Prologue

Six years earlier

I didn’t grow up gentle. I didn’t grow up soft. I grew up learning that the world would hit me first if I didn’t hit back harder. So I became the kind of person people whispered about. The kind they avoided. The kind they blamed for everything.

Reckless. Hostile. Impossible.

They said I was acting out for attention. They said I was dramatic, rebellious, unstable. They said I was trying to make a scene.

They had no idea.

I wasn’t rebelling. I was surviving.

Every fight I picked, every night I drowned myself in alcohol or whatever else I could get my hands on, every stupid, dangerous decision—I did it because it was easier than feeling anything. Easier than remembering. Easier than letting the past sink its claws into me again.

People love to preach forgiveness. They love to say things like “let it go” or “move on.” They say it like healing is a choice you can make in a single breath. Like the scars on my skin and the ones carved deeper inside me can be erased with a few kind words.

They don’t know what it’s like to wake up every day with the echo of someone else’s cruelty still ringing in your bones.

They don’t know what it’s like to be raised by a monster and told to smile.

My pack tried to help me. I’ll give them that. They tried. They offered support, guidance, patience. But eventually, even they stepped back. They said I had to want the help for it to work. They weren’t wrong, but hearing it felt like another door slamming in my face.

My friends left next. One by one, they drifted away, tired of my anger, tired of my self‑destruction, tired of trying to understand something I never explained. I didn’t blame them. It’s hard to stand beside someone who’s burning when you don’t know what lit the match.

So I ran.

I thought running would save me. I thought leaving everything behind would finally give me a chance to breathe. But running wasn’t freedom—it was another kind of cage. A colder one. A lonelier one. I spent months hiding, sleeping in abandoned places, jumping at every sound, waiting for the next threat to find me.

And it did.

Because I wasn’t just running from memories. I was running from people.

My father sent teams to search for me. I knew why—he wanted me safe. He always had. But my stepmother… she wanted something else entirely.

She wanted me gone.

She wanted me erased.

She wanted me dead.

My father never saw it. He never saw the way she looked at me when he wasn’t around. Never heard the venom in her voice when she spoke my name. Never noticed how everyone else in the pack avoided her gaze, terrified of what she’d do if they dared to speak the truth.

She ruled the house like a tyrant whenever he was away. And he was away a lot.

She was feared. And she loved it.

She twisted every bruise, every broken bone, every incident into proof that I was unstable, dramatic, too fragile because my mother was an omega. She painted herself as the patient, loving stepmother who tried her best with a difficult child.

But the truth was simple: She hated me.

She hated the reminder of my father’s affair. She hated the child born from a bond she could never compete with. She hated that my existence proved she wasn’t his true mate.

She told everyone she loved me like her own. But everyone except my father knew the truth—she couldn’t wait for the day I was no longer in her way.

Some days, the weight of her hatred felt suffocating. Some days, I wondered if she would finally go too far. Some days, I feared she already had. But she didn’t want a quick end for me. No, she wanted something else entirely.

She wanted me to suffer.

She wanted me to feel the betrayal she felt when she discovered my father’s affair. She wanted me to feel the heartbreak she felt when he mated with his fated mate—my mother—and conceived me. She wanted me to experience the same agony she endured while trying to salvage a bond that was never meant to be hers.

She wanted me to break the way she had broken.

And in many ways, she succeeded.

There were nights I lay awake wishing things had been different. Wishing my mother had lived. Wishing my father had chosen her instead of the woman who despised me. Wishing I had grown up in a home where love wasn’t conditional, where safety wasn’t a luxury, where I wasn’t treated like a stain on someone else’s life.

If things had been different, maybe I wouldn’t have turned to alcohol or drugs. Maybe I wouldn’t have run. Maybe I wouldn’t have spent years trying to numb the pain she carved into me.

Maybe I would have been free.

But that wasn’t the life I was given. This was.

And now, standing at the edge of a future I can’t yet see, I’m left with only one truth:

I survived. Not gracefully. Not cleanly. Not quietly.

But I survived.

And the thing about surviving is this—eventually, the fear burns away.

What’s left is anger. Sharp. Hot. Unforgiving.

The kind of anger that doesn’t hide anymore. The kind that doesn’t run.

The kind that fights back.