremony at eighteen.

I hadn't married into the Shadow Pack yet.

The Silver Moon Pack had just won three mines in the Northern Territories. Our influence was at its peak.

It was time to settle every debt from my past life.

"Miss?" Lina pursed her lips, about to say something more.

I already knew the rumors.

Damien had issued three consecutive declarations to the Alliance Council, demanding our betrothal be dissolved.

The reason was simple enough. He'd been surrounded by a beast surge during a solo hunt and fallen off a cliff. A rogue girl had dragged him out from the bottom, half-dead. To wake his wolf, she'd forced every last drop of her own wolf's power into him. Her wolf died from the strain, and she could never shift again.

Damien brought her back to the Shadow Pack.

He had only one thing to say: he would marry no one but her.

"Miss, don't lose heart! Your betrothal was sealed by both packs he can't just throw it away like that"

I raised a hand and cut Lina off.

I didn't want to hear a single word of comfort. Not again.

Lina fell silent abruptly, leaned close to my ear, and her tone shifted completely. "Miss he's here."

I followed Lina's gaze Damien was already standing in the entrance of the great hall.

Every breath in the room tightened at once.

The shift ceremony was the Silver Moon Pack's most sacred bloodline ritual. An outsider entering uninvited was an act of open provocation.

Damien clearly didn't care.

One arm was wrapped around the waist of the woman beside him. The other rested on her shoulder, as if shielding something fragile.

Faye Vale cowered behind him, her eyes darting nervously across every face in the hall.

Damien and I had grown up together after our packs formed an alliance.

When I lost control during my first shift, he'd bitten his own finger open and used his blood to suppress my feral wolf.

When the Elders publicly punished him as a boy, I'd knelt in the snow to beg for mercy on his behalf knelt until my knees were black with bruises.

Everyone in both packs had been certain: I would be the Shadow Pack's future Luna.

And now, at my own shift ceremony, he stood in the doorway with another woman in his arms.

Faye stepped out from behind Damien, walked straight to me, and dropped to her knees on the stone floor.

Cheek pressed to the ground. Arms stretched forward.

A textbook Omega submission the highest gesture of deference a lower-ranked wolf could offer an Alpha.

She trembled all over. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her voice thin as a string about to snap. "Serena, I'm so sorry this is all my fault"

Her fingertips twisted the hem of her dress until they turned white. "If you won't forgive me, I'll leave right now I'll never appear in front of Damien again Please don't blame him. He only did this because the guilt was eating him alive"

Every word came out broken, choked with tears. Her face was the picture of guilt and terror a wolfless Omega standing before a room full of Alphas, so helpless it was hard to even look at her.

In my past life, this scene had melted my heart on the spot.

She was an Omega who had lost her wolf. As an Alpha's daughter, I had a natural obligation to protect someone like her.

I'd even gone to the Silver Moon Elders myself.

"She's a lone rogue it's too dangerous for her out there. Why not grant her protected status and let her stay in the Shadow Pack as an Omega? That way she'd have a legitimate place, and it wouldn't affect the betrothal. Everyone wins."

That kindness became the thing that killed me.

This time, I stood beside the blood pool and didn't move a muscle.

Faye waited. And waited. No response came.

She lifted her head. Tears slid down her cheeks. Her voice splintered further. "Serena, I know I don't deserve it I don't deserve anything I don't even have a wolf anymore. I'm just a burden to everyone"

Then she started kowtowing. One bow after another.

Her forehead struck the stone with a dull thud.

Blood ran down her face, mixing with tears, dripping onto the snow-white floor.

Murmurs rippled through the hall. Someone gasped. Others whispered to each other.

Lina tensed and took half a step forward.

I glanced at her.

She froze.

I picked up the ceremonial blood wine from the attendant's tray and took a slow sip.

Let's see how far she's willing to take this little performance.

Because that's all it was a performance.

Every single second of it.

The whole "wolfless, broken Omega" act was fake. Those pitiful tears were fake. Every tremor and sob she'd ever put on in front of Damien not one word of it was real.

In my past life, behind the Shadow Pack's main compound, outside a hidden chamber

I'd seen Faye shift in the dead of night with my own eyes. Her wolf was perfectly intact. Stronger, even, than most rogues.

The moment she returned to human form, she'd called a black-market dealer.

"Get me those long-term shift suppressants the kind that won't show up on blood tests or provocation scans."

"As long as I never shift, Damien will spend the rest of his life believing he owes me."

"I don't need him to love me. I just need him to feel guilty forever."

Damien had been played. I had been played. Both packs every last one of us had been dancing on her strings.

And in my past life, I'd asked Damien one question: why he could never let Faye go.

"I'm the Alpha's son. From the day I was born, everyone's obedience came from bloodline dominance."

"They fear me. They respect me. All because of the power behind my name."

"Including you, Serena if there were no betrothal between our packs, would you have chosen me?"

In my past life, those words had left me speechless.

Our alliance was the only reason we'd ended up together. Remove that, and there was nothing left to talk about.

"Only Faye a rogue who'd lost her ability to shift saved me without knowing who I was. She gave up the most precious thing she had."

"How could I feel nothing after a sacrifice like that?"

I hadn't been able to argue.

Growing up, the Elders had hammered the same lesson into me over and over: every move an Alpha's daughter makes must serve a purpose.

Throwing yourself into the fire on blind impulse? That wasn't something I was built for.

But after being reborn, the holes in his logic were laughable.

When Damien fell off that cliff, he'd been wearing Shadow Pack battle armor. On his chest was the pack crest forged from black meteorite, a symbol exclusive to Alpha bloodlines. Only five existed in the entire wolf alliance.

Even a blind woman would've known from touching that armor alone that the wolf she was saving was no ordinary one.

