No Dogs Allowed

Cruisin' For A Blazin'

(ty for reading, you're always appreciated <3 the little star thanks you plenty)

(EDITED)(Note to readers: Some chapters ahead may not be fixed to be in line with the new edits)

I was younger by two minutes. Maybe that's where shit went awry first.

"Come here, Echo," she beckoned, patting the space in front of her on the silk cushions, right up beside the window. "I've got a present for you."

My grin was wide, and I went bounding over to her, scrabbling up the cushions with my unpracticed, five-year-old hands. She laughed, helping me sit up.

"Shh," she said, smiling brightly, before reaching over and taking a little blue box from her bedside. She set it between us. "Go on, open it."

I did. Inside, a dozen tiny chocolates lay, all varying in flavor and color, some wine red, some bone white, others blue like blood that hadn't breathed. I took one to pop it into my mouth.

"Massisseo?" she asked.

Being split from my father was its own punishment, and he sought to make us know it. Food wasn't very plentiful, and for the most part, we received leftovers or small snacks or haphazard soups as sustenance. Treats were reserved for holidays, or whenever my mother could sneak them in when she left the house. I'd never seen the outside world outside of our garden and window, so whatever was given, I ate.

"Don't you want some, Umma?" I asked, offering her one.

She hesitated. "Ah, no, I bought these for you! They're very expensive, you know. Swedish chocolates are the best that money can buy these days. Mani meogo."

I stared at the chocolates for a long while. I said, "Did hyung get some?"

For a long while, I thought my mother had chosen me because she'd had no other choice. But my mother wasn't as obedient as I'd mistaken, wasn't as gullible as people liked to believe, and was more a woman with too much hope but not enough trust. And she must've known from the very start, from those two minutes, from the mark on his hip to the mark on mine, that she did not have long to teach me how to survive.

Omegas didn't win the game against Alphas. So, at best, she had to teach me how to lose the game, and win my life.

"Don't be scared of being greedy," she'd said when I told her she could have the last chocolate. "Some people have to be greedy to get what they want. The world doesn't listen to their 'please' and 'thank you'. Sometimes—" She took the chocolate, and then my hand, and let me curl my fingers around it just as the coating began to melt under my warm skin. "—you have to steal first, if you want to own."

"Umma, why didn't you take hyung with you, too?" I said another night, settled against her arm, both of us bundled in white sheets in her bed. Incheon was a radiant blue ahead of us, beyond the windows, glowing with something spring-like and reckless.

My mother wrapped her arm around me. "Elias...needs a different home than you do. For twins, you both are very different."

I bristled at that. "Because he's an Alpha?"

"Because he's Elias," she said. "And you're Echo." My mother brushed my hair from my face. "Some things are just going to be harder for you, and I want you to be ready for it. I want to be here when you need it." She forgot to mention she wouldn't be there later. She wouldn't be there later, and therefore thought you could figuratively stock up on advice and affection, in delusion that it would be enough.