Shawls Academy: Claw Spirits Battle

Stacy POV

Six years of scrubbing this floor, and my knees still hadn't learned to stop shaking.

I knelt there, rag soaked through, wringing out water that had long gone cold, while across the room Giselle admired herself in a hand mirror, dabbing powder onto a face that had never once known a callus. She'd been "getting ready" for over half an hour. Getting ready for what, I couldn't say. Nothing about this pack house required her to lift a finger, least of all today.

The doorbell rang, and something in my chest seized before I even understood why.

I answered it anyway. Servants didn't get to ignore doors, even when their hands were raw and their pride was rawer.

"Post wolf, here on royal business," the man said, straightening a stack of envelopes bound in gold thread. "Every royal pup of age gets one of these once a year, if the Academy deems them worth the ink. Shawls Academy invitations. I need Miss Stacy, daughter of the Alpha."

I froze on the threshold, waiting for him to look past me, the way everyone did, searching for someone who looked like she belonged in a house like this.

"I'm Stacy," I said.

His eyes dragged from my scuffed knees to the bucket still gripped in my hand, and I watched the doubt settle into his face before he even tried to hide it. He didn't believe me. Six years of wearing a maid's uniform in my own father's house, and even the mailman needed convincing I hadn't been stolen from the servants' quarters at birth.

"Right," he said finally, and held the envelope out like it might bite him. "One for every royal heir this season. Yours."

My hands trembled harder taking it than they had scrubbing stone for six hours straight. Every royal pup got the chance to prove themselves at Shawls. Every single one — except me, apparently, for six years running, because my name kept vanishing off the list before it ever reached the door. This year, it hadn't.

This year, they'd remembered I existed.

I didn't wait for the door to close before I was moving.

"Dad." My voice cracked down the middle, too loud, too desperate, and I hated how much I sounded like I was still asking permission to breathe in this house. "Shawls Academy sends invitations to every royal who comes of age. This year, mine came."

He didn't even look up from the papers on his desk. "You're too young, Stacy."

"I'm seventeen." The words came out sharper than I meant them to, sharpened by six years of him looking straight through me. "Mum was seventeen when she went. I want to be a warrior. Just like her."

He looked at me then — really looked, for the first time in longer than I could count — and I watched something flicker behind his eyes before it sealed itself shut again. I was still in the maid's uniform. Still on my knees an hour ago, still smelling of the same lye soap I scrubbed the floors with. His daughter, dressed like hired help, in his own house, and he had let it happen every single day and called it discipline.

"I'll think about it," he said, which from him meant no, wrapped in enough softness that he wouldn't have to watch it land.

That was when Pearl walked in.

"Think about what?" Her mouth curled the way it always did right before she ruined something. She hadn't even asked. She already knew, the way she always somehow knew everything that was mine before I'd finished saying it out loud.

"Shawls Academy invited Stacy," Dad said, and I felt the betrayal of it settle cold in my stomach — he hadn't needed to tell her. He wanted to. "She wants to train as a warrior. Like Sophie."

Pearl's face didn't change so much as it hardened, like something setting in ice. "Absolutely not." Her voice came out clipped, final, the tone of someone used to being obeyed instantly. "She'll die there. Just like Sophie did."

Hearing my mother's name in that woman's mouth was its own kind of violence. I felt my hands curl into fists at my sides, nails biting half-moons into my palms.

Dad's spine straightened. "You're right, Pearl." He said it like he was agreeing to something he'd already decided alone, in the dark, a hundred times before. "Stacy isn't going. I can't lose another person I love to that place."

I stood there, invitation crushed in my fist, and felt six years of silence crack open all at once.

"Alpha, the council's waiting on you," Alvin said from the doorway, and Dad was already moving, already gone, already choosing a meeting over the daughter standing in front of him with her whole future dying in her hands.

"I'm leaving, dear." his voice trailed after him, bold, firm. "Make sure the chores are finished. Consider it a lesson in respecting me."

He left without looking back.

I don't remember deciding to speak. I just remember the words were already out before I could stop them.

"You did this." My voice didn't shake, not this time. "You've hated me since the day you walked into this house, and you finally found a way to take the one thing I've ever wanted."

The slap landed before I even saw her hand move.

"You stupid hypocrite." Pearl's voice cracked through the room like a whip, and I felt the sting bloom hot across my cheek before the sound of it even registered.

I bit down on the whimper rising in my throat. Barely.

"I told you, Mother. She's forgotten her place in this pack." Giselle had drifted in behind her, arms crossed, that smug little tilt to her chin she always wore when she thought she'd already won.

Something in my spine, something I'd kept leashed for six years of scrubbed floors and swallowed insults, finally snapped free.

"You took it from me." I wasn't shouting. I didn't need to. "The one thing that was ever mine, and you took it because you couldn't stand the idea of me becoming someone."

"Shut up, you bastard." I'd never heard her say it that plainly before. "You're nothing but a crazy lunatic whose only job in this house is to clean and listen to your Luna. Me."

