2

Emily

I really believed I could heal her.

Josh had never stopped trying. He secretly brought me potions and herbal remedies, sitting beside me in the dark corridor as I choked them down. We both pretended that the next bottle might be the one to neutralize the toxin, but the wolfsbane had already gone too deep. It moved through my veins like black ink in clear water—slow, dark, and impossible to pull back.

Some mornings, I woke up and felt absolutely nothing. No inner warmth. No spiritual connection. Just a hollow, echoing silence where Amy used to be.

Those were the mornings I finally understood the truth: the Emily I used to be was never coming back.

I lay flat on my bed. It was the only place left in this house that still felt like mine, though even that comfort was slipping away. My body barely obeyed me anymore. My arms were swollen and sore from endless scrubbing, and my back burned with a deep, muscular exhaustion from days without a single moment of rest.

Weeks ago, Clara had dismissed every maid from their duties. They still lived in the house, but they no longer worked. Only I did. And they no longer called me Miss Emily, either. They either looked right through me when I passed them in the hallway, or worse, they watched my downfall with quiet satisfaction, as if they had been waiting for this my entire life.

Suddenly, my bedroom door slammed open, banging violently against the wall.

I tried to sit up, but my body was too slow and heavy. It didn’t obey me fast enough.

Anna’s whip spoke before she did.

Crack.

The leather tore through the air and struck my bare back. Pain bloomed instantly—hot, sharp, and blinding.

“Get up,” she said, her voice terrifyingly calm. She struck me again. Crack. “Get up, lazy bitch.”

I tried to rise, but I couldn’t get past my knees. I hissed through my teeth, my legs trembling violently beneath my weight.

“Anna—”

The whip cut me off a third time, slicing into my skin.

“How dare you!” Her eyes flashed a deep, dangerous wolf-red. “How dare you say my name, slave? You address me as Miss Anna, or you don’t speak at all.”

She didn’t stop. I knew she was waiting for me to beg. She always waited for it, as if my humiliation fed something dark inside her soul. So, at first, I gave her what she wanted.

The words came out broken, sobbing, and small: “Please, Miss Anna… please stop… please.”

But she kept swinging anyway. Eventually, the tears ran dry, and I stopped making any sound at all. I simply curled in on myself, locking my arms over my head, and waited for the torment to end.

When she finally stopped, she was breathing a little hard, a look of immense satisfaction on her face. She crouched down in front of me and grabbed a fistful of my hair, ruthlessly yanking my head back until I had no choice but to look into her eyes.

“Who would have thought?” She tilted her head, inspecting my bloody face. “The once-great Emily, daughter of the Beta, reduced to my personal entertainment. Weak. Broken. Kneeling in the dirt before me.”

Tears slid down my face. Anna… She had once held my hand when I was a little girl suffering from fever. She had cried and begged me not to die, swearing she couldn’t live without me.

It had all been a disgusting lie. The very moment my mother died, her mask fell completely.

She leaned a little closer, her grip tightening on my scalp. “You will never stand above me again. Not in this life. Not ever.”

She let go of my hair, letting my head drop forward against the floor. She stood up smoothly, patting down her expensive clothes as though she hadn’t just whipped a human being.

“You want to know a secret?” she asked lightly, her voice conversational. “Your mother was a pathetic fool.”

My body went completely still.

“My mother didn’t just take her place after she died,” Anna continued, a cruel smirk spreading across her lips. “She took her husband decades ago. Lucas is my real father, Emily.”

The entire room went dead silent. The air left my lungs, and I forgot how to breathe. All I could do was kneel there, completely crushed under the weight of the revelation.

Her father. My father. The exact same man.

A flood of bitter memories rushed back to me. My mother had allowed Anna to call my father “Dad” because the pack children used to bully her for being a fatherless bastard. My mother had done it out of pure kindness, wanting to protect a little girl.

But it hadn’t been charity at all. It was a betrayal happening right under our noses.

Anna’s mocking laughter filled the room. “If your mother had known,” she added gleefully, “she would have regretted dying so early.”

My mother died never knowing. Part of me was glad she hadn’t. The heartbreak would have killed her long before the sickness did.

“Maids!” Anna barked.

Two of them appeared in the doorway almost immediately, as if they had been lingering outside, watching the whole thing.

Anna pointed at me with a lazy flick of her wrist. “Take this trash out of here. This room belongs to someone who actually has a wolf.”

As the two maids grabbed my bruised arms, a cold, wild panic flared in my chest. I could handle the hunger, the whippings, and the endless chores—but not this. Not losing the last room my mother had touched.

“No,” I begged, digging my bare heels into the plush rug my mother had chosen for my eighteenth birthday. “Please, Anna. Take the jewelry. Take all my clothes. Just let me stay in this room.”

