Princess Stolen

Author's Note:

Stephanie's Point of View

The first thing Alpha Geoff Rath ever gave me was a name. The second was a place in his kitchens. According to his Luna, Mirella, I should have been grateful for both.

They had found me wrapped in a blanket beside the northern boundary nearly eighteen years ago, although my eighteenth birthday remained two days away. A storm had passed through the mountains during the night, and one of the patrol wolves had heard me crying beneath an old cedar tree.

I had been at most a few months old. There had been two things with me–a blanket embroidered with silver thread and a necklace.

The blanket disappeared years ago. I had no idea where it went, but knowing Alpha Geoff and the Luna, it was most likely thrown away.

Their daughter, Cassandra, wore the necklace. I watched it catch the morning light as she entered the kitchen and dropped her breakfast tray beside the sink.

The kitchen had been busy since before sunrise. Heat rolled from the two large ovens along the back wall, carrying the smells of fresh bread, fried bacon, and the herbs Cook had already prepared for lunch. Copper pans hung above the long wooden worktables, and every available section of bench seemed to have something sitting on it. Bowls of chopped vegetables waited beside bundles of herbs, loaves cooled on wire racks, and a large pot of stock simmered near the stove.

Servants moved around each other with the ease that came from doing the same jobs together every morning. Knives struck chopping boards, cupboard doors opened and shut, water splashed into the deep sinks, and Cook's voice occasionally rose above everything when somebody moved too fast or left something where it shouldn't be.

I knew every part of the kitchen. I knew which oven ran hotter on the left, which cupboard door needed lifting before it would shut, and which section of the floor became slippery whenever someone carried water from the sinks. For all the work I did elsewhere in the packhouse, this was the one room that felt like mine.

"Wash that," she demanded in her high-pitched, nasal voice.

I looked at the half-eaten eggs, fruit, and toast she had left behind. "You have hands," I scoffed.

Her eyes lifted to mine. I had learned years ago that Cassandra enjoyed obedience less than she enjoyed forcing it. If I had obeyed too quickly, she would have found another job. If I argued, she found five. I just couldn't help arguing with her. I hated her and her family so much.

She smiled in that sinister way that I had always thought showed the ugliness within her. "Father wants the west guest rooms checked again. The Royal Family arrives before midday."

"I checked them last night."

"Check them again," she ordered.

I wiped my hands on my apron and began to remove it. Checking the rooms was much better than working in the hot kitchen.

Cassandra touched the necklace resting against her throat. My necklace. I had seen it in an old jewellery box when I was seven. I remembered asking Luna Mirella about it because something inside me had pulled toward it. She told me it belonged to the woman who abandoned me.

Cassandra overheard, and by dinner time, it adorned her neck. I had never seen it off her neck since. I knew every part of that necklace by sight after eleven years of watching Cassandra wear it.

The chain looked like silver, although it never tarnished the way the kitchen silver did. I had seen Cassandra swim in it, sleep in it and wear it through summers hot enough to leave sweat running down her neck. The metal always looked the same.

Small clear stones covered the pendant. They caught every scrap of light and threw it back in sharp flashes whenever Cassandra moved. When I was younger, I had thought they might be diamonds. Luna Mirella laughed when I asked and told me they were glass. I believed her. Nobody abandoned a baby beneath a tree with a necklace covered in diamonds.

The stones formed a single letter. S. That was why I thought Alpha Geoff had named me Stephanie. Nobody knew what my parents had called me, and there had been nothing else about me that carried a name. I assumed he had looked at the pendant, seen the letter and chosen something that started with it.

Sometimes I wondered what the S had originally stood for. Stephanie seemed the obvious answer. Whatever it meant, the necklace was mine. Cassandra knew it too.

"Try to look presentable while they're here," Cassandra said.

I glanced down at myself. My dark brown hair was twisted into a loose knot to keep it away from the food, although several strands had escaped around my face. My olive skin needed a wash after a morning beside the ovens, and my faded dress had flour across the front. I looked exactly like what I was–someone who had been working since before sunrise.

