The linen cloth slipped from Elyra’s trembling fingers, settling awkwardly over the picked-clean bones. A slick layer of mutton fat coated her lips, and the cold grease stuffed inside her tunic pressed uncomfortably against her bare ribs. She stood frozen beside the prep block, her heart pounding against her throat like a trapped bird.
Slowly, she turned around.
Mistress Vane, the head maid, stood in the arched stone doorway. Tall, sharp-featured, and clutching a heavy iron ring of keys against her apron, her dark eyes roved from the grease on Elyra’s chin down to the smeared platter. A small, cruel curve tugged at the corner of her thin lips.
"Well, well," Vane said, her voice dripping with soft malice as she stepped into the quiet kitchen. "Look at what we have here. Not only are you completely useless, but you’re a thief too?"
"Mistress Vane, wait..." Elyra’s voice cracked, dry and raspy. She took a panicked step forward, holding up her grease-stained hands. "Please, just listen to me for one second. I couldn’t even stand up straight. I was so lightheaded... I haven’t had a single bite of food in two days. It was just the trim. It was literally just the scraps left on the wooden block..."
"Scraps?" Vane barked out a short, nasty laugh, closing the distance between them until the sharp scent of her sour lavender water cut right through the smell of roasted meat. "That was the roasted rack set aside specifically for the High Alpha’s guards, you stupid girl. You just stole straight from the royal table. An omega with no wolf, acting like she owns the place? Oh, Lady Mirela is going to love hearing about this."
Panic flared bright and violent in Elyra’s chest. If her mother found out... if Mirela came down here, she knew it wouldn’t just be another canceled meal. Mirela was already looking for any excuse to scrub the shame of Elyra’s existence out of sight before the winter summit.
"No! Please! Don’t tell my mother!" Elyra lunged forward, grabbing a handful of the heavy, rough canvas of Vane’s apron. Pride meant nothing right now. "Please, I’m begging you. Don’t tell her. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll clean the entire lower cellar wing by myself. I’ll take over your morning fire shifts for a week... no two weeks! I’ll scrub the laundry troughs until my skin comes off. Just... please don’t go to her. Please."
Vane looked down at Elyra’s hands clutching her apron as if a gutter rat had just crawled up her skirt. With a slow, deliberate twist of her hips, she raised one hand and slammed it down onto Elyra’s knuckles, knocking her grip loose.
"Get your filthy hands off me," Vane sneered, adjusting the heavy ring of iron keys at her hip with a loud, metallic clatter. "You think your work is worth something? You’re an omega without a wolf, Elyra. You’re broken. You are less than the dirt stuck to the bottom of my boots, and now you’re a common thief. Stay right there."
Vane turned on her heel, her heavy wool skirts swishing violently against the stone floor as she marched out of the kitchen toward the main hall staircase.
"Mistress Vane! Wait, please!" Elyra tried to scramble after her, but her knees gave out, slamming hard into the damp flagstones.
She sat there in the silence of the kitchen, her chest heaving as she listened to Vane’s boots echo up the corridor until they completely disappeared.
Run, a desperate voice screamed in the back of her mind. Just run out through the pantry. Get to the woods.
Her eyes darted toward the narrow wooden door that opened into the kitchen garden. But run where? She had no wolf. She had no natural heat to fight off the mountain freeze, no claws, no endurance, and no pack out there that would take in a defective stray.
The boundary guards would hunt her down in twenty minutes, and if they didn’t, the winter night would freeze her blood by midnight. There was nowhere on this continent for a wolfless girl to go.
She was trapped.
Elyra dragged herself backward until her spine hit the thick, unyielding leg of the prep table. She pulled her wet skirts tight around her knees, shivering so hard her teeth clicked together. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to slow the ragged breath tearing through her throat, praying to whatever was listening that Vane would get sidetracked, that her mother wouldn’t care, that...
Heavy, furious footsteps slammed down the stone corridor.
