All Chapters of The Alpha's Silenced Mate: Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

Lyra's pov Three weeks ago, I was invisible, or so I thought, because that's the safest way to be when you're an orphan Omega living on pack charity, which is what I've been since I was twelve years old and a rogue attack took my parents, which left me with nothing except the clothes I was wearing and a pack that took me in because Moon Law says they have to. I learned early that keeping your head down and your mouth shut is how you survive when you have no family to protect you and no status to shield you from the wolves who think being powerless means you're fair game for whatever they want to take.So I kept to myself, worked hard in the healing ward where they placed me as an apprentice, and made myself useful enough that no one questioned whether I deserved the small room above the clinic and the meals I took in the kitchen after everyone else had finished. I ground herbs and mixed poultices and learned which plants stopped bleeding and which ones brought down fevers, and I was

Lyra's pov I wake up in darkness and for a long moment I don't remember where I am or what happened, and then I try to swallow and the pain hits me like lightning, so intense I curl in on myself and make a sound that would be a scream if I could scream but nothing comes out except a horrible rasping wheeze.I'm in a cell, small and dark and smelling like old stone and despair. My mouth is bandaged with something that tastes bitter, some kind of healing poultice, but underneath it everything is raw and wrong and gone.I try to speak—just a word, just a sound, anything—but my tongue won't move the way it should and the only thing that comes out is blood and a wet clicking noise that doesn't sound human.They took it.They actually took my tongue.I curl up on the cold floor and try to cry, but even that makes my throat hurt so badly I have to stop, and so I just lie there in the dark with silent tears running down my face and blood still seeping through the bandages. The stone floor is

Lyra's pov I wake up to the sound of footsteps, not the usual heavy, bored tread of the guard who brings water once a day and doesn't bother checking if I'm still breathing, but multiple sets of footsteps echoing down the stone corridor with purpose and urgency that makes my heart start hammering against my ribs before I'm even fully conscious. I scramble backward instinctively, pressing myself against the cold wall at the far corner of my cell, making myself as small as possible in the darkness that's been my only companion for, how long? Days? A week? I've lost track of time down here where there's no sunlight to mark the passage of hours, just endless black punctuated by brief moments of torchlight when the guard remembers I exist.The footsteps stop outside my cell and I can make out shapes through the bars—six people standing in the flickering torchlight, three of them wearing the leather and metal of pack guards and three in the formal robes that mark them as Elders. My stoma