“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.”