“Hey, everyone?” Lauren Myers uttered, clearing her throat nervously as she entered the living room in a haze of holiday toffee and rampant potpourri.  Her parents and two sisters, who were all waiting around the living room in bright red Christmas sweaters with mugs of hot coffee, turned their heads at the sound of her voice.  Despite having gone through the cheery and hug-a-second reintroductions in the foyer not twenty minutes ago, all of them flashed her fresh smiles as though they hadn’t seen her in years.

            “Hi, honey.  Did you get everything settled back into your room?  I hope I remembered to leave enough towels in your bathroom,” Lois Myers sang merrily with a wink to her middle child as she continued flipping eggs over the stove.  The empty nester had clearly gone all-out with decorations and cozy accommodations for the December return of her three daughters.

            “Yeah, there’s… there’s enough towels.  Thanks, Mom,” Lauren said, taking a deep breath.  Bathroom utilities were clearly not at the forefront of her mind at this moment as she leaned against the door frame.

            “Why don’t you come in and grab a mug?  I just made a fresh pot,” her father Ross said with a warm grin as he raised his coffee cup in her direction from the couch.  “It’s your favorite roast.”

            “Sure, sure, in just a minute,” Lauren muttered, twirling a finger through her long chocolate tresses as they cascaded over her shoulder.  She remained poised in the door.

            “Well, don’t just stand there.  You look like you’re about to bust us all for something,” her older sister Britney snorted playfully, raising an eyebrow at the awkward stance of her twenty-five-year-old Alpha sibling.  Even the ever-sarcastic eldest Myers daughter couldn’t hide her happiness at seeing Lauren, who by far made the fewest return trips home of the three.

            “She was just driving for a long time.  Maybe she wants to stand,” Millie suggested quietly as her eyes fell back to her phone in her lap.  Brushing a hand through her tangled locks, the youngest sister dug her thumb against the corner of her lip thoughtfully, proving her college experience thus far hadn’t affected her reserved docility in the least.

            “No, it’s… actually something else.  I… wanted to say something, and I guess I figured I should be standing for it,” Lauren responded, at last allowing herself an uneasy smile.

            Everyone in the room instantly returned their attention to the doorway, lips pursed expectantly and eyes bright with a mix of fear, curiosity, and wonderment.

            “I’m… getting married,” Lauren blurted, and she lifted her hand up to reveal the sparkling ring on her finger.

            The effect was instantaneous.  Everyone in the room leapt up and mobbed Lauren, throwing arms around her and flying into such a mad flurry of questions and exclamations, the girl could hardly keep up as she suddenly found herself cocooned by cooing family members.

            “No… freaking… way.”

            “When did this happen?”

            “Oh my God, congratulations!”

            “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

            “Where is he?”

            “Who is he?”

            “What’s his name?”

            “Is he coming?”

            “Are we going to meet him today?”

            “When?  When?”

            “He proposed just yesterday morning.  His name is Ian, and he’s… the most wonderful person I’ve ever met,” Lauren said dreamily, her voice rich with adoration, and for just a moment, it got easier to keep her querulously pounding heart rate in check.

            “Jesus, Lauren.  You’re so… I mean, wow,” Millie commented in awe on the look of genuine, luminous elation on her sister’s face.  All of them knew beyond a doubt from just a glance that this was the happiest they’d ever seen Lauren, and it heightened the celebratory mood even more.

            “Thanks, Millie,” she sighed appreciatively, clasping fingers with her younger sibling.

            “And?” her father chuckled good-naturedly, gently demanding more answers as he adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose.  “I don’t suppose you’re going to introduce us to the lucky young man before you head down the aisle?”

            “He’s… actually here.  Today.  Right now,” Lauren laughed sheepishly, her pulse rising again at an exponential rate.  She brushed her hair over an ear, trying to find ways to keep her hands occupied to prevent anxious jittering, but it was getting harder.

            “No way,” Britney scoffed with shock as she held her sister’s hand up to her face for better examination of the nuptial gem, jealousy evident in her glowing eyes.  “Is he outside?  How come we didn’t even see him when you pulled up?”

            “No, he’s… he’s already inside.  He’s waiting up in my room.”

            Suddenly, the electric excitement died down and became a hesitant fog of befuddlement.

            “Honey, you mean… he sneaked upstairs after you?  For Heaven’s sake, why didn’t you just have him come in at the same time as you?  Please, please, ask him to come down and say hello!” Lois gasped, still with her arms locked around her daughter in a firm embrace as she rocked back and forth so enthusiastically that the bun her greying brown hair was tied in nearly came undone.  “Was he nervous about meeting us?  I can’t imagine anything sillier.”

            “He, um… he… did come in at the same time as me,” Lauren mumbled under her breath as though this little fact could be slipped in under the radar, though she knew already the gleeful atmosphere was about to be assassinated.  She gritted her teeth as though standing in the center of the tracks with an oncoming train zooming toward her like a missile.

            The room fell silent.  Hands that had been affectionately wrapped around Lauren’s arms and shoulders steadily slid away so that everyone could take a step back and observe her with sheet-white faces.

            “Lauren… how did…” Millie began, obviously the only one not quite paralyzed yet.

            “He was in my pocket,” Lauren breathed, forcing herself to plaster the world’s most hopelessly optimistic smile on her lips, knowing full-well it was entirely in vain as she watched the joy squelched from the faces of her entire family.

            A steely stoicism settled oppressively in over the room like a plague despite the bright green and crimson streamers clogging the ceilings with the promise of peace on earth and goodwill to men.

            “Ian is…” Lois managed at last, her throat dry, and had to pause for a moment as though she was having a sword jammed down her throat.  She placed a hand delicately to her cheek.  “…a Beta?”

            “Y-Yes.  Yes he is, Mom,” Lauren said, chewing on her lower lip and folding her hands behind her back.  This was far harder than she’d already sickeningly prepped herself for, and she knew it would only make things worse to stare at the floor like a coward.  It was tough, but she forced herself to maintain eye contact with her mother.

            “Lauren, you… you can’t be serious, though,” Ross said, clinging to a final desperate hope at the whole thing being an elaborate prank.  He reached forward and placed a hand back on his daughter’s shoulder, though it clearly was difficult for him, as though the girl was suddenly afflicted with an incurable and highly contagious disease.  “It’s… it’s a joke, right?”

            “No, Daddy,” Lauren said softly.  “It’s not.  And it’s no big deal.  Honest.  Please, just… just let me go get him and bring him down here.  I know if you just give him a chance, you’ll all love him just as much as I do.”  As the girl rambled, she heard the overly hopeful words of this final sentence pass through her lips, and she knew it was a lie just as well as the others.

            As though she’d been slapped across the face, Lois Myers winced and backed up several feet so she could awkwardly crumble into an armchair, her fingers already digging deeply into the stressed creases of her forehead.  She closed her eyes, and Lauren couldn’t tell if it was from the onset of the headache, or the inability to look her daughter in the face any longer.

            Britney, as well, took a few steps back from the sister she’d referred to as her best friend during their high school years.  Her lips were steadily contorting into a revolted snarl.  Once she was standing next to the chair, she crouched down, getting near to the emotionally comatose Lois, and whispered something into her ear.

            Millie, meanwhile, looked too stunned to work herself into any kind of temperament beyond shock.

            Lauren clenched her fists and, short on courage in this unbearably tense instant, descended for a heartbeat into the dialogue from the night before that she’d melded protectively into her memory.

            “Are you… sure you want to go tomorrow?” Lauren whispered tenderly, leaning back against the headboard of her bed, as she cradled her tiny fiancé in her cupped palms.  Her violet nightie hung loosely around her slender thighs, partially concealed by the covers.  “I would completely understand if you wanted to stay behind for it all and let me try to talk with them first.”

            “Absolutely sure,” Ian affirmed, placing a reassuring hand on the soft thumb of his love as he looked unblinkingly up at her looming face.  “I told you.  I’m gonna be with you every step of the way from now on.  Plus, I’ll have to meet them sometime.”

            “You know I’m ready to try.  To keep this to ourselves, I mean.  If we have to.  We’ve been together for almost four years and they’ve never suspected a thing.”

            “I couldn’t ask you to put yourself through that kind of strain any more than you already have.  You love them,” Ian said.

            “But I love YOU too,” Lauren insisted, and stroked her thumb up and down the twenty-six-year-old Beta’s back.  “This isn’t just about them, you know.”

            “What’s the worst that could happen?  Your family may not like people like me, but they know you.  They trust you.  They have to at least listen,” he responded.  He wrapped his arms around the young woman’s finger and rested his cheek against her thumbprint.  He clasped his body against the smooth curvature of her peachy digit and planted a silent kiss on her skin.

            Warmth flooded Lauren’s body, from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, and practically radiated light outward as she studied the lanky, curly-haired young man dressed in his dorky sweater in the center of her hand.

            She couldn’t imagine ever learning to love anything on earth as much as the being currently hugging her finger.  It was a physical impossibility.

            “Thank you for this,” she whispered, bringing him closer to her chin.  She puckered up and smooched so gently on the side of his face that it hardly nudged him off-balance.  “No more hiding.  It’s time they knew what’s most important to me.”

            Lauren snapped back into the present, revitalized by the reminder of promises made.