"Right." I laughed, pushing myself off the floor, meeting her eyes without blinking, the invitation still crumpled in my fist like the last thing I had left. "You mean the replacement. Sure. My Luna."

"How dare you speak to my mother that way." Giselle lunged, her hand cutting toward my face.

I caught her wrist before it landed. Instinct, not thought.

"To me," I said, low, "you both are nothing." I shoved her hand away and she stumbled backward, hitting the floor hard.

"Are you mad? Wait till Dad gets back. You'll regret this." The words hit harder than her fall did. I felt the flinch happen before I could stop it, and Pearl saw it too. I watched satisfaction spread across her face like oil on water.

"Clean the floor. Faster than you have been. And do all the chores. I've given the maidservants the night off."

She smirked, drunk on her own power, and Giselle flicked her hair back as she rose. "Give them the whole month, Mother. They're valuable wolves in this pack. Unlike this rag of a thing."

"You took Shawls from me." My voice broke on the last word, and I hated that it did, hated giving her that much. "Six years of nothing, and the one letter that finally had my name on it, and you couldn't even let me keep that."

"You were never going to survive it anyway." Pearl's smile widened. "Just like your mother didn't."

The second slap came faster than I could brace for it.

I'd tried. I'd genuinely tried to respect her as my father's Luna, tried for six years to earn a kindness that was never coming. But there's only so much a person can swallow before it starts eating them from the inside instead.

"You know what, Giselle? Let's leave before her smell intoxicates us. She's so much like her mother; stupid, ugly, and dumb."

That was it.

My arm moved before I gave it permission, and it landed against Pearl's cheek with a crack that felt almost satisfying. Not calculated. Not clean. Six years of grief for a mother I'd lost and a warrior's path she'd never gotten to finish, all of it landing in a single blow because Pearl had taken the last piece of Sophie I had left to chase.

She turned to face me, and I let her see exactly what I felt. No apology in my expression. None.

That was when the door flew open.

Alpha Dave. My father.

The room shifted the second he stepped through it. Pearl crumpled to the floor, sobbing on cue, and Giselle was already moving straight to him, finger pointed at me like an accusation carved in stone.

"Alpha, she hit my mother." Her voice broke on command, tears cutting clean tracks through the makeup she used to hide what she really was.

I stood frozen, watching her perform grief like she'd rehearsed it a hundred times before this exact moment.

"She called me a replacement. And a stupid mother." Pearl's voice trembled beautifully. My father's eyes found mine, and something in them had already decided the verdict before I said a word — because he'd been looking for a reason for six years, and I'd finally, foolishly, handed him one.

He crossed the room and gripped my hands, too hard, too fast. I screamed as I felt skin split, blood welling under his grip.

"Dad, you actually believe them?" The disbelief in my own voice sounded pathetic even to me.

"Ever since I chose Pearl as my mate, you've been nothing but a rebel." His voice was ice, the voice of a man who'd been rehearsing this speech in his head for years, just waiting for the excuse to say it out loud. "I've warned you. Time and again. You want a warrior's life so badly, you'll fight your own family for it."

"So you think I'd do this to her? Hurt her, Dad, over a letter?"

"She's lying, Alpha." Giselle's voice pitched higher, more desperate. "She slapped her, she nearly tore her neck open with her claws."

"Dad—"

"Enough, Stacy." He didn't let me finish. Didn't let me try. He shoved me back and my spine hit the wall hard enough to steal the air from my lungs, like I was an enemy he was putting down instead of a daughter he was disciplining.

He wasn't the man I remembered anymore. He hadn't been for a long time — I'd just been too busy hoping to notice.

"I spent my whole life being good to you, to Mom—" My voice broke as he cut through it.

"She's dead."

"Dead because of you." The words tore out before I could stop them. "If you'd helped her that day, she'd still be alive. You ruthless excuse for an Alpha."

I regretted it the instant it left my mouth.

His hand moved before either of us could stop it, and pain exploded across my face as blood spattered the wall behind me.

"It's okay, Alpha." His beta, Alvin, stepped between us, pulling him back, but the look Alvin gave me over his shoulder wasn't sympathy. It was fury.

"From now on," my father said, voice flat, final, "you call me dad Giselle." He nodded toward Pearl. "I have no other daughter."

I felt something inside me shatter, quiet and complete, as those words left his mouth. The maidservants stood frozen near the far wall. His beta. His pack executives. All of them watching my father erase me in front of an audience — watching the last chance I'd had at becoming someone die in the same breath as the man who used to call me his little warrior.

The disgrace was unbearable. My own father, disowning me. Publicly. In front of everyone who mattered.

I didn't wait for the tears to fall. I didn't give any of them the satisfaction.

I shifted.

And froze — because the wolf staring back at me from the shattered mirror across the room wasn't silver.

She was black.

There was no time to understand what that meant. I turned and bolted from the pack house, paws tearing across the floor, past the stunned faces of everyone who used to call me family.

I didn't know where I was running to.

I only knew I was never coming back.