6: Exiled

Jasmine 

6

Jasmine

“Where were you the whole of yesterday?”

“Ugh, you’re a terrible mess and an eyesore,” one of the senior maids hissed, shoving a heavy basket of laundry into my trembling hands.

I was indeed a mess.

I couldn’t help it. My mind was completely unspooled, spinning in a chaotic, terrifying loop, and I hadn’t slept the entire night.

Pregnant.

The word throbbed behind my eyelids, a fragile, dangerous secret hidden deep inside my womb. What was I supposed to do now? How could I survive this?

Every time I caught a glimpse of Garrett, my heart leaped into my throat. I kept staring at him, desperately searching his face for any sign of the man who had held me so fiercely in the dark. But he was entirely consumed by his duties, moving with the cold, unyielding precision of a future Alpha. I hadn’t been able to see him or speak to him for days. He was a million miles away, completely out of reach.

The sheer anxiety of it all made me entirely clumsy. Later that afternoon, as I was finishing up the cleaning in Giselle’s sprawling luxury suite, my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I dragged a heavy clothing rack out of the way, but my foot caught on the plush rug. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Giselle’s designer heel deliberately hook around my ankle.

The world tilted. I gasped, tumbling forward into the coffee table. The tray overturned, and a dark, staining berry tea poured directly across the front of a pristine white silk dress Giselle had laid out. A whole row of her other expensive, custom-tailored silk gowns went crashing down with me, tearing against the sharp metal edge of the rack.

“I—I didn’t mean to, she… I tripped—” I stammered, frantically trying to pull myself up from the floor, but the sting of humiliation was already burning in my chest.

Giselle didn’t even look angry. She just wore that sickeningly sweet, pitying smile that always made everyone else look at me with disgust.

“I didn’t even like that dress much, sister,” she pouted softly to the head housekeeper who had just rushed in. “Did you really have to ruin it just to have me blamed for being difficult?”

“You clumsy, worthless brat!” the head housekeeper erupted, her voice echoing off the walls as she grabbed me by the arm and yanked me off the floor. “Do you have any idea how much these fabrics cost? You’re a curse to this household! Get out of here before you destroy anything else!”

Humiliated, I was sharply ordered out of the residential wing. As I walked down the grand, vaulted corridor, my feet slowed right outside Garrett’s bedroom door. It was cracked open just a fraction, a sliver of darkness cutting across the brightly lit hallway. I couldn’t help myself. I stood there for a long, agonizing minute.

“What are you doing here?” a sharp voice barked, shattering the silence.

The head housekeeper was marching down the hall, her eyes narrowed in deep suspicion. “You have no business near the Alpha heir’s quarters.”

With my head lowered, hiding the burning tears in my eyes, I quickly turned on my heel and fled back down to the servants’ quarters.

Then, that very evening, the world fell apart completely.

Giselle had been rushed to the pack hospital. She had been poisoned served a dish laced heavily with the exact rare  extract she was severely allergic to. Because I was the low-ranking maid assigned to her quarters, and because I had been the one transferring her meal trays from the kitchen that morning, the crosshairs landed directly on my back.

“You did it, didn’t you? You jealous, pathetic little parasite!” the head cook screamed, shoving me violently into the corner of the dry-storage pantry.

“I didn’t know! I swear, I didn’t touch her food!” I cried out, my voice cracking as my hands instinctively shielded my stomach, shielding the secret growing inside me.

But they wouldn’t listen. They spat at my feet, calling me every vile name in the book, their eyes burning with a collective, vicious rage. The kitchen staff was terrified; they were furiously trying to figure out how to hand me over to the pack zetas, who were demanding to know how their future Luna had been compromised under their roof.

“They’re going to tell the Luna mother,” another maid whispered, her eyes wide with malicious glee. “She’s going to skin you alive.”

Right on cue, the heavy wooden doors of the kitchen burst open with a deafening crash.

“Where is that stinking slut?!” Luna Victoria’s voice boomed through the room, vibrating with a terrifying, lethal authority that made every servant drop to their knees.

She marched into the pantry, her face twisted into an expression of pure, unadulterated disgust. Two high-ranking zetas flanked her, but it wasn’t a weapon she was holding in her manicured hand.

It was a pair of torn, shredded lace panties.