            “I’m sorry I didn’t say something sooner,” she sighed bitterly at last, her gaze bouncing nervously between the four faces before her.  With a terrified gulp of air, she wrung her fists together and proceeded to spill her guts with the wording she’d been rehearsing in the mirror all morning before coming: “I know it… might’ve made this easier if I’d tried to explain before he proposed, but I always knew this would be a bit… much for you all to hear, no matter what.  I thought maybe it wasn’t a part of myself I’d have to share with you, that I could have both, and maybe that was wrong.  But I can’t do that anymore.  I can’t lie to you all about the most important person in my life.  I’m… I’m happy.  Happier than I’ve ever been.  I know you all can see that, and I was just hoping maybe you all would want to share in that.  So… please.  Please.  Please just give him… and me… a chance?”

            Another bout of frigid silence colder than the winter outside followed that seemed to last an eon.  Lauren heard the tick of the seconds hand on a nearby clock booming in her eardrums, and she felt herself beginning to wilt as she watched all four of her family members’ faces remain unchanged by this heartfelt proclamation of hers.

            “Britney,” Lois breathed hoarsely, as though she’d been screaming for several minutes straight.  She still refused to look directly at her middle child.  “Please go find me some aspirin from the bathroom cabinet.”

            “Mom?” Lauren peeped.  She was positively crestfallen at this reception after she’d laid everything on the line with such rawness.  “Please talk to me.”

            “Millie.  I’d like you to tell your sister that I’m just… trying to process a few things right now, and will get back to her after I’ve had a chance to get through this headache,” Lois spat with aggression clearly intended more for the daughter she was obviously unwilling to candidly address.

            “But… Mom?” Millie mumbled, crossing her arms tightly over her chest as she leaned against a side table that propped up a miniature Christmas tree.  The youngest sister was visibly unnerved by this ticking time bomb of a situation.  “She can just h-”

            “Please just do like I asked you,” Lois grunted.

            “Um, Lauren?  Mom says… she’ll get back to you,” Millie awkwardly stammered, her nose wrinkling as she restated it.

            Lauren felt herself on the verge of tears, but bit her lip hard enough that she almost drew blood to keep herself cool.  Things were already looking grim, but her chances would be even worse if she couldn’t stand her ground.  She had to be strong.  For the both of them.          

            And then something else hit her like a punch in the gut, even stronger than the one she’d already received from her mother’s icy reception to the happiest news of her life.

            “Where… where’s Britney?  I thought she was going to get Mom a…” Lauren croaked, tuning out everything around her in an intense pre-panic focus as she heard her bedroom door on the second floor slam shut.

It was like a bolt of lightning had crashed into the deceptively serene family Christmas living room and split apart the delicate shell of stunted social graces that had been keeping everything barely in check for the past several minutes.

            Lois rose like a shot from her chair and marched swiftly past the petrified Lauren before she had a chance to react.

            “Mom, what’s going on?  What was Britney DOING?” Lauren cried as she built to a terrified crescendo, her cheeks drained of color.

            “Ross!” Lois barked as she made her way toward the stairs, as though this whole thing had been coordinated in the silent interim, and before the mortified daughter could give desperate chase, the well-built Myers patriarch begrudgingly grabbed Lauren by the shoulders and steered her toward a chair, forcing her to sit down as kindly as he could, even while she kicked at his shins.

            “Dad, what the hell are you doing?  LET ME GO!” Lauren screamed, now throwing her limbs every which way and thrashing against her father’s powerful grip with every fiber of her being.  She flung herself backward in the chair, only to find it was too close to the wall to provide any momentum, so she tried lunging for the carpet to snake around Ross’s legs, but this too was blocked.  Her father hunkered down on the floor, putting himself slightly below her eye level in hopes of soothing her.  There was an agonized glint in his eye.

            “Millie, please… help your sister calm down,” he requested softly to his other daughter, and Lauren’s younger sibling was at last snapped out of her frozen state.

            “Lauren?  Don’t w-worry.  Mom and Britney won’t do anything to him.  They probably just want to… go meet him,” Millie said, crouching by the chair and placing a hand on her sister’s knee in an attempt to calm her.  Her tone suggested she wasn’t entirely convinced by her own words.

            “Then why won’t they let me go up too?” Lauren growled, thrusting in every which way, but finding each attempt blocked by her parent.  “Dad, I swear to God, if they do anything to him…”

            “Lauren, I promise you,” her father said sincerely.  “Nothing will happen to your… your, um…”

            “My fiancé, Dad.  The man I’m going to marry,” Lauren spat, finishing the sentence for him.  Wrenching an arm loose, she slugged Ross in the shoulder, who took hold of her again, unfazed.  “Do you get that yet?  And I swear, if a single thing happens to him, I will never set foot in this house again.  I will never speak to Mom or you again.”

            “You’re just upset, honey.  You need to just breathe.  You’re getting overexcited,” Ross insisted in a hushed voice.  “Come on, just try breathing slowly with me.  In, out.  In, out.”

            Her eyes welling, Lauren gazed pleadingly through the lenses of her father’s spectacles.  She could see the love she’d always recognized behind them, but intermixed as well she saw something that made her heart sink.  Not compassion, but a regretful, almost shameful pity.

            “Lauren, they’re not going to hurt him, okay?  You know they won’t hurt him.”

            Lauren swallowed what felt like a ball of cement in her quivering throat.

            Did she know it?  Did she really?

            Despite the aggressive classism toward Betas she knew had been ingrained in her family for generations, Lauren knew they at least didn’t have a genocidally-inclined heritage like certain particularly vengeful Alpha bloodlines.

            The closest thing to a hate crime in her family’s history was on the part of Britney, who’d suffered a social slaughter her senior year of high school when it was discovered that a defensive lineman on the Alpha football team she’d reportedly been on the verge of becoming involved with had started messing around with a girl on the Beta cheer squad of a nearby school.  Britney answered the affront by slapping her suitor in the face, followed by tracking down the offending Beta at her cheer practice, spitting on her, and flicking her onto the football field.  It had earned Britney a few months in an Aegis anger management course, and singular though the event was, Lauren had never felt more distanced from the sibling she’d thought she knew so well, and it had created a divide that had existed ever since.

            And now she had come home to her parents and had to face them as, in their eyes, their daughter was literally snatched away by a piece of living scum.  Her father, and especially her mother, had always done whatever they felt was necessary to ensure the best for their daughters.

            Could she truly trust they wouldn’t do the same in this case, even if it meant…

            “Let GO of me!” screeched Lauren, struggling with renewed zeal, forcing her father to shift to a less awkward position as he continued holding her down in her chair.  Turning her head toward the ceiling, Lauren made a last-ditch effort to halt the unfolding madness with a blood-curdling shout: “DON’T TOUCH HIM!”

            Ian Berry had spent the past five minutes of solitude waiting on the enormous purple platform that served as his fiancé’s bedside table in her childhood.  He was more nervous than he’d been in a long time, but it was relaxing to be able to take stock of the massive space where the love of his life had spent her formative years.  After all, he’d only seen her home in pictures before, and now that he was here, ensconced in the bookshelves of fantasy novels, rock band posters, and sunflower-yellow wallpaper, it made him feel a particular closeness with her he hadn’t yet experienced

            Taking a seat on the base of a lamp once Lauren had lovingly deposited him down, he’d whipped out a book from his miniature suitcase and buried his nose in it.  Just in case she decided to bring her family up to her room to meet him instead, he decided it would pay for their first image of him to be an intellectual one.  It wasn’t that he didn’t actually enjoy reading, but given how much was riding on this meeting today, he knew only a stellar impression would have a prayer of selling them all on this.

            In truth, Ian had been prepared for this moment for the better part of four years, and the challenges it was sure to yield.  Lauren had always been upfront about her family’s intensely conservative political and social views, particularly when it came to the integration of the classes, and he’d come to accept that this was just the way of the world for some, as he had been doing for the previous two decades of his life.  His feelings for this girl made it well-worth swallowing the fact that her family wanted absolutely nothing to do with him or his kind.  Still, he’d yearned for the chance not just to try to make peace with the situation, but to allow Lauren the chance to reconcile these two halves of her life.  Over the months, he had seen it beginning to eat her up inside, even though she wouldn’t admit it openly.  No matter the outcome, they couldn’t continue to live a lie any longer.

            Hearing the pounding of footsteps up the staircase out in the hallway, followed by the twisting of the doorknob, Ian quickly brought the book back in front of his face, though he couldn’t help but peer over the rim of the cover.

            This was it.

            His heart fluttered immediately when he realized the figure entering the room wasn’t Lauren, but her older sister Britney, who he’d seen in numerous pictures over his partner’s social media but not yet in person.  Her bright red sweater caught his eye first with its loud hue, but the look on her tanned face quickly usurped this note.  The breath caught in his chest when he realized she was the only one entering the room, her gaze landing heavily on him.  Her upper lip was curled as though a large deceased animal was festering in the corner.

            “Oh my fucking God,” Britney coughed in disbelief as she slipped inside the room and slammed the door shut behind her.  She dug her fingers with distress into her short, silky locks.  “She didn’t.”

            “H-Hello there,” Ian said as pleasantly as he could, rising to his feet and tucking his book under his arm.  “You must be…”

            “Don’t even talk to me,” Britney scowled as she darted across the room and took a seat on the bed to more closely examine the specimen on the table.

            “I’m… sorry,” Ian mumbled under his breath.  He gripped the book harder in his now-trembling knuckles.  Though he wasn’t just yet letting himself get scared, he did find himself wistfully desiring Lauren to be standing in this room right now.

            “Ugh.  What a fucking disaster,” Britney said through grinding teeth.  She reached forward, simultaneously determined to touch the Beta but also afraid to confirm he was real.  Ian took a nervous step back, but it wasn’t enough to avoid the woman’s French-tipped fingers from flicking outward in a claw and striking him roughly in the torso.