Anna paused. She walked slowly over to my vanity and picked up a small porcelain bird—the very last gift my mother had given me before she became bedridden. She turned it over in her manicured hands.

“You think this room still smells like her, don’t you?” Anna whispered.

I couldn’t answer.

“Then I suppose,” Anna smiled, her grip tightening around the porcelain, “I need to erase her completely. Even dead, she takes up far too much space in this house.”

She opened her fingers. I watched in agonizing slow motion as the porcelain bird hit the hardwood floor and shattered into a thousand jagged white pieces.

“Destroy it all,” Anna commanded the maids. “The bed, the curtains, the family photos. Tear it down and redesign it. I want this room to look like she never existed.”

“No! Please—”

Before I could finish, Anna’s hand smacked across my face so hard that the world tilted. The sharp taste of copper filled my mouth. She grabbed my jaw, squeezing the bone until it creaked.

“The maid quarters,” she hissed into my face. “That is where you sleep from tonight.”

I was dragged out like a carcass, my feet scraping down the long hallway. I heard the other maids whispering and snickering as we passed. When we reached the back of the estate, they didn’t open the door gently—they threw me inside.

I hit the floor hard, and a raw, animalistic gasp tore from my throat. I lay there for a long moment, my cheek pressed against the freezing stone, trying to catch my breath.

When I finally pushed myself up to look around, my heart sank. This was not the maid's quarters I remembered. The old rooms had small, comfortable beds, windows, and warmth. This place was a tomb. It was a small, sunken cellar entirely made of bare grey stone. There were no windows, no mattress, and no furniture. The only thing filling the space was the suffocating smell of dampness and mold.

“This is the slave quarters,” one of the maids said from the doorway. “Miss Anna had it prepared especially for you.”

“I hope you find it comfortable,” the other added with a sneer.

I glanced up at her. In that brief moment, I didn’t see active cruelty in her eyes—just utter indifference. It was Mira. My mother had trusted Mira with everything, even giving her access to her private greenhouse. And Mira had simply decided, the moment the power shifted, that loyalty wasn’t worth carrying anymore.

The heavy iron door slammed shut, and absolute darkness swallowed me whole.

I sat on the freezing stone floor of the room designed to break my spirit. I took slow, deep, calculated breaths to manage the agony in my ribs, holding back my tears. I refused to cry where they could hear me. I would save my breakdown for the dead of night, in the safety of the dark.

Weeks passed. The human part of me—the fragile shell left behind without Amy—healed at an agonizingly slow pace. Without a wolf’s magic, cuts took days to close, bruises lingered for weeks, and bones had to knit back together in their own traumatic time.

And Amy was still unreachable. Every single morning, I reached into the dark spaces of my mind, desperately calling her name, only to be met with a hollow, echoing emptiness.

I woke up brutally early every day. I didn’t have a choice anymore. My work began long before anyone else opened their eyes, and it ended long after the packhouse went dark. I cleaned. I cooked. I scrubbed every piece of clothing for every cruel person under this roof, hanging them on the washlines while the morning sun was still low and the air was freezing.

I was in the yard, my raw arms shoved into a basin of icy water, when her voice sliced through the morning quiet.

“Slave.”

Not Emily. Never Emily anymore. Just Slave.

I dried my hands as fast as I could and ran toward the house. By the time I reached her door—what used to be my door—I was completely out of breath. I knocked twice and pushed it open, keeping my head bowed.

The room was already entirely unrecognizable. Every single trace of my mother had been violently stripped away and replaced by Anna’s gaudy taste—bright, obnoxious colors and loud patterns chosen for the sole purpose of defiling what had been there before. The shelves where my books used to sit were empty, save for Anna’s jewelry, her perfumes, and a framed photograph of Anna sitting proudly where my mother’s portrait used to hang.

“Miss Anna,” I said, bowing my head. “You called—”

A heavy crystal vase caught me directly above the temple.

I didn’t even see it coming. One moment I was standing in the doorway, and the next, the world spun and I stumbled sideways into the doorframe. My hand flew up too late. The sharp, shattered crystal cut a deep gash right above my ear.

For a second, there was only a numb shock. Then, the blinding pain crashed in.

“You missed a spot in my bathroom,” Anna hissed, stepping over the broken glass and blood toward me. “And for a slave, forgetting a chore is a death sentence.”

I pressed my trembling palm against the deep cut, watching the thick, dark blood coat my fingers.

I closed my eyes, committing the burning pain to memory. Every drop of blood. Every jagged scar. Every foul name she called me in the room that used to belong to me.

I was going to remember it all. And I was going to need every ounce of that rage when the time came to tear her world apart.