CHAPTER 3

WINIFRED HAWTHORNE POV

"Should we really let that filthy outcast sleep under our roof another night?"

Winifred Hawthorne lies frozen on the thin, dirt-stained mattress inside the attic servant room of the Whitcombe estate. Every breath tears through her shattered spine, her body numb from the brutal beating Alpha Ambrose had inflicted earlier that day. Her silver-grey eyes trace the cracked wooden ceiling beams as exhaustion drags her mind down into a feverish, dark trance.

In her fevered mind, memory twists into a vivid nightmare of twelve years ago.

She was only ten years old, a malnourished outcast wandering near the abandoned rogue border territory beyond the Hawthorne Cottage. The winter frost bit through her thin linen rags. She had stumbled across a wounded young wolf lying dying in the snow, his pitch-black fur matted with frozen blood and dark rogue venom.

His chest had barely moved. She had called out to him in panic, trying to rouse his spirit, but his eyes remained closed. When she finally turned to run toward the rogue orphanage, a weak, gravelly voice echoed from the blood-stained snow.

"Help... me..."

She was small and weak, her hands raw and bleeding, but she pulled an old wooden cart through the ice, lifting his massive, bleeding form onto the planks. She dragged him three miles across the frozen roads to the gates of the pack infirmary.

When the pack healers refused to unlock the heavy iron doors without silver coins, ten-year-old Winifred dropped to her knees on the frozen stone. She slammed her forehead against the icy pavement, begging them through tears until the Vice Director of the infirmary took pity on her and wheeled the dying boy into the recovery chamber.

She waited outside in the freezing wind for three days.

When he finally opened his eyes, he looked through the tall glass window, his lips curving into a pale, promise-filled smile. He pressed his palm against the glass, murmuring that he would remember her scent and return for her when he took his place as Alpha.

Then, a line of iron-armored guards arrived, whisking him away into the main territories before she could even speak her name.

Winifred wakes with a sharp gasp, tears soaking the rough linen pillow beneath her cheek.

The attic room is pitch-black. Her throat burns with suffocating thirst, her stomach twisting from raw hunger. She forces her bruised limbs to move, pushing herself off the mattress to search for water in the lower hall. She moves like a shadow, keeping her footsteps silent to avoid disturbing the family.

As she reaches the dark wooden banister at the top of the grand staircase, sharp, mocking voices ring out from the central hearth of the Whitcombe Pack House.

"Is she still breathing up there?" Dorothea Whitcombe’s sweet, dripping voice carries through the silent hall. "You promised this place would be cleared out so I could expand my private room. I do not want her rogue stench near my furs."

Winifred halts, her hands locking onto the carved wooden railing so hard her knuckles turn white.

Her mother’s cold voice replies instantly. "Be patient, Dorothea. Tomorrow morning, I will force her to sign the renunciation parchment and kick her into the outer rogue lands forever. We only endured her presence these past three years for the four percent pack territory stake."

"Four percent territory stake?" Dorothea sneers, the sound of her heavy silk robes rustling against the leather chairs echoing upward. "Grandmother left that useless stake to a wild orphan! It cannot even be cashed into silver coins! And I had to suffer the embarrassment of calling that feral wolf my sister!"

"Do you think your father and I were not disgusted?" her mother snaps back, her tone laced with deep venom. "She eats like a starving hound, scraping every bone clean as if she grew up in the mud! Every time Alpha allies visited our estate, her very existence brought shame upon the Whitcombe name!"

"I agree," Dorothea laughs, a dark, cruel sound. "When I dumped my ruined, stained tunics onto her bed, she bowed her head and thanked me like she had won a blessing! Seeing Father shatter her spine with that wooden bench today was the greatest relief of my life!"

"It is over now," her mother says smoothly. "Once she signs the pack transfer at dawn, we tell your grandmother she betrayed the family at the banquet. The old matriarch will never speak her name again."

Standing in the shadows of the upper landing, Winifred feels her breath catch in her throat. Her blood runs colder than the winter frost.

The old rogue pack leader at the orphanage had always taught her to finish every scrap of food so the pack cooks would know their work was valued. And whenever Dorothea handed her old, discarded garments, Winifred had accepted them with soft words, terrified that refusing them would make her family think she was ungrateful.

She had taken three part-time hunting shifts at the pack tavern just to pay for her basic medicinal herbs, desperate never to burden her parents' treasury.

Every smile, every gentle word, every sacrifice she had made to earn a crumb of their love was nothing but a sickening joke. They had tolerated her filthy existence solely for a four percent pack territory stake left by her dying grandmother.

And the substitute Luna vow—the arranged marriage that had given her body to Edmund’s violent hatred—was nothing more than a calculated trap to strip her of her rights and cast her out like trash.

Winifred bites her inner lip until the sharp taste of fresh blood fills her mouth, smothering the desperate cry in her chest.

She lets go of the railing. Step by step, dragging her broken, agonized body down the stone staircase, she steps directly into the flickering light of the hearthfire.

"Is that so?" Winifred asks, her voice trembling with lethal, quiet rage.