            “Hey - hey, this… this isn’t-” he gasped as he found himself pinned down to the table by Britney’s firm thumb and index fingers poised decisively against his shoulders.

            By this point, Ian was fully prepared to let loose a string of expletives.  Ultimately, though, he decided this wouldn’t be in his best interest in such a vulnerable position, particularly as the thick pad of Britney’s thumb shifted from his shoulder to his chest, poised directly above his sternum.

            “Why couldn’t it be fake?  Why couldn’t it just be another one of her sick jokes?”

            “I… think we’re maybe getting off on the wrong foot here,” Ian mumbled under his breath, squirming uselessly beneath the weight of the woman’s hand.  He pressed his fists against the flesh of her thumb, instantly reminded by the shape of it of the safety and serenity of sitting in Lauren’s palm, and this act finally yielded the reaction he wanted when Britney pulled away in disgust.

            Of course, it was the shape and precisely nothing else that reminded him of her.

            “Jesus Christ… I just can’t believe… it’s just insane,” Britney muttered to herself as she withdrew her arm to her sweater and wiped her hand rigorously against the wooly fabric, hoping to rid herself of an imagined Beta pathogen.  She shook her head.  Placing her hands over her mouth, the brunette plopped onto her back on the bed, now speaking rhetorically to the ceiling.  “God, does she ever think about anyone else except her own goddamned self?”

            “All the time,” Ian whispered reverently under his breath as he pulled himself back to his feet, too quietly for Britney to hear, and took a step back further on the table.

            His pulse quickened at the sound of a cry from downstairs.  Lauren’s cry.

            Instinctively, he searched the edge of the table.  Of course, the odds of him being of any help to her if she was actually in trouble were little to none, but he had to try.  There was no other consideration.

            Hopping off onto the bed would already be risky with Britney spread out, particularly since her hands had settled into a pattern of punching against the bed sheets that would easily send Ian flying if he got within two feet of them.  Climbing down the side was an impossibility as well, given the carved pattern in the legs of the table that were too fine to be used as handholds, even for someone of three-inch stature like Ian.

            What the hell was going on down there?

            The door swung open again and in came a woman in an equally extreme red sweater, her brunette hair tied back in a tight bun, and her skin now appearing to be pulled even tighter.  Save for the grave look of taught woe on the woman’s countenance, Lauren was the spitting image of who Ian instantly recognized as Lois Myers.

            “Oh, Lauren,” she sighed wearily, as she too caught sight of the Beta on the bedside table and seemed to shrivel up just as quickly as her eldest daughter, albeit far more dejectedly.  “Lauren, Lauren, Lauren.”

            “Mom, what if this… what if this comes back on us somehow?  You know how some of those legacy things work at Millie’s school.  What if she’s going for an internship and they get wind of this?  And me?  I’m already trying for the next department up, and thanks to Miss Free Love down there, I might be smacked right back down again,” Britney droned miserably, now with a hand clasped dramatically over her eyes.

            “Honey, you won’t need to worry about that.  You know how… liberal a lot of the people making those decisions are.  It will be all right, I promise.”

            “How can you promise something like that, Mom, when she’s about to marry her freaking pet.”

            “I’m not a pet,” Ian spoke up at last, closing his eyes with resolve.  He was prepared to put up with a certain amount, but there was, eventually, a line.

            “What did you just say to me?” the twenty-seven-year old Alpha groused, lifting her head from the bed to chance a glance at the source of her ire.

            “I said I’m not a pet.  Lauren isn’t marrying her pet.  She’s marrying a person.”

            “Wow.  Look, Mom.  She taught him tricks.  Perfect!” Britney huffed as she laid her head back on the bed again.

            “Oh, God, this is just a mess.  A vile, vile mess,” Lois said as she lowered herself onto the edge of the bed, and the quavering in her voice revealed she was about to cry.  “I just can’t believe… after all we’ve done for you kids…”

            “Mom, she’s the one SCREWING the Beta, not me!” cried Britney indignantly as she pulled herself back to her feet.  “I stayed normal.”

            “That’s enough,” Lois snapped to her daughter, though it was evidently much more a defense of her feelings than Ian’s honor.  “I just… I just need to think this over.  Think about how to say what needs to be said to her.”

            “I know you don’t approve of this.  Or me.  Or anyone like me,” Ian called out louder than before, having taken a deep breath and steeled himself for this.  “But I also know that you love your daughter enough to at least hear what she has to say.”

            “Don’t you dare…” Lois shrieked, rising from the bed like a startled bat and shooting straight for Ian with a pointer finger extended, until she was close enough to jab him in the chest.  “…talk to me about my daughter.”

            With this, Lois pinched her fingers together on the back collar of Ian’s shirt and plucked him from the table.  Her hand paused at chest level, her arm fully extended, and she dangled him above the plummet, only using the requisite amount of physical contact on his puny clothing to prevent him from dropping.

            “Denying everything isn’t going to make things go away,” Ian announced boldly, keeping his voice at a lowered volume as he anxiously forced himself not to look down, and instead remained locked on the intimidating billboard-sized visage of the middle-aged woman’s glowering countenance.  “You owe it to her, and to yourself, to talk about it.”

            “Oh, we’re going to talk about it, all right.  Very thoroughly,” Lois hissed with fire in her throat.  The young man’s attempts at peace had evidently allowed her to transition smoothly from forlorn anguish to seething fury.  Cupping her other palm a matter of inches below Ian’s swinging feet, Lois released the grip on his shirt and allowed him to plop haphazardly into her other hand.  Instantly her fingers wrapped him up in a fist that was only prevented from squeezing the air from the Beta’s lungs by the conflicted emotional weakness the woman felt as her tears finally began pouring down her cheeks.

            “Britney.  Come on.  We’re going back downstairs,” the matriarch ordered as she observed the quivering life form between her powerful fingers with barely quelled abhorrence.  For a moment, Ian’s lips parted, but no response escaped them as he gained a respectful timidity of the titaness who now held his entire being in her warm and vengeful fist.  “We have a lot to discuss.”

            “Mom?  MOM!” Lauren screamed at the sight of Lois and Britney marching back into the living room.  She struggled valiantly to rise to her feet, but Ross once again blocked her attempt.

            Almost immediately, the terrified Alpha’s eyes fell upon the sight of her defeated fiancé clenched in her mother’s upright fist and held willfully at stomach level, and the tears began flowing anew down her reddened cheeks.

            “Lauren, please try to calm down.  I want this discussion we’re going about to have to be as adult as possible,” Lois said.  Her voice still trembled, and her eyes were raw, but she had managed to get herself composed again on the way back downstairs.  She took a seat at the kitchen table, with a room’s worth of distance between herself and her daughter, along with Britney who had followed closely behind.

            “Put him down NOW!” Lauren fired back, her chest heaving as she lunged forward again, kicking at her father’s restraining shins with full resolve.  Ross grunted and merely adjusted his position again to hold her back.

            “I’m not squeezing him, Lauren.  Do you see that?  I’m not hurting him right now,” Lois peaceably countered, brandishing Ian higher in the air to confirm this fact.

            “I don’t care,” Lauren howled, gritting her teeth as cold tears trickled down the crook of her neck.  “Let… him… go.”

            “Honey, the important thing to start realizing as soon as possible is that you’re confused.  Very confused.  And we just want to start helping you get better.  Do you understand that?” Lois insisted.

            “All I understand is that if you don’t put him down right fucking now, I’m leaving this house and this family for-”

            “We’re going to talk right now, one way or another.  You know I would never do anything to hurt you, but if I have to act on your behalf, for your own good…” Lois sighed, and chose this moment to give Ian a little squeeze in her curled fist that earned a strained gasp from the cramped Beta, causing Lauren to flinch as if she’d been struck by a hatchet.  “…then you know I would not hesitate to do what’s best for you.  Do you understand that?”

            “Mom…” Millie uttered under her breath, too stunned by this act to come up with any response as she cowered on the couch between the two divided halves of the family.

            “Lauren.  Don’t worry.  It’ll be okay,” Ian called out in shallow breaths, lifting his head from the coiled tunnel of Lois’s fingers.

            “You should listen to your talking toy,” Britney spat at her sister, although a sly satisfaction crept inevitably through her words as she leaned with crossed arms into her chair.

            Shaking her head and shutting her eyes to unsuccessfully floodgate the tears, Lauren struggled for air.  It felt like her lungs were vibrating outward with every pained breath.

            “Please.  Please don’t do this, Mom,” she gasped, no longer actively struggling against her father.  “There’s no need for any of this.  Can’t you see…”

            “What?”

            “Can’t you see how happy I am now?” Lauren begged, half-choking on the words.  “I thought… that was all you ever wanted for me.  You said that to me once.”

            “I did.  And it’s still what I want.  It’s what I want for all three of you girls,” Lois insisted with genuine fervor.  “But you’re still so young.  You don’t understand what it’s like to-”

            “But I’m not, Mom.  Not anymore.  This is my life.  And maybe I’m confused or crazy about certain things, but on this, I’m not,” Lauren declared, then exhaled heavily.  “I’m in love.”

            Lois sighed and lowered her fist toward the table, resting her forearm on its surface, but still didn’t release Ian.  Instead she resorted to letting her fingers idly loosen and then curl back in around him, rotating him in her fist.  She dug the fingers of her free hand into her forehead and sighed.  “Ross… could you… I, I just… can’t anymore just yet…”

            “Sure,” he said, turning back to his daughter.  “Honey, if I let go of you, will you promise to stay here, just until we’ve all had a chance to talk?”

