Chapter One: Worthless

Marina's Pov 

They called me Omega. Worthless. Less than nothing.

I slept in a cupboard under the stairs. My hands bled washing their clothes in icy water. I scrubbed their floors until my knees bruised purple and black. I cooked their meals and ate their scraps—cold potatoes, stale bread, sometimes nothing at all. I did all of this cruelly because I believed in one thing: my fated mate would come for me.

I remember when things were different. Alpha Marcus and Luna Diane of the Shadowmoon Pack took me in when I was three years old. They had no children then. Luna Diane brushed my thick silver hair every night, her fingers gentle as she worked through the tangles. Alpha Marcus called me "little one" and let me sit on his lap during pack meetings. I had my own room with yellow curtains and a bed with soft blankets. I thought they loved me.

Then Luna Diane got pregnant.

At first, it was small things. Luna Diane stopped brushing my hair. Alpha Marcus forgot to say goodnight. They were busy, I told myself. A baby was coming. Everything would be fine.

But everything wasn't fine.

The baby came—a perfect little girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. They named her Alia. I was seven years old, and I tried so hard to be a good big sister. I helped with the diapers. I sang to her when she cried. I loved her because I thought we were family.

The coldness started slowly. They stopped including me in family meals. My yellow curtains came down. The soft blankets disappeared. But I still had a room. I still had clothes that fit. I told myself it could be worse.

Then I turned twelve.

Every werewolf shifts for the first time around twelve or thirteen. I waited and waited. The full moon came and went. Nothing happened. Another full moon. Still nothing. By the time I turned thirteen with no wolf, the whispers started.

"Defective."

"Broken."

"Not one of us."

Alpha Marcus called me into his office on my thirteenth birthday. Luna Diane stood beside him, holding nine-year-old Alia's hand. My sister—I still thought of her as my sister then—stared at me with something cold in her eyes.

"You have no wolf," Alpha Marcus said. His voice was flat. "You are not truly one of us. From this day forward, you are not our daughter. You will work for your keep like any other servant."

I stared at him. "But—"

"You have nothing to do with this family," Luna Diane interrupted. "Do you understand?"

I opened my mouth, closed it and looked at Alia. She smiled. 

That night, they took my room. I carried my few belongings down to the servants' quarters, but the head maid, Mrs. Chen, blocked the doorway.

"Not here," she said. "Alpha's orders. The cupboard under the stairs."

The cupboard under the stairs was where they stored cleaning supplies. It was barely big enough for me to lie down. It smelled like bleach and mold. There was no window. No light except what came through the crack under the door.

I didn't cry that first night. I was too shocked.

I cried every night after.

They took my clothes next. The dresses Luna Diane had bought me, the jeans that actually fit, the warm sweater I loved—all gone. Mrs. Chen threw a pile of old maid uniforms at me. They were too big, faded gray things that hung off my shoulders. I rolled up the sleeves and tied a rope around my waist to keep the skirt from falling down.

"You'll start in the kitchens," Mrs. Chen said. "Four in the morning. Don't be late."

I wasn't late. I was never late. I woke up at three-thirty every morning in that dark cupboard, my back aching from sleeping on the hard floor. I scrubbed pots until my fingers cracked and bled. I chopped vegetables until my wrists went numb. I served breakfast to the pack members who had once smiled at me, and now they looked through me like I was invisible.

Alia was the worst.

She was nine when it started. Nine years old and already cruel in ways that made my stomach turn.

"Fetch me water," she'd say, even though the pitcher was right next to her.

"My shoes are dirty. Clean them."

"I dropped my bracelet in the garden. Find it."

I did what she asked. Every single time. Because what choice did I have?

But it wasn't enough to just order me around. Alia needed to humiliate me.

She "accidentally" spilled juice on me during breakfast. The pack members laughed as the sticky liquid dripped down my face and soaked into my already-dirty uniform.

She told me to fetch a book from the library, then acted confused when I brought it. "I said the blue book, not the red one. Are you stupid? Go back and get it." There was no blue book. I spent two hours searching before she laughed and told me she was joking.

She invited her friends over and made me serve them tea. "This is the girl with no wolf," she told them, loud enough for me to hear. "My parents felt sorry for her, so they let her stay as a maid. Isn't that nice of them?"

Her friends giggled and whispered. One of them—a blonde girl named Sara—threw her cookie on the floor. "Oops. Clean that up."

I got on my hands and knees and cleaned it up.

The pack members were just as bad. They saw Alia treat me like dirt, and they followed her lead.

"Move faster, Omega."

"You missed a spot."

"What's the point of you, anyway?"

I took it all. Every insult. Every casual cruelty. Every moment of being treated like I was less than the dirt on their shoes. I took it because I had to. Because I had nowhere else to go and deep down, buried under all the pain and exhaustion, I still had hope.

My fated mate would come. He would see me and he would take me away from this place. He would love me. Protect me. Give me the family I'd lost.

I clung to that hope like a lifeline.

I was sixteen when my hands first bled. Luna Diane ordered me to wash all the pack's clothes by hand in the stone basin outside. It was January. The water was so cold it felt like knives cutting into my skin. I scrubbed and scrubbed, my fingers going numb, then painful, then numb again. When I finally finished hours later, I looked down and saw blood mixing with the soap suds. The skin on my knuckles had split open.

I wrapped them in strips of cloth torn from an old sheet and went back to work.

That night in my cupboard, I let myself cry. Not because of the pain in my hands—I was used to pain. But because I was so tired of being invisible and worthless. 

I was tired of hoping for something that might never come.

But I couldn't give up on that hope. It was all I had.

When I turned eighteen, something shifted inside me. Not my wolf—I still didn't have a wolf. But something else. An awareness. A pull. The stories said you could feel your fated mate once you came of age, that the bond would draw you together.

I felt it. It was faint but real. Somewhere out there, he existed.

I started paying attention to every male wolf who visited the pack. Could it be him? Or him? I searched their faces for recognition, for that spark the stories promised.

"What are you staring at, Omega?" Alia snapped one day, catching me looking at a visiting warrior. "You think someone like him would want someone like you?" She laughed, harsh and sharp. "You're nothing. You'll always be nothing."

I dropped my gaze and went back to scrubbing the floor.

But I didn't stop hoping. I couldn't.

My mate would come. He would see past the ugly gray uniform and the dirt under my fingernails and the silver hair I couldn't keep properly brushed because I was too exhausted. He would see me and he would save me.

He had to.

Because if he didn't, I had nothing left to live for.