TRAITOR’S DAUGHTER

Being wolfless would have been bearable if it weren’t for the blood in my veins.

They stopped calling me Aflira after that.

I became wolfless.

Then I became the “Broken Omega.”

But the worst name was the one I carried long before sixteen. TRAITOR’S DAUGHTER.

I was eight when they excited my father.

I remembered the smell os smoke from the torches lining the pack circle. The way warrior’s avoided looking at me they dragged him forward, his clothes were torn, his face was bruised but his back was straight . I remember the way he stood in the center of the pack circle, bruised, bloodied, eyes hollow. How accused him of betraying Moonfall during a border conflict. I remember the Alpha calling him traitor. Warriors died in ambush, and someone has to be blamed. My father had been the lead scout he had known the train he had been trusted. And trust, once broken, demanded blood. My father never begged. He never shouted his innocence. I didn’t understand politics or power at eight years old, I only understood that my fathers eyes searched for me in the crowd. When he found me, he didn’t look angry or ashamed. He just looked at me, he looked sad.

“I would never betray you,” he said, not to the Alpha but to me.

That look haunted me for years, then they executed him.

My mother’s scream haunted me for years as her scream echoed through the trees when they struck him down. She held me so tightly I couldn’t breathe.

Three nights later, she disappeared. No announcement, no explanation. Some whispered she had fled in disgrace, others murmured that she knew too much and had been silenced.

No one searched for her.

I stopped asking questions after that.

After that, our home was taken away. I was moved to a small wooden hut at the edge of the territory the place where widows, orphans, and outcast were sent to be forgotten. I was neither, yet somehow both. The other children avoided me at first then they began to mock me.

“Traitor’s daughter.”

“Cursed blood.”

When I didn’t shift at sixteen, it was as if fate itself had confirmed their suspicions.

The pack began treating me like an omen.I stood at the edge of the training grounds, with hands raw from scrubbing bloodstains from the dirt. Warriors passed without looking at me Some whispered. Some laughed. A few threw glances of pity at me. I carried water buckets heavier than my thin arms could manage. If I faltered, I was reminded that at least I was allowed to stay. As if existing were a privilege.

Yet, despite everything, I never felt empty. I learned long ago that pity hurt more than cruelty.

The forest whispered when I walk alone among trees, injured animals sometimes calmed when I touched them once, I pressed my hand against a wounded rabbit and watched its bleeding slow unnaturally fast. I never told anyone if they believed I was cursed now, what would they do if they thought I was something else entirely? So I stayed quiet. I endured.