The heavy oak door smashed open, cracking violently against the stone wall. Lady Mirela Veyrith swept into the kitchen, her dark velvet sleeves billowing behind her like storm clouds. Mistress Vane hovered two steps behind her, head bowed in fake modesty, but her eyes were practically shining.
The moment Elyra caught sight of her mother’s face... pale with pure rage, the yellow glow of her wolf flickering dangerous and unstable behind her eyes, her blood went completely cold. She tried to push herself even further back, her fingernails scraping uselessly against the floorboards.
"Mother..." Elyra gasped out, her voice trembling so badly she could barely frame the word. "Mother, please, let me explain... I was so hungry, I couldn’t..."
Mirela didn’t say a word. She closed the distance between them in three massive, predatory strides.
Before Elyra could even raise her arms to block her face, her mother’s right hand whipped through the air. The heavy gold signet ring on Mirela’s middle finger slashed straight across Elyra’s cheek and jawline.
CRACK.
The force of the hit slammed the side of Elyra’s head directly into the solid oak table leg. White light exploded across her vision. She hit the floor hard, her shoulder taking the brunt of the fall, and the impact knocked every drop of air right out of her lungs in a wet, wheezing gasp.
"Explain what, Elyra?" Mirela’s voice wasn’t a roar; it was a deadly, poison-soaked quiet that filled every corner of the room. "Explain to me how you manage to find brand-new ways to embarrass and drag this family’s name through the mud every single day?"
Elyra lay sideways on the cold stone, coughing up a mouthful of hot blood. Her jaw felt as if it had been shattered with a hammer, but she forced her weak arms to push her upper body off the floor.
"Mother... I was starving," she sobbed, tears cutting hot, stingy tracks through the dirt and blood on her skin. "I haven’t had real food in two days... it was just the leftovers... they were literally going to toss them to the hounds..."
"Leftovers?" Mirela sneered, taking another step forward. The sharp toe of her leather boot came down inches from Elyra’s nose, and Elyra flinched, pulling her head back. "You have the nerve to sit there and talk about food? You completely ruined your sister’s preparations for the summit match! You ruined Elowen’s whole evening, you made your father look like an idiot in front of the elders, and while she’s upstairs right now trying to fix what you broke, you’re down here hiding in the dark like a rat, stealing meat out of the pan!"
"I am not a rat!" Elyra shrieked, the raw words ripping out of her throat before she could filter them. She looked straight up into her mother’s furious eyes, her chest wildly heaving. "I’m your daughter! Stop talking to me like I’m an animal! Just stop treating me like I’m nothing!"
Mirela’s face went unnaturally still.
In a movement so fast Elyra couldn’t even blink, her mother bent down and struck her again,,, a brutal backhand right across the other side of her face.
Elyra’s head snapped sideways, her upper lip splitting wide against her front teeth. Fresh blood welled up, hot and metallic, pouring down her chin and soaking into the dirty wool of her dress.
"I am no mother to a wolfless thief," Mirela hissed, leaning so close that Elyra could smell the rich, sweet wine on her breath. "A real daughter of the Veyrith bloodline has strength. She has pride. She carries a wolf inside her. You? You’re a hollow, useless defect. You’re a mistake I have to spend every day hiding from the rest of the world."
Mirela stood up straight, turning her back on Elyra as if she were stepping around a pile of trash. She gestured toward the door, where two heavy-set guards had been standing in silence.
"Drag her out to the courtyard," Mirela said, her tone cold and completely flat. "Give her thirty lashes with the heavy whip. Then add another full week of solitary chores to her list. Not a single scrap of food until every inch of the gallery floor is done."
Elyra’s heart stopped. Thirty lashes. A wolfless body didn’t regenerate overnight like a shifter’s did. Thirty strikes from a silver-threaded leather whip would rip her back to pieces and leave her to rot with a fever, or just kill her right there on the stone.
