Alpha: Awakening

Fourteen Years Earlier

    It all happened so fast.

    The apartment wasn’t the nicest of places to be raising a child, it surely wouldn’t have been her mother’s first pick, but it was all they had money for. After father had walked out on them to be with his secretary who was half his age, he’d taken the steady income that afforded them their large house before this, but now, it was all so different. 

    Everything became different. Budgets were set, her tutor stopped coming to visit and teach her; Hyerin had been praised by her father’s cabinet party members for her intellect and her aptitude for learning and thinking on the spot. Now, she no longer saw the familiar faces, her mother ushering her out of the house late one moonless night, asking their personal chauffeur to drive them to this seedy little complex and Hyerin simply couldn’t understand why. She never saw Mr. Park ever again, after he drove off into the distance, the quiet motor fading off and seeming to isolate her and her mother here, wherever ‘here’ was.

    It’d been three months since their arrival and Hyerin didn’t see much of her mother, seeing as she now had to drop the politician’s stay-at-home wife act in order to start bringing in an income that would support herself and her small child. Hyerin was a good child though, she understood fairly quickly that this was her mother’s only choice and she stayed at the apartment, not making so much as a squeak while she stayed in her new ‘home’. Mother had spoken to her the day following their arrival, “Honey, we don’t have the money to hire a babysitter to watch you and I can’t send you to your daycare anymore. Will you be a good girl and stay at home while Mommy goes to work? You can draw me some of those wonderful pictures with your expensive colored pencils, okay?”

    And draw she did; for hours, Hyerin would lay on the floor, using one of the few blankets that Mother had packed as a makeshift rug as she colored in pictures of her family, drawing the familiar faces that her five year old self saw on a day to day basis. Or had seen on a day to day basis; it’d been more than a few weeks since she’d last seen her father or Mr. Kim and Mr. Na, two city politicians that she knew were important but not necessarily to her.

    It happened on a cool autumnal night, late September, as she recalled. The full moon had just passed, letting glimmering rays of silver light through the grimy windows and bathing the small apartment complex in an eerie glow.

    The window had shattered, causing Hyerin to awake, her heart jumping into as she got out of her makeshift bed of blankets and throw pillows. She had her chubby little hand placed on the doorknob of her ‘room’, really nothing more than a cramped storage closet, when she heard the sound of a soft ‘thud’ followed by another and then heavy footsteps that seemed to be walking away from where she knew her mother’s room to be. 

    Her tummy clenched and she instantly knew that opening that door would be the wrong decision. She heard male voices, loud and gruff, sounding like Father when he was angry with Mother. More footsteps, the heavy sound of boots walked right past her door and she waited with her breath coming in fast puffs, her tiny form shaking as she realized that something was terribly wrong. The loud voices suddenly quieted and Hyerin held her breath, not daring to let herself be known. Her stranger-danger siren was wailing out of control in her head and she couldn’t help the tears that slid down her chubby cheeks. Her nose dripped, but there was still no sound, so she didn’t try to sniffle.

    The footsteps started up again, heavy and jarring the floor with each step. As the person walked, Hyerin could make out a few words, “…where’s the brat?” followed by the second man’s voice “I don’t know, maybe a relative is watching her.”

    A laugh sounded, rough and simply screaming ‘evil’ to her five year old self. 

    “What a , she deserved something ten times as painful than just a silenced shot to her pretty little skull…though with that kind of body, I don’t blame the boss for wanting to keep her around. I should have had some fun while she was still breathing. Ain’t much for necrophilia,” The first man laughed, the sound almost like something one of the bad guys in her multitude of Disney movies at home would sound like. Even while thinking that, Hyerin’s mind processed the words ‘shot to’ and ‘skull’, instantly making her tummy constrict at the implication of such words. 

    Mommy went to Heaven. Her pretty, selfless, smart Mommy was no more and the thought hurt her more than anything she’d ever experienced. But Mommy would want her to be strong and to not get caught by these bad men, and so she stayed quiet, the tears falling relentlessly, drenching her yellow nightdress that Mommy had packed into a suitcase right before they left. 

    “Well the sanction is fulfilled. Time to go, Beta,” The first man’s voice called out, walking almost leisurely back towards where the window they’d crashed through presumably was. 

    Hyerin waited, she waited and waited for what seemed like hours before she heard no more noise. She grabbed at the door handle and twisted, dreading the sight that she knew would await her. 

    Her mother, lying in a pool of crimson with her eyes gazing exactly where she knew her precious baby girl was. Those once lively pools of fern green eyes now glazed and dull. A quarter sized hole placed directly in between her eyes and the red splatter on the wall would later tell Hyerin’s trained senses it was a low velocity slug that had killed her mother, but her five year old self could only stare and cry unabashedly because now she truly was alone. 

    The image of her dead mother would forever stay with her and when her first sanction was issued, she would make a little detour to see this man, this Beta and show him who was Alpha.