Seven was the Prince of the West.
The West was ruled by an old queen well beyond sixty. Klaus's mother was obsessed with the lusts of life, and she had a cruel and evil hunger. It was as if she were tormented by a disease of desire, for the country's meagre wealth was spent on food, clothes and thousands of young concubines that lived in her palace.
The queen had to taste every delicacy, have every luxury, fuck every pretty hole that roamed her land. For the queen was gluttony and lust personified. Like Erysichthon, she was ravenous in her search for opulence. And her people cowered in fear, hiding their Omegas under rot, dirtying beautiful features and mauling bodies.
Klaus's father—a doctor of great intelligence and the fairest of them all — was a victim of her hunger. It did not matter that he was covered in blood, sweat, and grime. It did not matter that his neck was marked by another; he was a bitten, mated wolf.
The queen relished the sharpness in his eyes, the handsome features, the flow of his voice, the confidence in his eyes. Yearning for his heart, she'd killed his husband—a handsome huntsman with a brilliant dimpled smile—and then she took him home.
Klaus was his father's only child, a prince raised as a tool for his revenge. There was no love in his life, only duty, sacrifice and a hatred for Alphas that his father taught to him by candlelight.
"We're here because of that fucking bitch," his father had whispered to him as he combed his hair, harsh tugs that had his little head spinning. "We're here because the Alphas want us to die." His father turned him then, crazed eyes the brightest of glowing blue. "If you want things to change, you must do everything I say. I will not coddle you, Klaus. You must be strong to live and you must be a leader to survive."
It was survival of the fittest in a court of thousands of backstabbing, murderous Omegas — relatives that would poison him for a rise in rank. But Klaus was taught the ways of manipulation. He knew how to influence and change the tides in his favour; he knew how to distinguish poison from his meals and defend himself at night; and most importantly, he knew how to hide the evidence of his kills.
Klaus was a genius that could do anything to survive, and that made him deadly.
And so, as his father rose to sit upon the throne as King, Klaus ruled as the top Omega prince of the court. He was the best in everything, and the prettiest of them all. No one could hold a candle to his brilliance, not even his Alpha half-sisters.
Some of which had tried to crawl into his bed and taste his cock, wanted him as their smart little Omega pet. Klaus would grit his teeth and accept their favour with an arched back, siphon information from their braying lips as they came. And then he'd kill them.
It didn't take long for all of his Alphas sisters to die. And soon there was not one Alpha heir left in the small cesspool of his family's blackened blood.
By then, his mother had grown to become a puppet that listened to his father's words and danced to his tune. She sat on her throne—old, dumb and forgetting, listening to his manipulation. It was a time of change, of policies with loopholes that benefited Omegas, and an economy that grew in strength.
Klaus had been the only option for an heir to the throne, But even that had not stopped his mother from selling him like a commodity. A moment of clarity, a spilled glass of wine, and Klaus was betrothed to the heir of the North, Euodia's older sister, for a waive of the debt that they owed.
It had been a shocking change in plans, one that had left Klaus shaken. And later, with fingers running over the frayed picture of his Papa—his father's husband, his father's true love. He had seen the truth in his own reflection. Klaus was not his mother's child, not with the dimples etched in his cheeks and the shape of his smile.
He had always been the son of his father's true love, his Papa.
And his mother knew that, had seen it in his face, in his very being.
He was the splitting image of the hunter she had killed for his father's hand.
Despite the setback, his father had pulled him aside right before he left, eyes bright with conquest, with hopes, with dreams. "This is good news. We'll take them all down," he'd promised. "There's no one left on your mother's side. No Alpha child to keep her kingdom running. You shall have it, and more." There had been madness in his eyes, but Klaus knew the odds were in their favour. For rebellion was brewing amongst the public and the Omegas were growing stronger. "Hold your wife close. Make her listen. You know how to please an Alpha, how to control her. Ruin the North, as I have ruined your mother."
"Yes, father," Klaus had agreed, then prepared his body and his mind for the wedding. A new loftier goal had now begun. He may be fucked and bred like cattle, but perhaps he'd be able to retrieve new information from the North, discover their weaknesses.. And that would be a boon in their plans of conquest.
As expected, Euodia's sister was stupid, a waste of fucking space. A dumb Alpha that knew nothing of the struggles of her people. She was an animal that ate, fucked and slept. And Klaus had easily settled into that role as her most favoured concubine, collecting information in the shadows. He discovered the weaknesses in their defences, the problems in their economy, the discord amongst their people.
And then he met Euodia, the Beta princess of the North.
Perhaps she had been the only danger in their plans. The only anomaly in the system. For despite being female, she was uncontrollable. There was a coldness in her eyes that he could not decipher, a broken soul he could not understand. She held the kingdom's weapons under lock and key, knew the ways of forbidden magic, and yet her peers deemed her weak.
It was laughable, crazy even, to watch the Alphas bully and burn the one person in charge of their strongest weapon. They couldn't see the strength in Euodia, not in the way Klaus could, as predators could recognise one another.