The whole "she didn't know who he was" story? It had been calculated from the very start.

"Stop!"

Damien's voice cracked through the hall like a whip, his Alpha dominance flooding the room. Every sound died instantly, as if someone had pulled the plug.

Faye's body went rigid. Slowly, she lifted her forehead from the stone.

Blood was still running down her face. She didn't wipe it. She just stared at me with those pitiful eyes.

I knew that look all too well. In my past life, she'd used it to wait for me to say "enough" so she could gracefully exit the scene.

This time, I wasn't playing along.

I swirled the blood wine in my palm and raised an eyebrow.

Faye clenched her jaw, lowered her head again, and braced her hands on the floor to keep going.

Damien crossed the distance in a single stride, grabbed the wrist holding my cup, and squeezed.

Hard enough to grind bone.

The wine cup shattered in his grip. Shards bit into my palm. Blood ran down between my fingers.

"Serena, look at her! Look at what she's done to herself!"

"Do you even have a heart?"

He crouched down, pulled Faye into his arms, and dabbed at her forehead with his sleeve. His voice went low and aching.

Then he looked up at me, eyes glacial. "Apologize. Right now. In front of everyone."

I glanced down at my palm, bleeding where the shards had cut in.

I almost laughed.

In my past life, the first thing I did after discovering Faye's deception was send a sealed letter to Damien through a trusted messenger.

Time, location, every detail of her secret shifting behind the compound, the black-market suppressant deal all of it, laid out clearly.

I'd urged him to investigate.

Three days later, Faye was dead.

Damien sent one line back through the messenger: "Thank you. Anyone who dares deceive me won't be left breathing."

I'd believed him. I thought he'd uncovered the truth and dealt with the liar himself.

That was exactly the kind of thing he'd do he was always ruthlessly decisive when it came to debts and betrayals.

But eight years later, in the split second that silver spike pierced the back of my neck, I finally understood.

The "liar" he'd been talking about was never Faye.

It was me.

"Serena, are you even listening to me?"

"I'm the one ending this betrothal. Faye hasn't done anything wrong."

I looked down at the wounds on my palm and let the corner of my mouth twist.

"Lina." I turned to her. "There are Grand Elders from the Alliance Council in the rear hall, aren't there?"

Lina blinked, then nodded.

I flicked the blood from my fingertips, gathered the hem of my ceremonial robe, and headed straight for the rear hall.

By the time Damien realized what was happening and came after me, I was already several steps ahead. "Wait the Grand Elders didn't come publicly. You're going to"

I didn't look back.

The Alliance Council's Grand Elders don't show up at a junior's coming-of-age ceremony for no reason.

My two older brothers had just captured three mines in the Northern Territories, securing the largest resource share in the alliance for the Silver Moon Pack. My father had been appointed Supreme Commander of the Northern Front. His reputation was at its zenith. A century of accumulated power had made the Silver Moon Pack second only to the Shadow Pack among the five great packs.

And right at this critical juncture, the Shadow Pack's heir had publicly issued three declarations demanding the dissolution of our betrothal.

The Shadow Pack Alpha couldn't sit still. Terrified that the Silver Moon Pack would turn hostile, he'd personally brought the Grand Elders to keep things under control.

In the corridor behind the rear hall, Damien was on my heels.

"Serena, don't make a scene in front of the Grand Elders."

"I already swore a blood oath in front of Faye. A wolf's blood oath can't be broken."

"If you step aside willingly, I give you my word the Shadow Pack won't touch Silver Moon territory."

I stopped and turned to face him.

He'd been born with the strongest Alpha bloodline in the Shadow Pack. Everything he'd ever wanted had been handed to him.

He had no concept of what the title "Luna of the Shadow Pack" actually meant.

It wasn't a woman's claim to a man.

It was the anchor holding a century-old alliance between two packs together.

My expression must have been cold enough to cut, because Damien opened his mouth and nothing came out.

I pushed open the doors to the rear hall. The Shadow Pack Alpha was seated at the head of the table.

"Blackwood girl what's got you running back here in such a rush?"

The core Elders of both packs filled every seat in the room.

I gave a proper junior's bow. Then I spoke.

"I'm sure the Elders have all heard the bond Damien and Faye forged through shared hardship is truly moving."

"I wouldn't dream of standing in the way of someone's fated connection."

"Today, I ask everyone here to bear witness: Serena Blackwood voluntarily withdraws from the betrothal with Damien Thorne."

The words landed, and the rear hall went airless.

The news spread through the entire wolf alliance overnight.

The Silver Moon Alpha's daughter at her own coming-of-age ceremony, before the core Elders of both packs had voluntarily dissolved the betrothal with the Shadow Pack heir.

Damien's face went ashen on the spot. He swayed where he stood.

The Shadow Pack Alpha was livid. Right there, in front of every Elder, he unleashed his Alpha dominance and forced Damien to one knee.

"You ungrateful bastard!"

My father was waiting for me in the Silver Moon Pack's council chamber.

"Who gave you the nerve!"

"The foundation of a century-old alliance and you tear it up on your own?"

"You're leaving for the Shadow Pack right now. You'll apologize to their Alpha in person. Tell him you're young and foolish."

"No."

"You think you're still a catch after calling off this betrothal? Which Alpha among the five packs would dare take you as their Luna now?"

"You might be surprised."

My father's finger nearly jabbed me between the eyes. "You've lost your mind!"

He slammed the doorframe hard enough to rattle the walls.

Before all this, I would never have dared. From childhood, the pack had molded me into the "proper Alpha's daughter" composed, dignified, always putting the bigger picture first.

But where had that bigger picture gotten us?

The Silver Moon Pack was nowhere near as powerful as the Shadow Pack. Appeasement and concessions would only get us killed faster.