His Unwanted Omega's Defiant Second Chance

Isabela POV:

Caden loomed over me, confident in the sheer, suffocating superiority of an Alpha bloodline.

"You think a few cheap words on a stage will alter reality?" he whispered, his hot, mint-scented breath brushing my temple. "Look at you. No scent. No claws. You don't even have a wolf crying in your head. You're an empty biological husk. Cori is warmth, purity, and light. You? You are an embarrassment to the very concept of our species."

Behind him, Greg nodded in grim satisfaction, arms crossed over his chest. Cathie was watching with a cruel smirk tucked into her handkerchief.

They expected the old Isabela. The Isabela who would crumble, drop her head, bite her lip until it bled, and whisper: I'm sorry, Alpha.

Instead, I looked up through my blonde bangs, and I began to laugh.

It was not a soft giggle. It was a low, melodic, terrifying sound that seemed to pull all the oxygen out of the private salon.

Caden's brow twitched. A flash of predatory unease darted across his pupils. "What the hell are you laughing at?"

"I'm laughing at how blind you are, little Alpha," I whispered.

Before the final syllable faded, my muscles fired.

Years of scraping for survival in the shadows—years of enduring brutal beatings in silence and secretly hardening every muscle in the dead of night just to protect my sick brother—exploded through my limbs.

I didn't lunge like a berserker. I ducked beneath his reach with liquid precision, stepped inside his guard, and drove the point of my heel directly into his instep while slamming my palm into his solar plexus.

Caden gasped, his diaphragm seizing.

Before he could register the shock, I caught the back of his neck with both hands and brought my knee upward with the full, unbridled torque of my hips, driving it straight between his thighs.

CRACK.

A strangled, wet shriek scraped out of Caden's throat.

His eyes rolled back. His knees turned to water. The towering Alpha heir folded in half like a cheap deck chair, collapsing onto the plush carpet with his face buried in the rug, wheezing and clutching his groin in blinding agony.

The room fell dead.

Cori's jaw dropped so wide her lip gloss tore. Cathie let out a squeak like a stepped-on mouse.

I wiped an imaginary speck of dust from my shoulder, stepped casually over Caden's twitching body, and looked Greg dead in the eye.

"You were saying, Father?"

Greg let out an ungodly roar. "You dead bitch!"

The Alpha shifted partially—his hands extending into dark brown claws, thick fur erupting along his forearms as he swung a haymaker designed to decapitate me against the plaster wall.

I didn't duck.

I raised my right arm, caught his wrist right at the joint, and diverted the momentum down into the oak side table.

BANG. The solid wood splintered into kindling.

Greg tried to wrench his arm back, but my fingers locked around his radial artery like a vise forged from steel. His eyes widened into white saucers.

How? the question screamed in his gaze. How can an unshifted Omega restrain an Alpha's claw?

"You spent twenty years thinking I was harmless because my wolf hadn't spoken," I whispered into his ear, twisting his forearm until his joint groaned with agony. "You should have prayed she never did."

I released him with a violent shove, sending the great Alpha of the Schneider Pack crashing back into his wife's vanity table.

Before anyone could draw breath, the outer doors were violently kicked open, and five armed Pack Enforcers poured into the room, their silver-tipped assault carbines pointed directly at my chest.