Worse still was the strange power that she had over the men he'd fallen in love with. It was maddening to watch them rage and bellow at her name, to see the devotion that they had towards her twisted in the depths of negativity and choler. And oddly, Klaus too would grow utterly obsessed with the crazy Beta.
He wanted to take her apart, wanted to learn what made her different from the Alphas. She did not care for his seduction, did not care for his scent as much as he did not care for hers. She did not wish to fuck Omegas. Motivation was lacking in all of her moves, and he struggled to see the reasons behind her actions. He struggled to understand her, the only pawn in his chess that moved on its own.
He would watch her from his corner on the floor as her family ridiculed her, just as they did with the Omegas by their side. And he'd see her festering power.
He could taste it in her—the intelligence behind emotionless eyes, the look on her face when he tried to snake his way into politics with a hand on her sister's shoulder. Her stance when decisions were made. She was so fucking clever that he rejoiced when they belittled her, when she was thrown out of politics as the family idiot, when no one cared about her opinions on matters.
And when her family was killed by them all, she'd been the last one standing, the last one leading the army of Alphas as the strongest and the best. An army that did not listen to her just because she was a Beta.
She could have been their most formidable enemy.
And for the first time in his life, that had incited a strange excitement through his system.
He'd soon discover later with her body plastered over the bench and torn into shreds that Euodia did not have the same capacity for human feeling. She lacked the empathy necessary for social behaviour. And all of her tyranny had always been her attempts to reach for the traces of emotions that she longed to feel. It was all just her attempts to fit in with a crowd of Alphas that looked down on her Beta status.
Prejudice had ruined them, and prejudice had ruined her.
Alone, the princess had always tried to reign supreme above the Alphas, done things only to claim herself as the best and the worse. Klaus had smiled then, fingers curling around her lifeless corpse, checked her pulse one last time. He had watched her body fall, pity dribbling through him for the loss of such potential.
Then had left her there to rot.
His father had been the one to kill his mother with a trigger to the head and a gleeful bark of laughter. "You've always been a wretched old bitch." The king had screamed. "Taking so many fucking Omegas." And his mother had stared at him then with wide, confused eyes that grew only brighter.
Klaus had watched when her head had blown, watched as blood splattered from the wound. His father had dropped the gun and laughed so hard he'd been breathless. He'd turned to Klaus then, body weighed down as if burdened by the kill. And Klaus had been alarmed by the weakness, the way he trembled as if lost without a purpose, without a goal. "Father—"
"Leave me," he'd whispered. "I am done." And that had been the beginning of his father's downfall. He had wasted away in bed, weak and sickly, hallucinating and whispering into the dark. That had been Klaus's first taste of the transformation, of the fall of an Omega who would soon become Lonely.
Later, he'd raised a gun to his father's head. His father had grown thin, and skin hung from his bones with darkness swallowing his hands and stretching to his heart. He was dying, and they both knew that. A gun to the head was what he'd have wanted, and Klaus was there to deliver his wishes, for his father was now lost in dreams and illusions.
"She was mine Klaus," his father had wept bitterly, knelt before a statue of their god—an Omega deity with her hands reaching for the stars. "I wanted to hate her, but I couldn't. I wanted to dislike our mating but I couldn't. Your mother was the worse, and yet she was mine. And now I pay the price for killing her. This is why I'm changing Klaus. I'm being punished."
"Don't worry, father," Klaus had said, curled his fingers around the trigger. His mind connected the dots, twisted and realised that his father was guilty for the mother. And despite everything, he'd been depending on his mother to live. Without motivation, without revenge to push him towards another day, he could not exist in this world. "You'll see Papa on the other side, he's waiting for you surely—"
"But I don't want to Klaus," his father had shook his head, clarity returning as they roamed Klaus's face, Papa's face. The King was a wreck, ruined and thin on the ground, ink travelling up his veins, colouring his eyes. Those eyes turned to him. Voids that spilled with pearls, trickled with so much want that it quivered from his lips. "I want to see her." His fingers were pressed to his hand at his temple, then around his throat as if parched. "God, I want to see her so much. I wish I didn't poison my body. I wish I'd given her a child, a real one. One that looked like her."
The tears alarmed him, and Klaus was glad that there was no one else in the room, glad that no one could see the tightening of his fingers. The stiffness in his shoulders at his words.
"My queen," his father moaned. "I want, I want to taste you again." His head raised to the statue, lost in the light of the stars. "I want to touch you. I want to have you in me. My queen, my Se—" His lips formed his mother's name, ink colouring his cheeks, teeth growing sharp. His father snarled, teeth snapping, black flooding every colour in his body.
The gun was fired before he could utter her name.
It was now that Klaus stood before the door with his own curse hanging over him like a shroud. A new realisation was dawning upon him of his father's words, of his father's suffering. For when he laid his eyes upon her, he was torn with a need to protect this new Beta, a Beta that lived only for their future. A Beta that would die. And when his gaze lingered on Zen, he saw the traces of his father's lunacy, the traces of a man in denial, in love.
He realised quickly that they were doomed.