            More bitterly resentful than she’d ever felt in her life, Lauren was far too dumbstruck by the sight of her mother threatening Ian with powdered ribs if she tried anything risky, so she swallowed and then nodded resolutely without looking her dad in the eye.

            “Thank you,” he said, taking a few steps back and sitting down on the coffee table, with plenty of room to block her again if she made a dash for the kitchen.  Taking a deep breath, the burly, softer-spoken parent made his attempt to break through: “I think what your mother is trying to get at here is that… there are certain things, as parents, that we have to try our best to do for you, to help you on the right path.  And when we see you’ve started to… veer off that path, just a little, it’s our job, because we love you, to try to-”

            “Why do you hate them so much?” Lauren challenged quietly, interrupting her father’s hesitant speech.  She was too mired in rage and fear to do anything but cut to the chase now.

            “Who?”

            “Don’t do this with me, Dad.  Don’t play this game.  Betas.  Why?”

            “Honey, this… this isn’t the time or place to discuss personal matters of politics, or-”

            “Actually, it’s exactly the time and place to discuss it,” Lauren shot back, gripping the sides of her chair violently to help prevent herself from launching forward with the intent of harming anyone between herself and her endangered lover.  “That’s what this is all about, and if you’re all going to lie to yourselves about it, then you’re all just hypocrites.”

            “Do you ever just stop and realize how insane you sound?” Britney called out.  She reached toward her mother’s fist and pressed a thumb to the back of Ian’s head, forcing him to stare straight ahead at Lauren across the room.  “Have you ever looked at this thing and thought about it?  Even for a second?”

            “Take your fucking finger off of him now,” Lauren instructed with enough coldness and murder in her irises that even Britney was prompted to listen and draw back, though she didn’t let how startled she was show.

            “I don’t… hate Betas,” Ross said at last with just enough truth that Lauren knew he, at least, fully believed it.  “It just makes me afraid for you to think of-”

            “Why are you afraid?” she demanded, returning her attention to him.

            “How is he supposed to… provide for you?  What kind of life could you possibly have?” Ross cut in.

            “We’re both adults.  We both have jobs.  Maybe I make more than him, but we’ve been getting along just fine,” Lauren answered with a wry, feigned grin.  “Maybe you didn’t notice, Dad, but I’m not a helpless damsel.  And he’s not helpless, either.  He makes more than some Alphas do.”

            “What the hell is she talking about?” Britney snickered.  “What even is he?  An itty bitty gigolo?”

            “Web design.  Even did some for Aegis,” Ian piped in, confidently but without getting loud enough to spark a reaction.  Lois’s fist seemed to recoil with surprise at being reminded of his presence, but that was all.

            “But… you can’t possibly have the time to watch him every single second.  Who’s there to watch out for you?” her father asked.

            “We watch out for each other, Dad.  Just because I’m the one who can pick him up instead of it being the other way around doesn’t make him useless,” Lauren said.   “And what?  You’re saying if Mom suddenly couldn’t reach all the shelves on her own, you’d just kick her out into the street?”

            “What about… you know…” Ross mumbled with obvious embarrassment, breaking eye contact again.  He obviously now was fishing for things to continue legitimizing his position.  “…if you ever wanted a family…”

            “What about it?” his daughter snapped.

            “How are you supposed to… to…”

            “You’re really asking me that, aren’t you, Dad?” Lauren simpered, and she could see a flash of genuine shame in her father’s eyes, this time directed at himself instead of his daughter.  “It’s not like it’s any of your business, but since the people I might’ve once called my family have decided to hold us both hostage for a little while, I guess I might as well, huh?”

            “Honey, you know that’s not what this-”

            “Dad, I’ll be honest, I don’t really know for sure what the hell is going on around this place anymore, but here we are, so I’m gonna play along, okay?  Do you see this?” Lauren rambled with a wave of her hands as she grew increasingly hysterical from the stress of the situation.  “When we’re ready to have a family, we’ll have one, just like you and Mom or anybody else on the freaking planet who wants little ones.  SIMPLE as that.  We might have an Alpha, and we might have a Beta.  Who knows?  Whoever they are, we’ll love them and let them know from the moment they can understand words that they are free to be whoever they want.”

            Another chilling silence fell over the room.

            “Dad.  Mom always told me she wanted me to be happy.  Do you remember what you would say to me?  What you wanted me to be?”

            Ross nodded, his eyes now glued to the floor.  His hands were folded neatly together.

            “What was it, Dad?”

            “Strong,” he uttered, his voice as well clearly shaken by all this.  He pushed his glasses further up his nose and then finally looked back to his middle daughter, a glistening in his eyes.  “I wanted you to be strong.”

            “And I am, Dad.  I’m stronger than you could’ve ever hoped.  Don’t you see everything I’ve done was my choice?  Was for me?  It was all so I could be something.” Lauren pleaded.  Her hands were now clasped together too as if in prayer.  “And I have become something.  Don’t you see that?”

            “I… do,” he managed.

            “Please.  Daddy.  I’m in love with someone who makes me happy, who can provide, who can raise a family.  And who loves me just as much.”

            “I know,” he muttered, then rose wearily from the coffee table and lumbered back toward the chair, but instead of moving to keep his daughter restrained, he only went on bended knee and gently took her hand in his, staring into her eyes with wretched pain.  “I know.”

            Though still fully engaged in an adrenaline-fueled survival mode, Lauren allowed herself a heavy sigh that caused a few pounds of emotional weight to drop from her shoulders as she watched her father surrender.

            “Mom.  Let Lauren’s boyfriend go,” Millie spoke up at last as she rose from the couch.  Her tone was soft, as always, yet forceful.  “Put him down.”

            “No,” Lois hissed to her traitorous family members, a wild gleam in her eye as she lifted Ian back from the surface of the table in a tightened fist.

            Britney, who looked beyond disgusted at her father’s apparent defection to the side of organic grime, breathed a sigh of relief to see her mother hadn’t lost her resolve yet in the face of Lauren’s weepiness.

            “Lois… maybe we… need to start calming things down a little,” Ross said over his shoulder.  “It’s okay.  We’ll talk a little more.  But… maybe you should put the little guy down.”

            “Oh God… Mom, do something!  Jesus…” Britney gasped hollowly.

            “Lauren, I love you too much to see you do this to yourself,” Lois sputtered.  The fist coiled around Ian had begun to tremble.  “I will not let you go down this road and become a pariah.  Do you hear me?  I will NOT.”

            “Mom.  Please let him go.  He’s… he’s a good man,” Lauren cried weakly.  “All we want is-”

            “I can see now I’m not going to get through to you with just words like I’d hoped.  And that makes me sad, but I swore I’d do whatever I had to for your protection, and I still intend to,” Lois whimpered through the furious tears, speaking over her daughter as she held Ian out at arm’s length.  “So we’ll just have to try a little action instead.”

            “Mom.  I know you’re upset, but… but I also know you’d never h-hurt anyone,” Lauren gasped weakly, her trembling hands held out as she rose steadily from her chair, afraid of spooking the woman while she had her fiancé clenched so precariously between her fingers.  She swallowed.  “Please let Ian go.”

            “I have a duty to you, dear.  And I don’t intend to forego it when you need me more than ever.”

            “It doesn’t have to be like this,” Lauren said, aching as she took tentative steps toward Lois, with her stunned father shuffling behind her.  “This isn’t you, Mom.”

            “You haven’t been around for long enough to know what is or isn’t me.  And above all, I am your guardian,” Lois answered gravely.  With Ian still tangled between the spindly ends of the woman’s digits, she held her index finger above Ian’s left arm and pinned it to her palm.

            “Lois.  It’s enough, don’t you think?” Ross insisted with a throat dry enough that the words barely came out.  He moved in front of his daughter as though shielding her from his wife’s madness.

            The woman flinched, as though only now coming to terms with her spouse’s existence, and her eyes flared ravenously.

            “God damn it, you will not undermine me again, ROSS!” the matriarch screeched, and suddenly the finger that had been tracing along Ian’s shoulder was joined by her thumb in pinching onto his forearm, and with a twist and a quiet crack like that of snapped pencil lead, the Beta’s arm was broken.

            “Dad, WAIT!” Lauren screamed through sputtering lips as she watched her fiancé begin howling with pain, and she could hear Millie whimpering in shock as well.  She grappled with the back of Ross’s sweater, urging him to stop in his tracks.  Her knees were wobbling so hard that she was forced to the ground, roughly catching herself on the fall until she was kneeling on the tile.

            Dumbstruck, Ross stared blankly at a woman he suddenly had difficulty recognizing, despite the wedding bands they shared, and took a robotic step backward next to his daughter again as Lois continued brandishing the wallowing victim.  With quivering fingers, he shoved his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose and ran his palm over his forehead.

            For a moment, the only sounds that filled the icy Christmas hearth of the Meyers sitting room and kitchen were Ian’s agonized grunting and the choked sobs of Lauren, who found herself thoroughly incapable of moving her legs as she cowered on the floor, unable to look up at her tortured fiancé for fear of pouncing at her mother’s throat out of instinct.

            “M-Mom, you… y-you hurt him.  Bad,” Millie uttered quietly from her cushioned perch, clearly too aghast to muster up a more appropriate descriptor.

            “I am doing what is necessary.  We all have to make choices, even if they hurt us,” Lois spoke up at last, addressing her middle daughter on the floor.  She wiped a fresh tear off her cheek.  “Believe me, Lauren.  This pains me just as much as you, if not more, because I can see how much help you need.  But we can get through this, together, like we always have.  All of us.  And all I need from you is one thing to make it all right.”

