Mirabel

TRIGGER WARNING: This scene contains themes of emotional abuse, exploitation, isolation, and implied physical punishment that some readers may find distressing.

MIRABEL

The pack house thrummed with anticipation. Laughter spilled from open windows, silk gowns rustled like whispers, and the sharp scent of fresh roses and expensive cologne drifted down to the kitchens. Everyone was caught in the fever of the ball, new tuxedos tailored sharp, nails lacquered blood-red or moon-silver, shoes clicking across marble floors as if the night itself belonged to them.

Everyone except her. Mirabel stood at the edge of the chaos, invisible as always, scrubbing a copper pot that still held the ghost of rosemary and roasted venison. Her hands were raw, knuckles cracked from lye and scalding water, but she barely noticed anymore. The ache had become background noise, like the distant music floating down from the grand hall.

She wasn't invited. She never was.

Alpha Sebastian had made that crystal clear years ago: You are the help. You stay unseen. You clean up the messes we leave behind. Tonight's celebration would end in a storm of shattered crystal, spilled wine, and half-eaten delicacies ground into the rugs. Then the real work would begin, scrubbing until her shoulders screamed, stacking plates until dawn bled gray through the windows, hoping for three, maybe four hours of sleep before the next day's demands began again.

She had prepared it all alone. Seventeen dishes, each one perfect: the spiced lamb that made the betas groan with pleasure, the delicate pastries dusted with gold leaf, the towering cake that now sat under crystal in the ballroom. Decorations hung in flawless symmetry, garlands of moonflowers and silver ribbons she'd woven until her fingers bled. The troublemakers had tried to sabotage her, knocking over vases, "accidentally" spilling sauce across tablecloths, but she'd fixed every disaster without a word, without sleep, without complaint. One mistake, Sebastian had warned, and she'd pay in blood. So she hadn't made any.

Now the house pulsed with life she wasn't allowed to touch. She could hear the orchestra tuning, the low growl of dominant wolves flirting, the delighted squeals of she-wolves showing off their gowns. Once, she might have dreamed of slipping into that world, of wearing something soft that didn't smell of bleach. But dreams were dangerous. They made the cage feel smaller.

Instead she repeated her mantra under her breath, soft as a prayer: I live when I live. I die when I die. It wasn't hope. It was survival.

She pressed her forehead against the cool stone wall for a moment, closing her eyes. Exhaustion clawed at her edges, one week without real rest, surviving on snatched naps between tasks. Her body felt hollow, brittle, like dry kindling waiting for a spark.

In two days, the house would quiet. The guests would leave. The decorations would come down. The glamour would fade. And everything would return to normal.

Her orders were clear, cook, clean, and vanish. She was to be a shadow in the halls, an invisible force that kept the Pack House running. Visibility was a death sentence, or at least, a guarantee of pain. In this house, they didn't need a reason to punish her; they only needed to notice her. To stay unseen was to stay safe, a lesson she had spent sixteen years perfecting.

The story Alpha Sebastian told was a heavy chain she wore every day. At five years old, she had supposedly opened the gates to the rogues who slaughtered her parents and half the pack. She had no memory of the betrayal, but Sebastian, her uncle, her Alpha, reminded her of her "sin" with every strike and every sneer.

​Eventually, the weight of a lie becomes heavy enough to feel like the truth. She had stopped pleading her innocence years ago; when the world decides you are a murderer, your voice becomes nothing more than noise. She had resigned herself to atonement, accepting the cruelty as the price of her continued existence.

​Sebastian was a man of cold cycles. On his good days, he ignored her; on his bad days, she was a convenient punching bag for the grief of losing his brother. He delighted in reminding her that she was a stain on their bloodline.

​She had tried to escape the cycle, first by running, then by trying to end it all. But the pack was a cage she couldn't pick. Every flight was anticipated, every attempt at peace through death was interrupted. They wouldn't let her leave, and they wouldn't let her die. She was a permanent fixture of their resentment.

The truth, however, has a way of slipping out when the wine flows too freely.

​It was seven years after the massacre when the foundation of her misery crumbled. Sebastian, slumped in a drunken stupor and unaware of the girl trembling behind the heavy velvet curtains, let the real story spill from his lips. In the span of one bourbon-soaked confession, she finally understood: she wasn't a murderer. She was a scapegoat for a much darker secret.

Alpha Sebastian Hiddlefield wasn't just a cruel guardian, he was a master architect of misery. That night, reeking of expensive scotch and unearned victory, he wasn't the "righteous" leader the pack feared. He was a "pathological egotist" with a loosened tongue, toasting to his own genius with a glass that shook in his hand.

​As he began to speak, the words weren't directed at anyone but the ghosts in the room. In a series of bourbon-soaked slurs, he laid out the architecture of his masterpiece. He spoke of the "rogue attack" not as a tragedy, but as a stroke of tactical brilliance. He laughed at the memory of the gates being opened not by a five-year-old girl, but by his own hand.

