Chapter One
Her
The pain ripped through my body and I felt the claws and fur once again try and tear through my flesh. My entire jaw was on fire as my canines tried to elongate and my wolf’s teeth tried to rip through my gums. I heard the tearing as my skin began to rip away from my bones as they shifted and changed, preparing for my wolf. They continue to stab me with their damn cattle prods, but the pain was nothing in comparison to the change.
“Fuck,” I hear a voice to my left. “She’s not going to do it! How does a damn mutt have this much control!”
That’s the question isn’t it?
Until a few weeks ago, I was happy. I was graduating college and looking forward to beginning my career, not even bothering to worry about the fact that I’m 23 and haven’t yet changed. My wolf was content to stay dormant as I travelled the world, hiking into the most remote parts of the world to photograph rare plants and animals. She got her fill of the wilderness during the course of our work. I suppose I took my freedom for granted…and I definitely knew nothing about my pack.
I get control of my wolf, for the millionth time, but the pain is still there. This time not coming from my wolf, but my battered body. Apparently, there’s nothing like a thorough beating to bring forth an unwilling wolf. Too bad I hate these bastards enough to keep my control.
My father, the Alpha, comes to stand over me and backhands me. I feel a cut open up over my cheek from the ring on his hand.
“You will not deny me,” he growls into my face, and the chains are clamped around my neck, wrists and ankles all over again.
I know what comes next. A long line of dominant male wolves. I’ll spare the details, but being naked and chained to a bed should be enough to figure it out. The door opens and I float away, going to a place in my mind where my wolf rips free and she leaves the pack nothing more than minced meat on the tiles. Some of the men are more apprehensive than others, getting it over with as fast as possible and leaving, the others are just sadistic. It’s the sadistic ones I will spend the most time with when I get free.
They shouldn’t have been able to contain me, I’ve trained extensively with the packs enforcers and it’s not exaggerating for me to say that I am lethal, but I was betrayed. My life story is a lie. I wasn’t born into the pack, I was stolen from another. I’ve heard the whole story while I’ve been in this fucking prison cell.
The story I know, the story I lived, is that I was born into this pack, the daughter of the Alpha and a mother who died in child birth. I was trained to fight from the moment I could walk, I was even permitted to go to school, the only female in the pack to ever be allowed to. Pack females are home schooled to reduce the risk that they do something stupid like, I don’t know, decide they want to leave. But I was allowed to. I was allowed to go to college and take trips across the world during my courses, all to keep me happy. They flipped on me after my graduation. The moment I walked through the doors I was chained and dragged down here.
Now, my Dad isn’t my Dad, my pack is full of torturers and rapists, and my fate seems to have changed, reducing me to nothing more than a wolf incubator chained in the basement of the pack alphas house.
Isn’t that nice?
My glowing future in animal and plant research and photography has become a life of imprisonment and degradation.
My only satisfaction is that I’m more dominant than the lot of them, thus the basis of my appeal. They stole me from a rival packs' alpha because my real father is supposedly even more dominant than my jailer. The more dominant the parents, the more dominant the child, the more dominant the potential heir for the packs throne.
Lucky me.
I surrender to the glory of unconsciousness just in time for one of my more sadistic callers to walk through the door.
I come to as a soft voice speaks into my ear.
“Wake up Willow, I need you to open your eyes for me.”
Willow? Who is Willow? Oh, god no. They’ve got someone else down here.
Someone places a hand on my shoulder and I jerk back, as far as I can, which isn’t far considering the fact that I’m chained down. Whoever this is seems to have gotten the message though, and the offending hand disappears.
“I’m sorry, but I need you awake. Please open your eyes,” the soft voice says again.
I open them slowly, my eyes swollen and blurry from my recent beatings, and stare up at a murky silhouette kneeling next to me.
“Can you walk?”
I don’t respond. Whoever this is must have been sent by the alpha. How else would he have gotten down here? I will give them nothing more than what they have taken from me.
“Willow, you need to speak to me. I need to know where the key to the chains is.”
He keeps calling me Willow.
