HER FATED MATE IS AN OMEGA

"Is there anything you regret at the moment?" The therapist asked.

Elara's eyes closed, the salt of her tears stinging the raw skin of her cheeks. Her heart bobbed up and down in her chest. She couldn't even say no. How could she? The memories were everywhere, clinging to the corners of her vision like a lewdity, greasy and unwanted. She ran a hand over the back of her neck, feeling the prickly, unfamiliar sensation of her hair, newly clipped short at a salon. A physical shedding of a skin that no longer fits.

She still couldn't believe it. Ten years. She had wasted the entirety of her twenties on a man who didn't care if she existed or not.

The irony was a bitter pill she'd been forced to swallow daily. Elara was the one with the money hidden in dormant accounts; she was the one with the command in her blood. Her father, President Alexander Vance, ruled the entire nation with an iron fist, yet she had lived for a decade as if he were a commoner in some nameless, dusty outskirts city.

Twelve years ago, she had run. At eighteen, she thought Greene was her sanctuary. She thought his smile was a promise, not a lure. To be his wife, she had suppressed every instinct. She had served him, his ungrateful mother, and his leeching siblings at their table every single day. She, a dominant Alpha of the most powerful lineage in the country, had masked her pheromones, stifled her power, and played the role of a submissive Omega until her soul felt paper-thin. All for the sake of a man who ultimately looked at her with nothing but bored disdain.

The final message he gave her before tossing the divorce papers onto the stained kitchen table played on a loop in her head: "I have finally found the woman suitable for my status."

"What do you mean, love?" she had asked, her voice steady even as her world cracked.

She remembered looking down at her hands as she picked up the documents. They were smeared with dirt from the garden, calloused and rough, hands that had scrubbed floors and sold drinks in neon-lit clubs just to pay for Greene's tuition. She had built him. She had carved a man out of a boy with her own blood and sweat, while her father watched from the White House, letting her drown in her own choices just to prove a point.

"What do you mean, divorce?" Her heart had trembled then. It was trembling now.

"I found the right person for me," Greene had said, straightening his expensive tie, the one she'd bought him. "She's an Alpha. I knew her from college and she's ready to turn my whole life around. She's the daughter of President Vance."

Elara had scoffed, a jagged, hysterical sound. The President had only one child. Him. Her. Greene was being played, or he was a fool, or perhaps some social climber had successfully