"No! Mother, please, no!" Elyra dragged herself forward on her hands and knees, grabbing wildly at the hem of Mirela’s heavy gown. "Please! It will kill me! You know I don’t heal like Elowen! Please, just have some mercy!"
Mirela didn’t even bother looking down at her. She yanked her skirt out of Elyra’s bloody fingers with a single, disgusted snap of her wrist.
"Think about what you’ve done, Elyra," Mirela said, walking calmly toward the corridor. "Stop bringing shame to this house. You should be down on your knees thanking me right now... if your father knew you were stealing straight off his guards’ table, he would have had you thrown into the lower dungeon cells. This is the only mercy you’re getting."
"Mother! Please! Don’t do this!"
The two guards stepped into the room. One of them... Torin, a broad-shouldered warrior who had been on the estate guards since Elyra was a little girl, grabbed her under her arms and hauled her up. He didn’t slam her around, but his hands were like iron clamps.
"Come on, small one," Torin grunted under his breath, keeping his gaze locked dead ahead so he didn’t have to look at her face. "Don’t make this harder on yourself by fighting it."
"Torin, please," she sobbed as they dragged her feet across the stone, hauling her out into the freezing, bitter air of the inner courtyard. The sky above was a dark, bruise-colored grey, and the wind cutting through the mountain gap hit her torn lip like ice water. "Please, just tell them it was a mistake..."
They pulled her up to the black iron posting ring anchored in the center of the yard... the very post reserved for rogues, traitors, and criminals. Torin pulled her arms up over her head, threading thick leather straps around her wrists and buckling them down tight against the rusted ring.
Elyra hung there, her toes barely skimming the frosty flagstones. She felt sick, her stomach twisting into painful knots.
The second guard, a harsh-faced shifter named Garick, uncoiled the heavy, braided leather whip from his hip. He flicked his wrist, snapping it against the stone floor.
CRACK.
The sharp sound bounced off the high stone walls of the keep.
"Count ’em out," Garick growled.
The first blow landed before Elyra could even try to brace her body for it.
CRACK.
"ARGHHH!"
It didn’t feel like leather. It felt like a white-hot iron rod being dragged straight across her shoulder blades, searing through her clothes and into her meat. The sheer shock of the pain tore the breath right out of her lungs, throwing her body into a violent, helpless arch against the post.
"One!" Garick yelled out.
CRACK.
"AAAAAGH! STOP! PLEASE!"
"Two!"
The second blow slashed lower, tearing through the thin, damp wool of her dress and ripping open the delicate skin underneath. Hot, thick blood burst to the surface instantly, spilling down her back and drenching the waistband of her skirts.
Elyra screamed until her vocal cords felt shredded, her fingers frantically clawing at the icy iron ring above her head.
CRACK.
"ARGHHH! GOD, PLEASE! NO MORE!"
"Three!"
CRACK.
"FOUR!"
With every strike, the world narrowed down to blinding white flashes and raw agony. The cold mountain wind burned inside her throat, but her entire back was an inferno. She could literally hear the sickening sound of her own flesh tearing, could feel her own blood pouring out of her, warm and slick, running down the backs of her thighs.
By the tenth strike, her legs gave out completely. She hung by her bound wrists alone, her body twisting helplessly with every heavy blow. Her sharp screams had broken down into wet, ragged, pathetic choking sounds.
Sweat, tears, and blood mixed together, dripping off her chin and pooling on the frozen ground beneath her feet.
"AGH! PLEASE... SOMEONE... ARGHHH!"
Up on the second-floor balcony, a curtain moved. Elyra managed to drag her tear-filled eyes up for half a second. Standing behind the thick, clear glass of her warm bedroom window was her sister, Elowen.
Elowen held a steaming mug in both hands, watching the blood drip down Elyra’s ankles with a faint, detached look of boredom, before turning around and walking away into her warm room.
CRACK.
"ARGHHH!"
"Fifteen!"
