Chapter Two

The courtyard had gone deathly silent.

My father’s eyes were still wide, his face caught in something I had never seen before—fear. My stepbrother stared at him, waiting, his hand frozen around the whip, his smirk long gone. Whatever had been whispered just moments ago, it had cracked through the Alpha like thunder, and even the pack seemed to sense it.

For the first time, they looked uneasy.

Then my father lifted his hand sharply, his voice cutting through the silence.

“Enough! You all leave now.”

The order rang across the courtyard, and instantly, murmurs spread like wildfire. Confusion. Curiosity. But not a single wolf dared to disobey. One by one, the pack began to scatter, though not without throwing lingering glances back at me. I could feel their eyes burning into my skin, whispering questions that no one would dare voice aloud.

The guards moved quickly. They untied the ropes from my wrists, letting the rough fibers scrape across open wounds, then hauled me to my feet. My legs buckled beneath me, but they dragged me anyway, my toes scraping against the dirt as the courtyard emptied behind us. My stepbrother didn’t follow. Neither did my father. They only watched me being taken away, their faces still pale, still shaken.

That fear… it wasn’t for me. I knew that much. It was something else. Something bigger.

The cell door slammed shut, and once again I was swallowed by damp stone and silence.

I slid down against the wall, curling my knees to my chest. Pain flared sharp across my back, each breath making the lashes burn deeper. I pressed my forehead into my arms, trying to steady myself, but my thoughts kept circling back to the same question—what could rattle the Alpha like that? What could turn my stepbrother’s smirk into horror?

It gnawed at me, sharper than the pain. I paced the narrow length of the cell, restless, my bare feet dragging against stone. I knew better than to hope, but still… something had shifted. My punishment had been cut short. That had never happened before. Not once in ten years.

Time bled into itself. Minutes or hours—I couldn’t tell. My body grew heavier with every step, exhaustion pressing down until even the hard floor felt like surrender. The past weeks had already wrung me dry, each day filled with endless labor for the pack’s twenty-year anniversary. I had been pushed past my breaking point long before the lashes.

The lashes still stung, really bad. And all I could do was sob, no one brought me ointment or anything, I was used to it. And even though I couldn’t heal quickly like others, I learned to endure.

Sleep stole over me before I realized it, though it was not peace. It never was.

The clanging of the door snapped me awake. Rough hands gripped my arms, jerking me upright, dragging me from the cold floor. My heart slammed against my ribs. Maybe this was it. Maybe they had only paused to build the suspense, and now they would finish it—one hundred lashes, and then more until they had completed all the strokes.

But they didn’t take me to the courtyard.

The path twisted differently this time, until we reached a door I had never passed through before. The guards shoved it open, and I stumbled inside.

The air here was warm. Clean. The faint scent of herbs and lavender hung in the room. And waiting inside were women—maids—lined up in silence.

Their eyes fixed on me as though I were something foreign, their gazes sharp and unblinking. I shifted back, but the guards pushed me forward until my feet sank into the rug.

One of the maids stepped forward, a folded towel in her hands. She held it out to me, her fingers trembling slightly.

I blinked at her, then at the guards.

“They’ll bathe you,” one said flatly. “Treat your wounds. Get you ready.”

The words snagged in my chest.

Get me ready?

For what?

I opened my mouth, the question nearly tumbling out, but I swallowed it back. Questions had never given me anything but pain. I kept my eyes lowered, though my heart thrashed in my chest.

The guards left, the door shutting with a hollow thud. The silence that followed was thick, heavy. The maids studied me carefully, almost wary, as if they too didn’t understand why I was here.

Finally, one of them moved closer, her eyes softer than the rest.

“Please, take off your clothes, ma’am!”

Ma’am?

What’s going on?

Why are they sounding like this... What’s wrong with everyone?

“I’ll get some ointments for your wounds.”

They… they never even treated me when I was sick. My memory of fevered nights spent working until I collapsed. So why do they care now? And so suddenly?

My wolf hadn’t been activated yet, so it was impossible to heal on my own. Every wound lingered, deep and raw, nothing like the others who mended in hours. When the maids dabbed the ointments onto my back, the sting made me jerk forward, my hands gripping the edge of the wooden table they had placed me against.

The burn was sharp at first, like fire crawling into my skin, but slowly it dulled into a throbbing ache, the kind that never truly left. Their hands worked quickly, covering each stripe, though they flinched at the sight of my torn flesh. I heard one of them mutter under her breath, too soft for me to catch, and another silenced her with a sharp glance.

They never looked at me like this before.

No pity. No care. No respect. I had been nothing more than a curse rotting inside the Alpha’s house, and now—suddenly—they were calling me *ma’am* and handling me like something precious. I couldn’t make sense of it.

When they were done with my back, another group of maids came forward with bundles of cloth. Not the tattered hand-me-downs I’d worn all my life, patched with blanket scraps and seams let out too many times to count, but fabrics smooth and shining beneath the lamplight. They wrapped me carefully, dressing me in a gown I didn’t even know existed within these walls.

The fabric hugged my body in ways I had never seen before. Soft against my skin, fitted perfectly to my frame. One of the maids tied a golden sash at my waist while another brushed out my tangled hair, pulling it into neat strands that fell across my shoulders. Another knelt, slipping delicate shoes onto my feet.

When they finally stepped back, I barely recognized the reflection staring at me from the tall mirror they pushed forward.

For a long moment, I just stared. The girl looking back at me was not the one who slept on stone floors, not the one mocked and lashed in the courtyard. She looked like one of those girls I once saw in magazines and paintings—daughters of noble families, bright-eyed and untouched, the kind I used to dream of being before I stopped dreaming at all.

The tears burned at the corners of my eyes, but before I could even blink them away, the door slammed open again.

The guards.

Their boots echoed as they marched inside, cutting through the silence, and without a word they seized my arms once more. The maids lowered their heads and stepped aside. My questions tangled in my throat, but I didn’t dare ask.

The corridors stretched endlessly as they dragged me forward, the rug beneath my feet muffling every step. I had walked these halls all my life, yet never like this—never dressed like someone who belonged. My heart beat harder the further we went, dread clawing at me with every turn.

And then we stopped.

In front of a door I knew too well.

I had only been here once in my life—when I was five, playing in the halls, my tiny feet carrying me where I didn’t belong. I remembered pushing the door open, laughing, only for my father’s bark to thunder through the air as he yanked me out, his hand so tight on my wrist I thought it would break. “Never come near this place again,” he had growled, his eyes burning with a warning I never forgot.

Now, I was here again.

The guards didn’t move at first. They stood stiffly, like statues waiting for a signal, and the silence pressed down so heavy I could barely breathe. Then, at last, the door opened from the inside.

A man sat there.

I had never seen him before, not in my life. But the sight of him rooted me to the floor. His eyes—blood red, glowing faintly in the shadows—locked onto mine, and every instinct in me screamed danger.