            “What?” came the croak, after a long pause.  The young woman forced herself to look up, though her vision was immediately blurred by moisture again at the sight of Ian, awkwardly clutching his arm and moaning with pain within the caged confines of Lois’s palm.

            “To begin healing, dear, you’ve got to say this.  For us, and for yourself.  You have to say you’ll stay away from this Beta from now on.”

            “Yes.  Yes, I will,” Lauren declared without hesitation, the words stinging in her throat, but at the same time a feeling of hope welling up inside.  All she had to do was bow to her mother’s cruel orders, and then Ian could be saved.  It could be over soon.  The end of this nightmare might somehow be in sight.

            “You will what?”

            “I’ll stay away from Ian.”

            “The Beta,” Britney corrected, slapping her hand onto the table hard enough that it shook.  “Not Ian.”

            “I will stay away from the Beta,” Lauren vowed with steely resolve that caused both her mother and sister’s eyes to widen with surprise at the near sincerity of it.  It sent a chill down her own spine, but the Alpha was determined not to screw over this one possible chance to rescue Ian.  Struggling through uttering any number of horrible lies would be far preferable to watching this situation turn any worse.  “Now why don’t you send him out of the house now?”

            “I don’t think so.  Not yet.  I know you’re just placating me for now, and I’ve accepted that.  Your healing will take time.  But you’re not the only one who has a part to play in this process,” Lois snapped, and then her hollowed eyes fell upon the writhing Beta in her hand.  Her fingers closed back around him in a fist, and he squirmed harder.  “It’s your turn, little one.”

            “Yes?” he wheezed.

            “You’ve caused us all a great deal of grief on a day that was supposed to be a happy reunion,” Lois accused, and her fingers squeezed just a little tighter such that Ian grunted as his sides started to form bruises.  “My daughter was confused, and you took advantage of her state to slither your way into a world where you don’t belong.  You don’t deserve this chance, but if you want to leave here today, you’re going to look at us.  All of us.  And swear that you will never see or speak to my daughter again.  Admit that someone like her could never love a thing like you.”

            Ian’s eyes darted around the room, his lip quivering.  He looked from the paled expressions of Ross and Millie, to the fiendishly scowling Britney who was practically foaming at the mouth with aggression, and finally to Lauren, fighting with all her might to keep a convincing look of stoicism plastered inorganically on her face.

            He knew she was doing this all for him: putting her family relationships on the line, and spewing whatever filth her mother demanded.  In his tiny and rapidly beating heart he appreciated it deeply, knowing so few people in the world would’ve done such a thing to protect him.  But in that same moment, realizing it was only his own personal safety at stake, he knew there was one and only one option.

            With a single heave of his chest, Ian craned his neck to look back up at Lois, his eyes welled but unblinking.

            “No.”

            Visibly stunned, the tensed Alpha curled her upper lip in a snarl.

            “Excuse me?”

            “Don’t be stupid.  Just say it,” Lauren growled as angrily at him as she could manage, though Ian could hear directly through her ruse and detect the desperate pleading behind it for him to just cave to Lois’s demand to ensure he walked away with his life.

            “Lauren, stop.  I want to hear it from him,” Lois snapped.  Her mouth hung open and her brow furrowed as she zeroed in on the subject in her fist.  Her thumb nudged under his chin, forcing him to keep his gaze leveled upward at her.  “Would you like to repeat that a bit louder?”

            “I said no, I won’t say it.  I won’t stay away from Lauren, not as long as she doesn’t ask me to herself.  And I intend to love her like she loves me until the day I die,” Ian articulated awkwardly but using plenty of volume as he gasped for air with Lois’s massive thumb prodding into his windpipe.

            “You people really have forgotten your place, haven’t you?  You think the world being taken over by an army of giant monsters made you invincible,” Lois said.  Her fist tightened, putting added pressure on Ian’s injured arm, which caused him to gasp in agony again.

            “No.  I know you can kill me right now and no one would be able to stop you in time.  And I think I see it in your eyes, too.  That you could,” Ian stated, somehow without stumbling despite the beads of sweat pouring down his forehead, and he could feel the firm fingers coiled around him flinch.  The palm was already clammier.

            “You believe the Omegas - your false gods - can protect you from the natural order?”

            “I’ll tell you what I do believe.  I’ve spent my whole life listening to Alphas tell me what I can or can’t do, sometimes even making sure I do it if I refused.  I know that may never go away in my lifetime, and I’m at peace with that,” Ian explained with an eerie calm that forced Lois to surrender her utter attention.  “But I will become a goddamned stain on your hands before I’ll let you… or anyone else… tell me what to BE.”

            No one else could manage a word.  Lois’s lips quivered, a thousand synapses snapping and burning inside her skull as she looked on the tiny life in her hands with simultaneous livid contempt and what for the first time looked like wild discovery.  Like she’d suddenly found herself holding a ticking nuclear bomb in the shape of a three-inch-tall man.

            “Freak,” she hissed, voice quavering as more tears leaked from her swollen eyes.  Her hand lowering toward the kitchen table, her fingers unfurled, allowing Ian to crumple in a trembling heap onto the surface.  He groaned, wrapping his other arm around his broken one again.  Lauren winced, instinctively wanting to leap forward and scoop him up now that he was free and clearly in a great deal of pain, but knowing her volatile mother could still end this with a swat of her hand.

            “Get it out of here,” Lois deadpanned, her voice ragged again, and her eyes seemed to stare directly through her family.  Her hands were laid rigidly on her knees, as though her body had been arranged by a coroner.  “Now.”

            “Insane,” Britney mumbled, and suddenly her fingers were shooting forward and grabbing Ian up into a balled fist, her thumb pinning him into her palm.  “You’ve all gone fucking insane.”

            “PUT HIM DOWN!” Lauren bellowed as adrenaline instantly restored her strength, and this time she didn’t stop herself, lunging forward toward her sister with arms braced hard enough that Britney was flung back, where she landed atop the table, though even in her surprise she kept her fist firmly wound around Ian.

            “Back off, sis, or I won’t just do another arm.  I’ll do the middle, with all the important stuff,” Britney hissed as she kicked into her sibling’s stomach and knocked the wind out of her as she stumbled backward.  She opened her clawed fingers just long enough to prod a pointer finger into Ian’s stomach indicatively.

            “Brit.  You need to stop this now.  Give him back to your sister,” Ross fired off as he helped pull Lauren to her feet, though he gave his eldest plenty of room, sensing how cornered she now felt as the last remaining Myers not on the right side.  “All of this needs to end now.”

            “That’s exactly what I’m going to do, Dad,” Britney promised as she slowly began backing toward the hallway and out of the kitchen.  She clutched Ian at eye level, making it clear without repeating the consequences for being approached.  “I’ve worked too hard to get where I am now.  I won’t let my family’s fucked-up fetishes tear that down.”

            “Britney, please don’t.  Let the little guy go,” Millie begged from behind her father and sister as she slid from the couch, fingers knitted together tightly enough that her digits had turned bone-white.  She now, as well, was crying.

            “Don’t start coming after me.  Any of you.  I swear I’ll do it,” Britney drawled venomously, swiping her car keys off a hook on the wall without looking as she neared the front door.  Lauren, followed by Ross and Millie, trailed hesitantly after her and watched as the eldest daughter nudged her way through the swinging glass with a shoulder.  “I swear to fucking God I will make your pet freak into paste, Lauren.”

            Britney’s silver two-door tore down the slick winter road of the highway she’d swerved onto a mile away from the house, with one trembling hand on the steering wheel and one in a softened fist around Ian, hovering over the center cup holder.  Her eyes darted back and forth like those of a startled housecat, reading every screeching wheel and every flung fleck of snow as a potential threat.  The outdated heater was roaring with life, but doing little to bring down the chill.

            No more than a quarter mile behind her was the Meyer family’s van in pursuit, slipping in between other Christmas Eve commuters to catch up.  Ross slammed on the gas pedal, with Lauren anxiously clutching his shoulder in the passenger seat, and Millie in the back.

            “Faster, Dad.  Please.  Faster,” Lauren mumbled as she gave her father’s arm another shake.  She’d been numbly repeating the same three words in sequence for the last five minutes, too shell-shocked and emotionally ravaged by this whole unfurling nightmare to manage anything else.

            “I am, honey.  We won’t lose them,” he promised.  “Millie, is that seatbelt on?”

            “Yes, yes.  Please come quickly.  Yes, the interstate, we just passed Mile 41.  That’s the right model.  It’s silver,” Millie said into her phone with pauses between statements, sniffling with the effort to hold back further anguished sobs, then leaned up toward the front.  “Dad, what’s Britney’s license again?”

            “GT58M3,” Ross repeated back resolutely, which his youngest daughter spoke again into the receiver.

            The mood was just as tense in the other racing vehicle, though no words had yet been spoken by either the stone-faced Alpha or pain-wracked Beta prisoner.

            “You… you’ve…” Ian sputtered at last, having hugged his broken arm to his body at an angle that helped slightly with the pain, though Britney’s thumb pressed harder into his shoulder blades at the sound of his voice.

            “Don’t fucking talk to me, insect,” came the droll reply.

            “S-Sorry, it’s… just that…”

            “I know perfectly goddamned well that they’re coming, if that’s what you’re trying to tell me.  I see them.  And I’m not worried,” Britney snapped as she overtook a snow plow to pull ahead.  A bemused horn squawked from behind them.

            “No, no that’s… not it,” her tiny captive managed with a hard swallow as he gazed blearily up at the face of his fiancé’s older sister, her short dark locks framing a face hardened with bitter resolve.

