Chapter 1 RAINA
My eyes opened slowly, sticky with sleep or dried blood. I could hear voices rumble down the corridor like normal, but something was off, the atmosphere was different, charged with something I couldn’t recognise. I was used to my cell, my space, I’d lived, eaten, slept and been educated all within these walls, so the tension in the air was immediately apparent but the source of it was unknown.
I moved my head slightly trying to ignore the searing pain it caused in my neck and back, to listen better but whatever was happening was too muffled for me to hear. I moved my arm slowly, careful not to jostle myself while I tried to reposition, but the pain was almost unbearable. The nausea from moving rolled through my stomach and sweat beaded on my head and the back of my neck. My fingers roamed the rough stone hoping for a cold spot that would help control the acid creeping up the back of my throat, but sunlight was already streaming through the bars that covered the small window and the only stone in reach was already warm.
Had you asked me two days ago how long I had been in the dungeons, in a cell, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Time had become a meaningless blur. I slept, I ate (sort of), I drank (the little I was given) and I was beaten sometimes once, sometimes multiple times in what I assumed was a one-day period, but the pain often caused me to pass out so who knew. My ‘tutor’ came in most days, but the time periods and length of the lessons varied. I can only imagine that my twisted father has some long-term plan that involves ensuring I am educated but mentally and physically broken. He doesn’t even know if I am taking in the information I am being provided with because he doesn’t allow me to speak.
Three (ish) days ago, I had been sat staring out of my cell window like normal, hoping the oblivion would help me ignore the pain from a fresh beating. The dust floating in the sunlight could be mesmerising if neither of my eyes were swollen shut. My pain tolerance while in the constant nightmare had gotten better, my body was weaker, but it seemed to be becoming more resilient which is why I was so shocked when a new feeling started to creep up my spine. It was like an itch but getting increasingly more intense. If my back was a ladder, it started down near my hips and rippled out across my back as it worked its way up towards my shoulders and eventually into the nape of my neck. I wondered if one of my wounds had developed an infection, but this wasn’t like any sensation I’d had before, it would have been enjoyable in a twisted way if it didn’t feel like it was breaking my bones on its path of destruction.
The pain built until it was excruciating but something about it had a sweet, reliving feeling, it felt oddly comforting like a cold bath after a day of exercising. I felt myself give into it, letting the stiffness from the pain melt away, part of me hoping it meant I was finally dying. It didn’t, it was in fact the first sure sign of the passage of time. A clock would have been preferable or maybe a calendar but at least it gave me information I had previously been denied.
That pain had been my indicator that I had turned 18, that pain was my first shift into my wolf. The process is always painful for everyone. We are not designed as humans to break every bone in our body simultaneously and have them reform in the same instance that they snap. As with everything in my life since the age of 8, the situation was made more awkward and painful by the restraints around my legs, wrists, waist, and neck and by the fact I was horribly malnourished and dehydrated.
The shift took effort and strength, neither of which I had to give but my wolf (Goddess bless her) had decided to ignore that and change us anyway. I wish I could hear her, understand her rationale, just know that she is really there. It would be nice to have a friend, a voice in my head coaching me through the beatings, the pain and the constant recovery cycle I was stuck in. When I shifted back my ankles and wrists were snapped and there was blood everywhere. It would have looked like a fresh, horror scene with blood spurt sprayed across the floor, walls and ceiling. A skinny, shackled girl hanging limply from the wall onto the floor and the subtle shine from the instruments of torture lined up on a table on the opposite wall, but this was how it had looked since my first week down here.
The breaks were healing quickly, and I had hoped that maybe my dad wouldn’t notice but as is my luck he had noticed immediately and he had been furious. The idea that I had shifted without his permission sent him into the type of tantrum he normally reserved for my older brother. How he thought I was supposed to be able to stop it was anyone’s guess. As though I was supposed to be able to control it. He had whipped me raw with a silver tipped whip and poured wolfsbane on the open wounds. He snarled and cackled like a lunatic the whole time and once the Wolfsbane had dried he beat me again just to reinforce the lesson. He punched, kicked, and stamped on every inch of me the day after while screaming that I wasn’t good enough to be a wolf and I needed to remember my place, which was on the floor at his feet. My last memory of that beating had been him stamping my head into the ground as I’d tried to raise it up a fraction to spit blood onto the ground.
In a way you could say he was a good dad; he visited me every single day. The thought made me laugh bitterly inside my head. I’d rather never see him again, than watch his blotched, swollen face loom over me one more time. I had imagined killing him so many times it almost felt real. If ill-wishes had the desired effect, then maybe one day he would trip coming into my cell and crack his bulbous head on the rocks he’d made me live on for 10 years.
My dad, the Alpha of the nomad pack. His dad had unexpectedly lost his pack to a small war between 5 or 6 other packs and had found himself Packless. Granda had two choices find a pack to take in him and his family or become a rogue. As was often his style he chose option 3. He had travelled far into rogue lands and unpopulated areas collecting lone wolves or families who had found themselves in a similar situation. He had introduced them to the idea of the pack he was putting together and in a surprisingly short period of time had gathered 70 people.
Once the pack had its foundations on the grounds of Granda’s former pack and they had set up trade and protection deals with neighbouring packs, granda passed the pack to dad and sadly passed away shortly after. When I had been small it was a wonderful pack to be part of, everyone cared about each other, and we had big barbeques and fun days with bouncy castles, sports days, or garden games that all the children and adults would play together. It felt like a community, parents looking out for all the kids, not just their own and people swapped and lent tools, food or whatever else was needed. It was a safe, secure and really happy place to grow-up.