​In the span of a single night, the weight of sixteen years of guilt vanished, replaced by something far colder. She wasn't a murderer. She wasn't a curse upon her pack. She was the carefully maintained scapegoat for a monster's ambition. The uncle she had spent her life trying to appease was nothing more than the architect of her parents' graves.

​The roots of his hatred ran deeper than she ever imagined. Sebastian hadn't just hated her father, Cedric; he had loathed him for the simple crime of existing.

Cedric was the true heir, the favored son, and most unforgivably, the man who claimed the woman Sebastian wanted.

​Marie had been Sebastian’s obsession long before the Moon Goddess spoke. He had demanded Cedric stay away, and for a while, his brother had tried to honor that promise. But the mate bond is not a thing to be bargained with. It is an ancient, magnetic pull that ignores the promises of men.

​On Cedric’s eighteenth birthday, the bond snapped into place. The moment they locked eyes, the pact between brothers was incinerated. Cedric couldn't walk away from his soul’s counterpart.

It was his turn to warn his brother off his mate. Although Sebastian readily agreed to stay away. He did not keep that promise, he kept harassing Marie whenever he could get her alone and away from Cedric, confessing his undying love for her and asking her to reject her true mate and be with him instead, because he liked her very much and would treat her better than her true mate. Of course, Marie outrightly rejected his advances and chose to be with her mate instead. This only infuriates Sebastian further, who thinks Cedric got everything he ever wanted without any effort. First, he wanted to be the alpha but couldn’t. Then he wanted Marie at any cost, yet Cedric got mated to her.

Sebastian hated Cedric and their parents so much, he blamed them for everything and wanted to end their happy little lives. He was crafty about it and never let his hatred towards them show. He acted as if he was happy for them but secretly swore to tear them apart by all means necessary. If he couldn’t have her, no one should. When Cedric became the alpha, despite being three years his junior, Sebastian knew he had to find a way to snatch the title from his brother one way or the other, even if he wasn’t of alpha blood.

Their parents had waited until his eighteenth birthday, when he could not shift like the others, before telling him the truth. He always knew something was wrong but just didn't know what it was. They had then apologized for not being his real parents, but they loved him all the same. Wouldn't it have made more sense if they had told him this truth sooner? But they allowed him to humiliate himself. He was just an adopted child who spent his whole life acting and parading himself like an alpha, only to be crushed on his birthday. He was strong, no doubt, but not as strong as an alpha should. He felt cheated that his whole life was a lie and that was why he knew he had to do something about them all.

Sebastian couldn't forgive his brother for the "theft." of everything he wanted and he would never forgive his parent for lying to him for all those years. In Sebastian's twisted mind, his brother hadn't just found a mate, he had stolen a prize. And watching them together for years had rotted Sebastian from the inside out, until the only cure for his jealousy was a massacre.

They told him they found him one day roaming in the forest close to the pack with no clothes on. All efforts to find his real parents proved abortive. Sarah, their mother, and Luna at the time did not have a child of her own and, because she is fond of children, she begged to look after Sebastian until his real parents showed up, but after several years of looking after him, no one came to claim him. The Alpha parents wanted to tell him for a long time that he wasn’t their real child, but they didn’t want him to feel out of place or begin to feel inferior to his younger brother. They treated him like their own child, no matter what anyone says, Sebastian is their firstborn child and it will stay that way forever. Alpha Dominic was ready to make him alpha if he got an alpha wolf too, so until they got their wolves, nothing was decided.

Naturally, werewolves shift on their eighteenth birthday. An alpha is different, however, because they get their wolves earlier than the rest and shift at the sixteenth or seventeenth birthday, depending on how strong they are. This didn’t happen for Sebastian, who couldn’t shift until his nineteenth birthday. Although he was strong and exhibited the aura of alpha, when he shifted his wolf was just an average brown wolf, he knew then he could never be the alpha. Although no one said anything about it, no one made him feel any different, he just couldn’t take it.

He began to slowly poison their parents and when they began to fall sick, he was the one that showed the most concern. When their parents died one after the other, he began to plot the destruction of his brother. He wanted to make it quicker but the rogues wouldn’t cooperate, knowing how strong Cedric was. He took his time to gain the trust of the rogues and traded some valuable pieces of information with them, making some of Cedric's most trusted warriors the scapegoat for the leaked information. Cedric began to wonder why his warriors were suddenly betraying him one after the other. In all of this, he never once suspected his dear brother.

Sebastian wanted to take everything away from him one by one so that Cedric could feel what it was like to be deprived of what he wanted the most. He revelled in his brother’s misery while also showing fake sympathy. When Marie became pregnant with Mirabel, he hated them even more. That child could have been his, she should be having his daughter, not Cedric’s. He could never forgive them for choosing to be together and that was why he enlisted the rogues to kill the alpha and his wife so that when he becomes the next alpha no one would question his authority. He was still the alpha’s first son afterall, ruling over a pack takes a lot of training and dedication. Fortunately, he had both.