            “Then just spit it out already if you’re so sure you don’t care about getting more arms snapped.”

            “You’ve… held Betas.”

            “What?” she scowled.  She switched lanes again, feeling the rattle of the anti-locking breaks as she went over a small patch of ice.

            “I said I can tell you’ve had a Beta in your hand before.  Your mom… um, not so much.  But you, definitely.”

            “So what?”

            “It just surprised me.  I mean, you look scared out of your mind right now.  You’re driving like a maniac in the snow.  You say you don’t care what happens to me.  But…”

            “You’ve got that right,” Britney responded, giving Ian an extra squeeze.  He grunted, but nodded again at her when the pressure of her fingers relented.

            “…but you’re still not crushing me.  Even when you’re trying to make a point,” he said, voice nearly hoarse, but steady given his focus.

            “And just what about that is so important that you think it’s worth it to risk saying anything to me about it?” Britney demanded.

            “Well, from… from what I know about you, it’s just…”

            “Okay, you can go ahead and shut the fuck up again before you even try to tell me what you think you know about me,” she snarled with renewed fury.  “You and the rest of your disgusting race know bullshit.”

            “I know we’ve… never met, but I’ve known Lauren for a while now.  She’s told me…”

            “What?” Britney interrupted, and suddenly her fist was rising up from the cup holder to a position even with her nose.  The rage was still present in spades, but at such close range, Ian could easily recognize the fear in her eyes as well.  “What did she tell you?”

            “Don’t worry.  Nothing super personal,” Ian grunted at the change in elevation.  “But I do know how much you hate people like me.”

            “Yeah, great detective work there, you little shit,” Britney said with a roll of her eyes as she lowered her fist back down, though this time she kept Ian at chest level.  “If you couldn’t figure out that part on your own, your head’s even emptier than I thought.”

            “Not just that.  I know you hated us so much you were actually afraid to be near any of us, back in grade school.  I know you cried about it and your mom had to come get you.”

            “Can you blame me?  What if I’d caught something from one of you?” Britney said with a disgusted sneer.

            “I also know you never got near another one after that time.  Lauren said your mom made sure you never had to.  But…”

            “You know, I hope you’re going somewhere with all this, because it would be a huge waste of the last words you ever said to anyone if Dad and Lauren catch up with us and I’m forced to toss you out the window.”

            “…but I heard about the thing in high school, too.  Ten years ago, right?  That… jock guy everybody thought you were gonna get together with.  Would’ve been your first boyfriend, Lauren said.  You were so picky that nobody was ever good enough for you, and even him, you barely talked to.  And then that other girl…”

            Britney flinched, biting her lip, but kept her eyes locked to the road as she zoomed around another cluster of cars.  Her gaze flashed to the rearview mirror, and over the rows of snow-swept vehicles, she could make out her father’s van gaining ground.  She stamped harder on the gas, lurching them forward even faster.  The woman’s eyes glowed with some mutated jumble of passionate ire, and her lips parted to answer, but no sound escaped.

            “…that other girl.  The Beta.  Lorelai,” Ian continued cautiously, his voice lowered to a tone that bordered on soothing.  “You heard they hooked up, so you showed up at her cheer practice and…”

            “Gave her what she deserved,” Britney growled with white-hot fury under her breath.

            “Y-Yeah.  But… see, when Lauren… described that to me, it just made me think…” Ian mumbled, clearly eager to move on, but not letting himself become frantic in her grasp.  “There’s always an Alpha on Beta campuses, so nothing like that ever happens.  You have to have a reason to be let in, but it sounded like you just walked on, no problem.  And for someone who supposedly hates us as much as you do, well…”

            “It wasn’t hard.  I know how to talk my way into things.  How do you think I got where I am today?” Britney answered quickly, having obviously swallowed the rage that had momentarily bubbled to the surface, and there was something defensive in her tone now.  As though she felt threatened.

            “You’re lying,” Ian boldly uttered, shivering now from the increasing cold, despite the heat provided by Britney’s coiled palm.

            “Did you honestly just say that to me?”

            “Yes, I did.  Someone had to,” he continued with the courage of someone who was well aware that he had very little left to lose.  “And if you’re really the last face I’m ever going to see, I’d like to at least go out knowing I spoke the truth.”

            “So what are you trying to say?  You think I just snuck into a school made for things I’ve spent my whole life avoiding?”

            “No.  I think you didn’t have to prove you had a reason, because you’d been there before.  Probably more than once,” Ian retorted.

            “And I think delirium is starting to settle in because of that busted arm of yours.”

            “Sounds made up, right?  After Lauren told me all that, it just… didn’t sound right.  So I thought I’d look into it a little.  Took some digging, but I had time,” Ian said.  “I found a couple off-hand comments from the guard that everybody seemed to ignore after Lorelai didn’t want to press charges.  Said he’d seen you before because you were there to pick up your sister.  Obviously, that was just a mix-up, because you don’t have a sister who’s a Beta.”

            “Obviously.”

            “But maybe there wasn’t really a mix-up.  Maybe you did have someone else there to pick up.  Just not a sister.”

            “You’re kidding me, right?” Britney whipped back through gritted teeth as she nearly sideswiped a blaring sports car while switching lanes.  By now, the rest of the family was only a few cars behind her.

            “The only one kidding anyone now is you, Britney,” Ian said, and he felt a tremor run through her fingers all around him to have her name mentioned aloud.  “I didn’t think anything of it after that.  But… now I think I kind of get it.”

            “Oh, really?” Britney challenged sarcastically, eyes narrowed briefly before snapping back to the road.  “Well, thank God I have you to counsel me.  I guess being with an Alpha has made you into some little fucked up shaman, hmm?”

            “No.  But it does give me some perspective.”

            “As if that qualifies you to-”

            “It doesn’t qualify anything,” Ian cut in sharply, eliciting another wince from Britney.  “It just means I understand.”

            “You understand, do you?  So tell me this, then.  Do you understand what it’s like to have everything you thought you knew turned on its head?  To have somebody you can start to be yourself with for once in your life?  To have that somebody make you feel something… important, and then tear it away the next moment like nothing ever existed?” Britney hissed with a quavering voice, a nerve obviously having been violently struck that hadn’t been disturbed in a long time.

            “She made you feel safe, didn’t she?” Ian offered without missing a beat.

            “It was more than that.  She-” Britney began before realizing she had been trapped, and suddenly it was as though the words had been sucked into the ether.  Her mouth hung open.

            Neither party spoke for a solid sixty seconds.  The roar of the tires filled in the space with a nearly deafening hum of spattered sleet.  Britney’s grip loosened enough on Ian that he could freely wrap his free arm around the snapped limb, though she kept him secure with the kind of expert positioning only someone with experience would be able to pull off.  Now, her fingers were doing more cradling than clenching.

            “What did Lorelai do?” Ian pressed at last, his voice gentle and free of judgment, as though he was speaking to Lauren instead of her tightly wound sibling.

            “She made me love her,” Britney whispered, as though fearful of someone else hearing.  Her lips trembled, and her eyes were going red from refusal to blink.  Her hand tightened on the wheel until it looked like she could rend the leather protrusion away from the dashboard with a good enough yank.

            “Britney, I don’t believe a single person has ever made you do a thing in your life.  And do you expect me to think some Beta could convince you to believe something that wasn’t real?”

            “She tricked me.  She was a worm, just like the rest of you.  It was all to humiliate me.  I can see that now.  Every move, every word, every k-” the woman spat hatefully, stopping herself short before another incriminating item could be let loose, though she clearly was already in the utterly indifferent throes of hysterical abandon.

            “For something so fake, she certainly went to a lot of trouble to make sure you stayed out of it.  And you know she didn’t have to, given how far down the track you flung her,” Ian pointed out casually, and in an odd gamble, leaned his chin against Britney’s curled thumb.  “People don’t throw themselves completely on the line for other people unless they really do mean something to them.  I know that personally.”

            “Right, because it’s all exactly the same, you and your little fucking fairy tale ending with my sister.  You and your kind, all running around on the ground down there, and thinking when someone lifts you up that suddenly you can understand everything and everybody.”

            “I’m sorry you had to go through that.  I am.  Look, though, we’re… we’re really not so different.  Betas, I mean.  We’re just as capable of seeing our own fallibility and working to do something about it.”

            “And I guess you think that makes you all a bunch of little saints, right?” Britney blurted, for an instant drowning the whirring cacophony outside the car.

            “I never said we were saints, big or little,” Ian said genuinely.  “We spill milk, we don’t leave a tip, we sleep with strangers.  We fuck up.  We’re… people.  Like you.”

            Britney, ignoring the tears that were now glistening on her rosy cheeks, looked down and aggressively locked eyes with the occupant of her nearly-opened fist, as if to confirm she wasn’t being swindled.  Ian stared back with the same bona fide intent, and for a flash he witnessed the same acceptance and humanity he normally saw in a face slightly different than Britney’s.

            It was at this moment that the back left tire of the car struck a patch of black ice concealed beneath a rolling snow drift and began shifting toward the demarcated painted center.

            Even in her surprise, Britney’s hand was restrained from hurting Ian further as she returned her eyes to the road all too late and watched as her vehicle settled into a tail spin.  Her hand was thrust back into the cup holder, bracing her fist against the rim for support to keep from jarring the Beta.  A mad flurry of honked horns, erupting snow piles, and swerving cars melded into one chaotic second that seemed to last forever as the car slid diagonally across the lanes and into the path of a black semi-truck dragging a thirty-ton payload behind it.