Cassandra had spent considerably longer preparing for the day. Her blonde hair fell in soft waves past her shoulders, and the pale blue dress she wore fitted her perfectly. She was pretty, especially when she had time to arrange herself, although I had learned never to tell her that. Compliments tended to encourage her.

Her gaze moved over my face before settling on my hair. She did that often enough that I had stopped wondering why. Cassandra had once complained that it was unfair for a servant to have hair as thick as mine. Another time, she demanded to know what I used on my skin, only to become irritated when I told her it was soap.

I had never understood why she cared. Cassandra had expensive dresses, jewellery, cosmetics and an entire room devoted to clothes. I had two dresses and an apron.

"The Alpha King has three sons," she continued. "I intend to have one of them as my mate. Maybe even all of them."

"Congratulations."

Her smile disappeared. "I could have you punished," she threatened.

"You usually do."

She stared at me for several seconds before leaving in a huff.  I waited until the door swung shut before smiling. I had to find my fun somewhere. Who cared if she had me whipped for it? I had been whipped for even less. All it took was her simpering to her father, and he would take out his silver-tipped whip.

I reached for Cassandra's tray and felt the skin across my back pull beneath my dress. The last whipping had been six days ago, which meant the deeper cuts had started to heal. Most of them only hurt when I stretched too far or twisted the wrong way.

Alpha Geoff kept the whip in his study. Brown leather with silver worked into the tip. I knew the sound of it leaving his desk drawer almost as well as I knew the sound it made through the air.

The silver made each strike worse. It burned after the leather left my skin and kept burning long after the punishment ended. The first few times, I had wondered why silver affected me when I had never connected with a wolf. Eventually, I stopped wondering. Whatever I was missing, my body still reacted like every other wolf-shifter's.

One of the younger kitchen maids covered her mouth. I looked at her, and she burst out laughing. I joined her. It was either that or throw Cassandra's breakfast tray through the window, and windows cost money.

According to Alpha Geoff, everything I ate, wore and used belonged to his family. My work paid my debt. At the rate he calculated it, I suspected I would finish paying for my infant formula sometime around my eighty-third birthday. Assuming I lived that long.

Being wolfless made that questionable. Every wolf-shifter had connected with their wolf by eighteen, though most began hearing them much earlier. Cassandra had first heard hers at fifteen. So far, I had heard nothing, and people had stopped expecting anything from me years ago.

That suited the Raths. I was merely a wolfless orphan. A wolfless orphan had little standing within a pack, and a servant had even less. Unfortunately for me, I was both.

Technically, I was the senior kitchen maid. I had worked in these kitchens since I was old enough to carry a plate without dropping it, which meant the younger servants usually came to me when something went wrong.

I organised the morning jobs, checked the pantry stores and made sure meals reached the dining room on time. If Cook was away, I organised the kitchen, but none of that gave me any authority outside these walls.

Every wolf in the Rath Pack outranked me. A thirteen-year-old with a newly awakened wolf could order me to fetch something, and Alpha Geoff expected me to obey. Some of the younger pack members discovered that particular privilege with embarrassing enthusiasm.

Most days, I started before sunrise. Breakfast had to be prepared before the morning patrol returned; bread needed kneading for the midday meal; vegetables had to be peeled; meat had to be prepared; and pantry supplies had to be counted. Once breakfast was cleared, I washed the dishes, scrubbed the benches, and started all over again for lunch. The kitchen was only part of it.

Luna Mirella sent me wherever another pair of hands was needed. I changed the bedding in the guest rooms, carried the laundry, polished the silver, swept the hallways, and scrubbed the floors. During large pack gatherings, I helped prepare the dining hall before returning to the kitchen to serve the meal. By the time everyone else finished eating, I usually had a stack of dirty plates waiting for me.