Mum and dad were so sweet back then, properly in love like Mates should be but they had a secret I hadn’t known about, not until I was 7. It was the kind of secret I could have spent the rest of my life happily being ignorant of. All it took was one person, one of our pack members turned traitor and it ruined everything for me and my family. They collected information, exploited trust and then exposed our packs vulnerabilities to a neighbouring pack. We were steamrolled. It still mystifies me why someone would do something like that to us, my dad is the single worst person I’ve ever known, and I wish him dead daily, but I don’t understand what caused someone to betray him the way that man did, at least not while he was still acting like a decent person and leader.
The Alpha of the invading pack made a beeline for my mum knowing, thanks to the traitor’s information, that she was my dad’s biggest weakness. If truth be told she would have been mine and Nathaniel’s weakness too, she was funny, loving and supportive. She used to read bedtime stories and lay on the floor with us to play with our toys, she taught us how to do jigsaws and play board games and when we were scared, she’d built forts in our bedrooms and fill them with fairy lights.
The invading Alpha had forced my dad on bended knee to surrender his Alpha status or risk mum being killed. That surrender was the mark for when things went bad. The truth came out in bits and pieces over the following weeks, and every new piece of information shattered my limited world view further than I had known would be possible. It turned out that my mum and dad weren’t fated Mates, they were chosen Mates whose connection had been completed during the Marking process but only because dad and grandpa had Alpha powers. When dad surrendered his position the connection between him, and mum fell apart. They tried to hold it together, find their connection again but just before my 8th birthday my mum found her fated Mate in the Beta of a visiting pack.
She left with him and his pack, but she knowingly or unknowingly took all the nice parts of my dad with her. She abandoned me and Nathaniel with barely a backward glance, like we’d never existed, as though she hadn’t spent hours plaiting my hair or tending to Nathaniel’s injuries. We begged and pleaded with her to stay or take us with her but she just said that we would understand when we were older. I had thought in that moment, watching from the living room window as my mum climbed into the passenger’s seat of a stranger’s car, that I would never be in as much pain as I was in that moment, crying into Nathaniel’s shoulder and listening to dad get drunk in the kitchen. I was wrong, it took dad very little time to start channelling his anger into regaining his Alpha status and using that momentum to invade and kill the neighbouring pack who had challenged him.
He killed everyone in that Pack, men, woman, and children. Our pack members were horrified, we had been built on a foundation of acceptance, welcoming anyone into our pack so long as they had a strong spirit and good intentions, the pack members should have been invited to join us, not slaughtered. It marked a disturbing turning point in my dad’s personality. He had so much anger and no-one to be angry at so as a solution he got angry at everyone, even himself I suspect.
It wasn’t very long after those murders that I started to notice the biggest shift in dad’s behaviour. He became mean, vicious, and superior. He used his power to belittle other pack members, bulling them into doing as he asked, and he started treating me like a punch bag. I couldn’t do anything correctly and the more I tried to please him the angrier it seemed to make him. Even my older brother, who before all of this had been my dad’s heir, became a sort of slave instead of being groomed as the next leader of our pack.
My dad would come home from whatever ‘job’ he has tasked himself with that day and order my brother to make dinner. He would then call for me and beat me for whatever perceived wrong I had done, if my blood got on the floor, he’d make my brother clean it up. It only took couple of months of this routine for me to do something so bad (being late home from school because there was a queue for the showers after P.E) that he had me thrown in the cells while the guards looked on, even they looked terrified of upsetting him. The first night that I had sat shackled to the wall and counting the stone slabs to pass the time, I had realised that this had been my destined fate since mum had walked away, taking her squishy hugs and late night chats away with her, I looked too like her, and dad only needed one child to carry on the Alpha line.
The morning after he had put me in the cells and had the guards chain me up, he came back to beat me. He beat me so badly I spent over a week unconscious, based on the moon that was visible outside. When I woke up, hungry, scared and sore, he beat me again for being weak. The physical abuse, the wolfsbane, silver whips, and beatings were painful, but his words broke me.
He told me over and over that I was a liar and a whore like my mother, that I was scum, dirt, a traitor, and a disgrace. I couldn’t understand what was making him say those words to me, I was 8, barely even looking at boys. I didn’t know enough about anything to be a traitor and lying made me blush so I couldn’t do that either. His words, screamed into my face confused my head and made my stomach hurt as I tried to work out what I had done that would make him think I was a bad child, a bad daughter, worthy of this treatment. I cried every day until I realised, I was wasting the small quota of water I was allowed in a day.
The only friendly face I now saw was Curtis, he was a large guard but soft and kind. He looked like the type of man whose mum babied him for too long and now he wasn’t quite sure how to act like an adult. He treated me like a stray animal he’d found in an alley way, approaching me cautiously and keeping his voice low and steady. He would sneak me extra food and water when he was on guard duty and would occasionally clean my infected wounds if they were getting bad. His hands would tremble when he touched me, scared of hurting me or just not used to touching other people but he would persist until the pain got too much for me and I would whimper or cry, that always made him stop.
So, if my shift was any indicator, I had just turned 18. I had been locked up for 10 years of my life with no access to or knowledge of the outside world. What did the world look like now? What information was being kept from me as my father carefully dictated the ‘education’ I received? I didn’t even know if my big brother was alive or not (Goddess let him be ok). I felt more lost than I ever had before which was funny since everyone in the pack knew exactly where I was.
