To ruin an Omega

ISOBEL

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think past the rushing in my ears.

“The only reason we’re lucky to survive this,” Joseph said, “is because they don’t want the shame of Hazel killing their Alpha to come out. They’re protecting their own reputation. We should be grateful for that.”

Grateful.

The word echoed in my head, bouncing around until it lost all meaning.

“We can have another child if that’s what you want.”

My hand moved before I thought about it. The slap cracked across his face, loud enough to make him stumble back a step.

“Goddess,” I breathed. “My mother was right about you after all.”

He touched his cheek. But he didn’t say anything.

“You’re weak!” The words tore out of me. “Spineless! You’d let them butcher our daughter and thank them for the discretion!”

I hit him again. He didn’t block it. I hit him a third time, and my knuckles connected with his jaw hard enough to hurt. He still didn’t fight back.

“Isobel—”

I swung again. This time, he caught my wrist and held it gently, like I was fragile. Like I might break.

“Perhaps you need time alone with the body.”

He released my hand and walked past me. The door clicked shut behind him.

The silence that followed felt thick enough to choke on.

I stood there, staring at nothing, until my legs remembered how to move. Then I crossed to the box. The letter fell from my hand. It drifted to the floor, landing near my foot.

My knees then hit the ground.

I reached out. My fingers trembled as they brushed against her cheek. Her skin felt wrong. Too cold. They were too stiff too.

“They’ll pay for this,” I whispered.

The words felt empty. Pointless.

Who would pay? How? Joseph was right about one thing. We couldn’t win a war against Lily of the Valley. They were too big, too powerful. We’d be destroyed.

But doing nothing meant accepting this. It meant letting them get away with what they’d done to my daughter.

“I would never let this happen,” I said to her closed eyes. “I swear, I—”

Movement caught my eye.

I looked up.

Hazel stood in the corner of the room.

Not in the box. Whole. Intact. She wore the nightgown she’d probably been killed in, and her hair fell in perfect waves around her shoulders—no blood, no matted tangles, no evidence of what they’d done to her.

My breath caught.

The room felt colder. The air pressure changed, like right before a thunderstorm.

“Mother,” she said.

Her voice sounded wrong. Hollow, like it was coming from the bottom of a well, or from somewhere just behind where she was standing. Her voice sounded wrong. Hollow. Like it was coming from the bottom of a well.

“Hazel?” I pushed to my feet. Took a step toward her. “Baby, I—”

“Don’t.”

I froze.

Her eyes met mine. They looked different than I remembered. They were harder and so much colder.

“This is your fault,” she said.

The words punched the air from my lungs.

“What?”

“All of it.” She gestured vaguely. “Everything that happened to me. Every mistake I made. Every crime I committed. It’s because of you.”

“Hazel, no—”

“You were a terrible mother.” She said it flatly. Matter-of-fact. “You smothered me. Made me think I deserved everything I wanted. You never said no. Never taught me consequences. You just… let me become this.”

Tears blurred my vision. “I tried to give you what I never had. I wanted you to feel loved.”

“You wanted me to worship you,” Hazel corrected. “You wanted me to be grateful. To owe you. That’s not love. That’s textbook manipulation.”

“That’s not fair—”

“Fair?” She laughed. The sound made my skin crawl. “You want to talk about fair? You let me think the world would bend for me. That I could do whatever I wanted and someone would clean up the mess. And when things went wrong, you blamed everyone else. You blamed Fia. You blamed father. You blamed circumstance. You never once looked at me and said, ’Hazel, you did this. You need to fix it.’ Well… apart from that one time and it was only to save my skin.”

My chest felt tight. “I was protecting you.”

“You were enabling me.” She took a step closer. “And now I’m dead because of it. Because you never taught me that actions have consequences. Because you let me think I was invincible.”

“Please—”

“Do you want justice for me?” she asked.

I nodded because I couldn’t form the words.

“Then do it right.”

She walked to the leisure table in the middle of the room. Her hand reached out and picked up something I hadn’t noticed on the snack table.

A knife.

The blade caught the light.

“There’s only one way to pay,” she said. “You need to pay for your crimes of being a bad mother. Let us begin again in the next life.”

She held the knife out to me.

My hand moved on its own and my fingers closed around the handle. The weight of it felt real and so so solid.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry. I’ll raise you better in the next life. I promise.”

Hazel smiled. It looked gentle and almost forgiving.

“I know, Mother.”

I lifted the knife.

The blade caught the light again. For a moment, I saw myself reflected in the steel. Saw the dark circles under my eyes, the tear tracks on my cheeks, the grief written into every line of my face.

Then the reflection changed.

The lounge bled away—walls dissolving, furniture fading—and I was in a kitchen. Our kitchen, but younger and brighter.

Sunlight streamed through windows that shouldn’t exist, warm and golden in a way light hadn’t felt in years.

The smell of fresh bread filled the air. My hands already held the knife, already moving. The blade slid through the loaf easily. Perfectly. Each slice came away clean, revealing soft white interior dotted with herbs.

I wasn’t cutting bread.

(I was.)

I arranged the pieces on a plate. Watched my hands work with the distant fascination of someone watching themselves in a dream.

When I looked up, Hazel sat across from me at the table. She looked younger. Smaller. Maybe five or six years old. Her hair was pulled back in pigtails, and she wore a dress I vaguely remembered buying for her birthday.

“Here, baby.” I held out a piece of bread. “Just how you like it.”

She took it, bit into it and smiled at me with crumbs on her lips.

“Thank you, mama.”

Warmth bloomed in my chest. Pure and sweetly uncomplicated as it used to be once upon a time.

“You did well,” she said softly.

She reached across the table. Her small hand wrapped around mine.

“Let’s go, Mother.”

I nodded, letting her pull me to my feet and lead me forward.

The kitchen faded. The warmth faded. Everything faded except her hand in mine and the feeling of being forgiven.

We walked together into the light.

And for the first time in days, the ache in my chest eased.

(Somewhere far away, in a lounge that still smelled like copper, a body slumped to the floor. The knife clattered from slack fingers. Blood pooled slowly, spreading toward a box that held the pieces of a girl who’d been loved too much and taught too little.)

(But I didn’t see that.)

(I only saw Hazel, whole and smiling, leading me home.)