Winter added the chore of fires. Every morning, someone had to carry wood through the house and clean the fireplaces of yesterday's ash. Summer brought fruit preserving, and autumn meant storing enough food to carry the pack through the colder months. All of that went towards my debt. Alpha Geoff kept the calculations himself, but I had never seen them.

Whenever I asked how much I still owed, the amount seemed to have grown. "The food you eat costs money, as do the clothes you wear. That little room beside the servants' quarters, soap, heating all cost money," he had told me.

According to him, keeping me alive had been an expensive undertaking. Strangely, my labour never seemed quite as expensive.

The kitchen staff were different. Most of them had worked beside me long enough to know I could gut a fish, rescue a burnt sauce and prepare a banquet while Cassandra stood in the doorway explaining how useless I was.

They listened when I gave them instructions, which Cassandra hated. She could make me wash her breakfast tray, but the moment she left the kitchen, everyone looked to me to finish breakfast service.

"All right," I said, picking up the list of jobs beside the stove. "Royal Family or otherwise, we're still feeding half the pack at midday. Liana, check the bread. Elsi, you're with Cook on the venison. I'll do the guest rooms before Cassandra decides the curtains have personally offended her."

The younger maid grinned. Elsi snorted from where she was trimming the venison. "Careful. She might hear you and have the curtains whipped."

"Only after she makes Stephanie apologise to them," Liana added.

I laughed and grabbed the cleaning basket from beneath the bench. That was the difference between the kitchen and the rest of the pack. In here, I was Stephanie. They teased me, argued with me and trusted me to get everyone through a busy day.

The moment I walked through the kitchen door, I became the wolfless orphan Alpha Geoff had taken in. Being important in one room and worthless everywhere else was an odd way to live, but I had almost eighteen years of practice.

Almost eighteen. I had two days left until my supposed birthday. No one really knew when it was, but it was approximately two months before I was found.

I told myself I expected nothing from it. Eighteen was another number, another day in the kitchen and probably another reminder from Alpha Geoff about how much I owed him, but that didn't stop me from wondering.

I had watched other wolves my age hear their wolves for the first time. Some ran through the packhouse shouting. Others went pale and stood there listening to a voice only they could hear. Liana had cried when hers first spoke to her. She spent the rest of that day smiling at nothing while the rest of us teased her.

I smiled with them. Later that night, alone in my little room, I tried speaking inside my own head.

"Hello?"

"Anyone?"

I had felt ridiculous after the fifth attempt, but I still tried again on my next birthday, and the one after that. I had stopped trying months ago.

At least, I told myself I had. Two days remained. There was still a small part of me waiting for a voice to answer, even though I knew better than to build a future around it.

My future presented a bigger problem. At eighteen, I became an adult under pack law. Alpha Geoff had taken responsibility for an abandoned infant, and I had spent my childhood under his authority because I belonged to his pack and lived beneath his roof.

An adult was different. I could leave. I thought I could, anyway.

Nobody had ever explained that part to me, and asking Alpha Geoff seemed like a good way to remind him that my birthday was approaching. I preferred to keep that information to myself until I understood what choices I actually had.

Leaving also required money, and I had none. Unlike the other Omegas, I had never received wages. Every hour I worked went against my supposed debt, and Alpha Geoff controlled the records for that too.

I owned two dresses, two pairs of shoes, my apron and the small collection of things in my room. Even those were questionable. If I asked Luna Mirella, she would probably tell me the Raths had paid for them, which made them Rath property. My necklace should have been the one thing nobody could claim, but Cassandra had solved that problem years ago.

I adjusted the cleaning basket against my hip and looked towards the kitchen door. Two days. Perhaps eighteen would arrive and change nothing. I would wake before sunrise, pull on my apron and come downstairs to start breakfast. Cassandra would find something to complain about. Luna Mirella would find something for me to scrub. Alpha Geoff would remind me that I owed him for rescuing me.

Or I could find out whether eighteen finally gave me the right to walk through the pack gates and keep going. For the first time, I wanted to know.