            Slamming onto the brakes with all her might, Britney heard the grinding impact as the side of her car made screeching contact with the truck, the spooked driver of which was already in the process of swerving himself without warning to avert further damage.

            The window of Britney’s car shattered on impact, leaving the Alpha at the mercy of a hail of shattered glass.  In a burst of packed snow, the car went off the road and began rolling down the slope toward the ravine below.

            “DAD!” Lauren cried at the sight of her sister’s car careening over the snow-capped side of the highway and down the hill just ahead of them.  The words were trapped in her throat as she grappled violently with the prospect that she might’ve lost her sister and her fiancé in one fell swoop.  “They… t-they-”

            “These fucking brakes,” Ross growled desperately as he wrestled with his vehicle’s controls.

            “Dad, the tr-” Millie peeped, pointing with a trembling hand in the direction of the sliding semi as it hit the same patch of black ice and rolled right into the incoming lanes, its harsh headlights blasting through the crystalline air.

            Teetering on its wheels, the truck was now rolling laterally and on the verge of tipping over, directly onto a row of cars that would be compressed like soda cans beneath its rapidly overshadowing black trailer and spray of sparks.  Vehicles screeched to a halt, but there was nowhere to go without heading for oncoming traffic, as the lanes forward were completely blocked.

            Silent prayers were sent up along with cries of accursed luck, all lost amidst the insanity.  The ground rumbled and sent snow upward in flaky spires, as though an earthquake had ripped through the center of the highway, though the panic had risen too high for anyone to take notice at first.

            A brown leather boot nearly as long as the truck itself burst through the miasmic snow flurries and slammed into the road between the out-of-control behemoth and the doomed motorists, followed by a tanned leg as thick as a pillar, sculpted with calf muscles obviously capable of kicking the truck off into the invisible distance like a playground ball if its owner so chose.  The black trailer collided with the monumental footwear in an ugly squelch of metal as it screeched to an instant halt, the wheels that had gone airborne slamming back down to the ground.  Several smaller collisions resulted in the ensuing commotion due to the ice in the increasingly thick traffic, though the truck remained leaning against the ankle of the giantess.

            The Omega’s tremendous frame, appearing as a silhouette high above and outlined by the dimmed winter sun, seemed to hover over all for a few moments like a guardian angel before lowering toward the chaos with hands outstretched.  Her long red hair whipped about in the cutting breeze.

            Though they’d avoided being crunched under the trailer, Ross’s steering wheel was already turned as far as it would go, and the Meyers’ van was sailing across the lanes and toward the gulch on the opposite side.  Just before the front wheels could splash through the wall of packed snow, though, shadow fell over the hood.

            A gargantuan left hand soared downward, seemingly from the heavens, as the storm made it difficult to make out precise features above the towering being’s waist, with fingers curled as it descended rapidly on the van.  The peachy palm scooped into the side, darkening the windows as it clasped, and clenched beneath the vehicle’s metal belly, lifting it from the road before it had a chance to slide over the hill.

            An enormous pair of narrowed emerald eyes filled up the windshield as they stared inside to inspect for injury, before softening in their gaze.  The fiery tresses continuing billowing in the white rush at the staggering altitude.

            “Is everyone all right in there?” a lilting voice bellowed through the cold roar of the mounting storm.  The proximity revealed their goddess-like savior was young: probably no more than nineteen, with long eyelashes and soft dimples at the corners of her mouth.  Still in shock, the three Meyers nodded in mechanical unison, before Lauren became self-aware again, slamming her hands on the dashboard and waving her arms to get the Omega’s attention.

            The descent down the ice-coated slope in Britney’s car had been heart-haltingly fast, and the impact on the frozen ravine below didn’t make for a gentle ending either.  Abrasively cold air was already rushing inside due to the shattered window, and was compounded with the crash of the ice as the front of the car collided with the surface and burrowed into the treacherous waters below.

            Ian surprised himself to realize he was not, in fact, a pile of person-shaped pulp once impact had been made.  He’d certainly braced himself for it as Britney’s palm positioned him such that the brunt of the blow was absorbed into her skin, and though he was fairly sure he at least had whiplash, the mere act of not only breathing but having motor skills still intact was a veritable miracle.

            Of course, as Ian awkwardly clambered upward out of the protective cage of Britney’s limp fingers and over the edge of the cup holder with his one usable arm, he realized celebrations should be put on hold, as the car had already slid far enough into the ravine that water was trickling into the smashed window.  Craning his neck in all directions for some indication of a possible solution, the Beta looked up and realized his captor was apparently unconscious, with a small shard of the window glass embedded in her neck.

            “Britney.  Britney, c’mon, wake up,” Ian barked as loudly as he could to be heard above the now-rushing waterfall making its way into the vehicle.  With his free arm, he punched meekly into the woman’s knuckles.  “WAKE UP!”

            Climbing much higher was mostly out of the question with his broken arm, though he knew it wouldn’t make much difference once enough of the ravine had seeped into the car to claim it for the icy depths.  Ian scooped up a small piece of glass that had landed on the seat and began prodding incessantly at Britney’s hand with it, hoping to startle her awake, though this wasn’t having the desired effect either, even when her skin was scratched.

            “BRITNEY!  WORK WITH ME!” Ian shouted at the top of his lungs as he scurried toward the dashboard, looking for something - anything - that could be used to help.  Nothing within reach was remotely useful, but before the Beta could even find time to be upset about this, he glanced back out the window to see the distant tree line shifting more into view as the car inched further downward, and he knew his time to explore options had run out.  With heartbeats to spare, Ian threw himself back into the cup holder beneath the arch of Britney’s fingers.

            A slip of the wheels on uneven terrain caused the silver vehicle to lurch forward far enough that it no longer had any traction, and with a sickening crunch of ice, it plunged fully into the water toward the basin below.

            Ice water crashed by the gallon into the car, which was already beginning to turn on its side, and though it seemed like it was too late to truly make any difference, Ian found himself relieved to feel Britney’s fingers curling back around him again as she gasped back into consciousness.

            “What the fuck…” she grunted groggily, before yelping with pain at the shard wedged in her neck.  Her hands were trembling, but she kept steady enough as she lifted Ian out of the cup holder again and struggled to clamber into the back, as the water had already filled in up to the level of the front seats.

            In a matter of seconds, what was previously the gray December sky outside the windows was replaced by the crushing aquamarine void of the deepest section of the ravine.

            “Are you okay?” Ian demanded, barely thinking about it, and earned a look of surprise from Britney as she wrestled her way atop the seats to hold off on being submerged in ice water as long as possible, though she was quickly running out of seconds as the car continued twisting and turning on its descent, until it struck the basin with a hard smack that nearly jolted the pair back to the windshield.

            “Y-Yeah…” she mumbled.  Her hand wrapped more completely around the Beta’s body, providing additional warmth from her last reserves of it.  “You?”

            “Fine.  How strong a swimmer are you?” Ian said.  He could feel the tremors running violently through Britney’s fingers as the water rose up to the level of her thighs, with no other place to climb in the small car to avoid it.  She hesitated, then took a deep inhale.

            “You’re not g-gonna be able to… m-make it, being in the w-water that long,” she reported gravely through chattering teeth.  “The… top’s already f-frozen again.  Even if I… t-take us right b-back to the top, and even if I can b-break through that layer, you’ll be an ice c-cube before it h-happens.”

            “Your mouth,” Ian said, again hardly thinking about it as the frigid depths reached Britney’s abdomen.  “What about if I…”

            Despite the mania of the situation and her rapidly devolving body temperature, Britney found it within herself to furrow her brow in shock and stare gape-mouthed at the Beta.  “My m-mo… you’d seriously trust m-me t-to-”

            “Yes I would,” he interrupted.  “Now what are you waiting for?”

            With a single nod of her head, Britney scooped her new charge into her palm and cupped him to her open mouth, depositing him atop her tongue and sealing her lips behind him as she left the remaining air pocket with one last gulp to kick off into the icy waters.

            Jostled against her cheeks and along her molars, Ian struggled to hang onto something in the muggy environment.  At one point, he felt himself sliding toward her gullet, but her swollen tongue quickly bucked upward and buoyed him closer to the roof of her mouth, where she pinned him before any more slippery locomotion could occur.  Given the three-inch height of her passenger, Britney was barely able to close her lips all the way, but it did make it easier to keep track of him.

            Fighting her way back through the pressure of the continually flowing ravine water, the athletic Alpha began kicking her way up toward the glistening opaque surface.  The ovular point of impact where the car had entered the ravine was still visible, but had indeed frozen over already with a thin sheet of ice.  Her limbs were already beyond numb, and by the time Britney reached the surface, throwing her limp fists at the hardened layer, it felt as useful as trying to melt the ice with a harsh glare.

            Ian wasn’t fairing terribly well, either.  As the Alpha put her remaining strength into breaking through their gelid underwater prison, she had less attention to devote to keeping the Beta from being tossed about.  Wrestling with the base of Britney’s tongue, Ian fought to keep himself near the front of her lips, but every thrust of her neck and every automatic siphoning of air down into the throat pulled him further away.  With every surface in the uneven blackness coated with saliva, there was nothing to keep him from continually rolling back and forth toward possible doom.

            Low on oxygen and rapidly losing cognition, Britney’s eyelids began to flutter, though through some subconscious sense of duty, she kept her lips completely shut, her tongue blocking Ian from slipping past her uvula once again.  The last sight she could coherently make out was the phosphorescent green visage of the ice being overtaken by a shadow: an oblong shape that extended with five trunk-like appendages and descended toward her.  In her air-deprived brain, for a moment, it crossed Britney’s mind that it was the reaper come to claim them.

