Chapter 1
When I was little, my mum died, and after a few years of mourning, Dad married again. This sounds like the classic tale of the wicked stepmother hating the child and favouring her own children, but that wasn’t the case - in fact, Dorothy was more like a big sister to me in some ways than a stepmother, and we became very close.
Not long after Dad and Dorothy married, she found out she was pregnant. She gave birth to a girl just after I’d turned nine, and Dad was over the moon. I was a little worried, but after Doreah’s birth, Dorothy assured me that no one would ever take my place as Dad’s heir. I was to be Alpha when he passed on, and Doreah’s birth in no way affected my inheritance. In fact, Dorothy even suggested that Doreah could be my Beta, to which I happily agreed. It wasn’t often another sibling became Beta to their sibling’s Alpha, but I already felt close to Doreah, having actually helped Dorothy a little before the paramedics came, so I was more than agreeable to the idea.
Doreah was a fiesty little thing, and as she grew, she proved herself to be the sassiest child ever. Dad often lamented she got the smart mouth, but he didn’t mind, and I found it hilarious whenever they got into a sparring match. But they were very close, and our little family was, probably, happier than it had been since Mum’s passing.
No one could be sure what had killed her. The official report was a car accident in which she was a passenger, but Dad had his doubts. And after Dorothy and he began dating, she seemed to come in for quite a few mishaps. It wasn’t until she was almost hit and killed by a car - ironically in the last few weeks of her pregnancy - when Dad finally started looking into the matter. And what he found out was very upsetting.
Dorothy had once been a member of the Whitewater pack. They were one of the most territorial packs out there, not to mention extremely classist. Dorothy had come in for a hefty amount of torment growing up because she was a “half-breed”, so called because her mother had come from the Silver Stones pack, a pack the Whitewaters considered inferior. Dorothy had suffered countless abuses under the so called caring eye of her father, and had finally had enough, running away and severing all ties with her former pack. She’d been rogue for a while before our pack had found her, and had leapt at the chance to join officially once Dad had heard her story.
But her old pack hadn’t taken her desertion very well. In fact, they’d been very upset to find out she’d escaped and found freedom with another “inferior” pack. The Whitewaters also happened to be territorial over their packmates, so Dorothy’s desertion had been a serious betrayal. Hence all the accidents.
Dad was less than pleased, and he decided enough was enough. He sent a message to the Alpha of the Whitewater pack and told them to stay the hell away from his wife, or there’d be serious consequences. Dorothy, he said, was now a member of the Greenfields pack, and no one from the Whitewater pack was ever going to take her away. If the Whitewaters wanted to press the issue, they were more than welcome to, but they’d be up against stiff opposition. Dad commanded quite a bit of loyalty from other packs, and if the Whitewaters wanted to play hard-ball, Dad was more than willing to bring his game to the ta
Naturally, the Whitewaters did not take Dad’s message very well, and on Doreah’s tenth birthday, all hell broke loose.