My breath hitched in my throat. A paralyzing, icy panic flooded my veins. My heart stopped entirely. Those were mine. They were the pair Garrett had torn from my body in a fit of ravenous hunger.

That was from two weeks ago.

He had pinned me against his bedroom door the night he had snuck me in there. We were almost caught, and I remembered hurrying out without being able to find my panties.

I completely forgot about it. Garrett kept it?

My heart was beating madly.

Luna Victoria threw the ruined fabric directly at my face. It struck my chest and fell to the floor.

“The owner of these… they’re yours, aren’t they, Jasmine?”

I couldn’t speak. My jaw trembled, my eyes wide with terror as I stared at the lace.

“I saw her lingering around the Alpha heir’s room earlier today!” one of the laundry maids piped up maliciously, pointing a finger at me. 

“Who could have imagined that she planted her disgusting things in there? You’re absolutely vile!”

Luna Victoria let out a sharp, mocking laugh that echoed hollowly against the stone walls.

“This is what you did, isn’t it? Giselle laughed the other day, mentioning how you always make pathetic puppy eyes at her mate. So this was your grand plan? To have her poisoned just days before her engagement, then plant your trash there thinking you could slide right into her place and seduce the future Alpha?”

“No, Luna, I didn’t... please, that’s not—”

Before the explanation could even form in my throat, Luna Victoria’s hand came down hard across my face.

The force of the slap tore through the silence, snapping my head to the side. The metallic taste of blood burst across my tongue, and I stumbled against the wooden shelving, my cheek burning with a fierce, blinding heat.

“Silence, you disgusting creature!” Victoria snarled.

An elder who was visiting the manor stood near the doorway, watching the entire spectacle with a cold, judgmental sneer.

At that exact moment, the heavy double doors swung open again. Garrett stepped into the kitchen. He was dressed in his dark tactical gear, radiating the pure, crushing dominance of a returning commander.

A desperate, foolish spark of hope flared in the deepest recesses of my soul. I looked at him through my tears, my chest heaving.

Please, my mind screamed. Please say something. Tell them. They were calling me a mate-snatcher, a whorish predator just like my mother, but it wasn’t true. The only person in this entire world who knew the absolute truth, the only one who knew why those panties were kept, was him.

But Garrett didn’t look at me with love.

His dark eyes snapped to the fabric on the floor, and then his gaze flew to his mother. His handsome face instantly contorted into a mask of pure, unbridled fury but it wasn’t directed at the people hurting me.

“You went through my things?!” Garrett demanded, his voice dropping into a dangerous, thundering register that shook the very air in the kitchen.

“Son,” Luna Victoria said quickly, stepping forward to calm his raging aura. “We were just having some clean-up and arranging some things. I mean, you’re getting a wife soon. We found these hidden deep in your quarters. And we found this.” She pulled a crumpled, yellowed piece of paper from her pocket.

I recognized it instantly.

My heart completely shattered. It was a love letter. A naive, deeply emotional letter I had written to him when I was sixteen, long before we ever became lovers in the dark. Back when I was invisible to him. Before we found out we were mates. 

Garrett had seen it years later, and instead of throwing it away, he had kept it locked in his desk.

“She has been obsessing over you,” Victoria continued, gesturing wildly at me. “She poisoned Giselle so she could have you. Tell me, Garrett, you have nothing to do with this… with her, do you?”

I stared at him, my vision blurring, waiting for the man who had held me, who had whispered that I was addictive against my skin, to finally stand up.

Garrett looked down at me.

He didn’t admit that the letter had been kept out of affection. He didn’t admit that he was the one who had stolen my panties. He chose himself.

“Of course not,” Garrett said, his voice entirely smooth, completely devoid of warmth as he barely spared me a passing glance. “She is nothing to me.”

My heart stopped beating. The world went entirely silent. He was denying me. Right to my face, in front of the entire pack, he was erasing my existence to protect his pristine image. A small, broken whimper left my lips, a sound of absolute defeat.

Luna Victoria turned back to me, her eyes gleaming with absolute triumph. “We cannot tolerate this malicious filth in our pack anymore. You are leaving this territory right now.”

“What?” I whispered, my voice barely a thread as I looked around the room. “I… I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“You should have thought of that before whoring around and hurting Giselle! You’re exiled, Jasmine. Effective immediately,” Victoria declared.