            The Omega’s hand smashed through the ice like it was peanut brittle and scooped Britney’s unconscious form between surprisingly delicate fingertips.  Chunks of sleet and water sloshed from the Alpha’s body as she was brought to rest in the center of the massive hand, her body heat steadily trying to regulate as a row of fingers was laid atop her torso, without pressing down in order to allow air back in.

            Sputtering back to the land of the living, then, Britney turned her head to the side and spat Ian’s weathered and spit-drenched but nevertheless fully alive self onto the titanic pad of palm flesh before he could be accidentally swallowed.

            The weary Beta blinked at the sudden reintroduction to light, already colder than ever at being back in the open, stormy air, and squinted with confusion at the intricate spiral skin cell patterns in the terrain of the Omega’s hand before managing to the put the pieces together when he turned around to drink in the looming sight of a face too large to comprehend its very existence.  Despite their godlike scale, the features were soft and filled with genuine concern that helped his sprinting heart rate to settle down.

            “Thank you,” Ian breathed quietly in the Alpha’s direction, fairly certain that his words would be lost amidst the wind.

            “N-No.  Thank you,” Britney coughed weakly.  “Ian.”

“Hey, sleepy-head,” Lauren cooed sweetly to her waking fiancé as she leaned over his precious form.  Careful not to nudge him too hard, the young woman couldn’t help but stroke the tip of her index finger along the Beta’s cheek as he reclined rather comfortably in a hospital bed, his broken arm elevated and fitted with a few temporary prosthetics while the regenerative salve worked its medical magic.  As usual, she was in control enough that his head was barely moved by the gesture.

            “Mmm… hi, beautiful,” he mumbled with a relieved smile, hearing a carol being crooned quietly over the ceiling speakers.  “Where… where are your-”

            “Daddy and Millie went to check on Britney in the other wing.  They said they’d be back in a little bit,” Lauren said, trying not to visibly cringe as she glanced at his tiny left arm.  “How do you feel?”

            “Perfect.  Good as new.  In fact, we could probably head outside and toss a ball around later today,” Ian chuckled, coughing again from his own enthusiasm as he glanced along the balcony he was situated on that allowed Alphas access to Beta patients.

            “Hey now, you need to calm down, even with the jokes.  That Dr. Randolph said as long as we give this stuff a full day to work on the first treatment without exciting anything, it’ll only take a few more applications for it to be just fine again,” Lauren scolded gently. She caressed Ian’s cheek again with a different fingertip.

            “I guess it’s been a few hours, huh?”

            “Well, more than that.  You were pretty out of it until they got you warmed up again, and then they knocked you out to work on the arm.  But that’s still no excuse.  You’re getting your rest,” she, waggling a finger at him.  Her eyes darted to a nearby digital clock that read 12:04.  “Actually, that reminds me of something.”

            “What?”

            “Merry Christmas,” she said with a weary smirk.

            “Same to you.”

            “It’s kind of a shame.  You probably won’t be able to use your present until you’re all healed up again,” she sighed.

            “Aw, damn it,” he said with a snap, feigning intense irritation.  “So what is it?”

            Lauren batted her eyelashes coyly and brushed her messy brown locks away from her forehead.  “Really?  You think I’d just tell you before you can open it yourself?  You’re like a kid.”

            “C’mon, give me a break here, they’re not letting me out of this place for another two days.”

            “That’s if things are looking good, but I’m gonna push for longer anyway,” Lauren insisted with resolve.  “And since I’ll be nursing you back to health at home, you’ll be on a strict regime of lying still and letting the medicine do its job.  Got it?”

            “Oh, you spoil-sport, you,” Ian snickered with another awkward cough, and he could see his fiancé flinch again.  “Sorry.  Trying to cut back on the laughing thing.”

            “No, please do.  I’m… glad to see you happy.  I want to be able to keep looking at you like this,” she said.  “I think in some weird way, it’ll… you know, help when we look back on this Christmas a few years from now.”

            “Yeah…” Ian droned, his eyes falling to his lap and away from the comforting gaze he’d shared with the woman of his dreams ever since he’d woken up again.  Of course, she noticed it immediately.

            “What is it?” she demanded in a whisper as she leaned in closer, the fingertip returning to his cheek and sending goose bumps down his spine.  Her long chocolate locks unfurled around him in a swooping canopy.  “What’s wrong?”

            “I… I’m just…”

            “Ian, please.”

            “I’m so sorry,” he uttered, his voice cracking with a sudden depth of pain that Lauren so rarely heard him afflicted with.

            “No.  No, no, no, no,” she rambled in a desperate lullaby, instantly realizing what his grievance was.  She laid her pinky finger atop his good arm, pleading with him to withdraw.  “Don’t you dare do this to yourself.”

            “No, I… I am,” he sighed.  “I was the one who tried to talk you into taking me with you to meet them.  If… if we’d just done it like you wanted-”

            “They’d have still let me know how they felt, and things would’ve turned out the same way, except you wouldn’t have been put in any danger,” Lauren consoled.  She sniffled.  “That much, at least, you have to realize.”

            “Do I?” the Beta croaked.  “Your… mom wouldn’t be going to an Omega for one of their…”

            “Stop it,” Lauren said firmly without raising her voice.  Her warm breath washed gently over the bed, and her eyes began to glisten.  “I’m not going to let you talk like that.  None of this was your fault.  Do you understand me?  None of it.”

            “But-”

            “Do you understand?” she repeated.  “Everything that happened today involving my family was brought on by themselves, and Mom especially.  If anyone’s to blame, it’s me.  If… I hadn’t left you up there, alone, maybe I could’ve-”

            “You couldn’t know what they were going to do,” Ian corrected.  “You did everything you possibly could to get me out of there.  It’s not on you.”

            “Then for God’s sake, don’t put it on yourself, either,” Lauren pleaded as her voice quavered too.  She clasped a hand to the side of her face in distress.  “It’s hard enough already to see you like this without having to worry about what you’re thinking, too.”

            “I… know,” he groaned, his eyes darting to his arm dejectedly.  “I’m working on it.”

            “And Britney.  You know she got off easy,” Lauren said, trying not to snarl for fear of appearing too sour in this loving mood, and she glanced down at her knuckle.  It was still bruised a light purple from earlier; after the redheaded Omega who’d stopped the disaster had lowered her hand so Britney and Ian could be retrieved by the Meyers, once Lauren was safely cradling her fiancé again in her palm, she’d wasted no time in slugging her sister in the face hard enough that Britney’s nose broke.

            “She’ll… be all right,” Ian insisted, knowing Lauren was still confused with his refusal to pursue disciplinary action against the eldest Meyers sister.

            “Ian, please, just… just one more time, I need you to look me in the eye and swear that this isn’t because she forced you to say something to protect herself.  I need you to believe that I’ll never let anything happen to you ever again, and that you’re safe to tell the truth,” Lauren begged, moving in even closer to study the Beta’s face.

            “I swear, it wasn’t like that,” Ian vowed, and he could tell that though she still felt sickened with rage toward her sister, at last Lauren was able to release some of the emotional baggage.  “And that’s the truth.”

            “Okay,” the Alpha sighed with reluctant acceptance.  “Just… tell me, though what happened in there?  The Omega that pulled you out, she said… she said Britney had you in her-”

            “In her mouth, yeah.  We both knew I wouldn’t make it in the water on my own for long, even if she hung onto me.”

            “So she was…” Lauren continued with an uncomfortable swallow, obviously having difficulty processing such a paradox.  “…saving you?”

            “Yes.”

            The Alpha’s lips contorted into a soft “o,” as if she wanted to ask why, but couldn’t get the syllable out.  Finally, she managed: “H-How?”

            A knowing look crossed Ian’s tiny countenance that befuddled his fiancé even further.  “Like I said, she’ll be all right,” he said truthfully.  “I don’t think it’s my place to try to explain it.”

            “I don’t know if I’ll ever find out, then,” Lauren responded dryly.  “Because I’m not sure I’ll even be able to look her in the eye again.”

            “I know,” he said.  “Please, just… give it some time.  Somewhere in there, she wants to try to make it up.  I know she does.  I saw it.”

            “I believe you,” she uttered, shutting her eyes meditatively and pursing her lips.  “Thank you.”

            “Not sure how you can say that.  Look, still, even if it wasn’t all my fault-”

            “-wasn’t at all your fault,” Lauren cut in abruptly.  Her hand scooped underneath the bed and its attached stabilizers and lifted her lover off the balcony closer to her face, as if the proximity would drive her point home more effectively.

            “…r-right,” Ian said with a lumpy swallow.  “But even then, I’m just realizing… I mean, your family kind of got split apart today.  Your home.  Not even this fancy healing goop can fix that.”

            Lauren bit the corner of her mouth and nodded, then leaned in closer until her lips were poised over Ian’s head.  She dipped an inch lower and planted a kiss on the side of his face, and it made him feel far warmer than anything medical science was capable of inflicting on him.

            “I know it won’t be fixed overnight.  There’ll still be tough times ahead.  But that’s okay,” she admitted.

            “How?”

            “Because you’re my home now,” she whispered tenderly as her fingertip returned to his hand.  It was as though an electric current was running through both of them in tandem, allowing them to see things through the same eyes.  Her engagement ring gem glistened under the dim fluorescence of the cozy room.

            “You’re mine, too,” Ian said with a gentle smile, soothed for the time being and confident that he was safer than he’d ever been in his entire life.  “The only one I’ve ever had.”

            “And the only one you’ll ever need,” Lauren promised.