"Garick, hold up a second," Torin muttered, taking a step toward the post. He looked down at Elyra’s limp, wrecked frame, watching how shallow and erratic her chest was moving. "She doesn’t have a wolf, man. Her skin isn’t going to stitch itself back together. You’re going to kill her before thirty."
"Luna gave a direct order," Garick snapped, raising the whip back over his shoulder. "Thirty lashes. Not twenty-nine. You want to explain to the Luna why I stopped early? ’Cause if I do, it’s my back on this post next."
CRACK.
"AAAAAAAGH!"
"Sixteen!"
The courtyard slowly dissolved into a hazy smear of deep red and freezing dark. Elyra stopped shouting. She couldn’t anymore. She just hung there, her forehead pressed hard against the icy wood of the whipping post, her teeth dug so deep into her own tongue that her mouth filled with the taste of copper.
When the final strike finally hit... a vicious diagonal slash that cut from her left hip all the way up to her neck, Elyra didn’t even have the breath left to scream. Her body went entirely limp, her head dropping forward against her chest like a broken doll’s.
"Thirty," Garick panted, wiping the sweat from his eyes and wrapping the bloody leather back around his hand.
"Get her down," Torin said, his voice completely flat.
"Luna said she stays tied up for five hours to think about what she did," Garick replied coldly, turning toward the torchlit entrance. "Let the cold settle into those cuts. Then she can crawl back to her hole."
Their heavy boots crunched against the frosted ground as they walked away, and the heavy courtyard doors slammed shut, leaving her alone in the dark.
Those five hours were a nightmare of slow, excruciating misery. The winter wind picked up, freezing the pools of blood on her back into a hard, stiff crust that tore open her wounds every single time she tried to take a shallow breath.
Her hands lost all feeling, turning a greyish blue under the tight leather straps that cut off her blood flow.
When the guards finally came back hours later to unbuckle her, they didn’t catch her.
Garick unclasped the iron lock, and Elyra dropped like a stone, crashing hard onto the icy flagstones.
A sharp, breathless shriek ripped from her throat as her open, ruined back slammed into the frozen stone. She lay there in the pitch black, gasping for air, her face pressed flat against the ice.
Above her, the voice of a young servant girl carrying a lantern drifted down through the cold air.
"Ew, look at her," the girl whispered, holding the lamp out so the flickering yellow light hit Elyra’s collapsed body. "She’s so pale and bloody. Honestly... there’s no way she’s actually the Alpha and Luna’s daughter. Look at her hair, look at her face. She doesn’t look a thing like them. No wolf, no strength... she’s just some trash they picked up out of the dirt."
"Doesn’t matter what she is," Garick grunted, pushing open the heavy door. "She’s garbage either way. Get inside, it’s freezing."
The heavy oak door thudded shut, locking the night back out.
Elyra lay motionless on the stone for a long time, listening to the wind scream through the iron gates. Every tiny shudder of her muscles sent lightning bolts of pure, agonizing pain straight up her spinal cord.
Get up, she told herself. Get up right now or you’re going to die out here on the ice.
Inch by agonizing inch, Elyra forced her elbows under her chest. She couldn’t stand. Her legs were numb, dead weights, shaking violently under her small frame.
So she dragged herself.
She crawled across the frozen courtyard, through the dark side entrance, and down the damp stone steps leading to the bottom of the cellar wing. Every step she dragged herself down left a dark smear of blood behind her.
Her room wasn’t a real room.
It was an old, forgotten storage alcove built right under the main stone staircase—a windowless, cramped box barely wide enough for a rickety wooden frame packed with thin, rotting straw. No fire. No rug. Just a cracked pitcher of stale water and a thin, threadbare blanket that smelled like mildew.
Elyra pulled her broken body over the threshold, reaching back with shaking, bloody fingers to pull the weak wooden door shut.
She collapsed sideways onto the straw mattress, unable to lay on her back, unable to find a single angle that didn’t make her want to scream until her lungs burst. She pulled the thin blanket over her shivering shoulders, clutching it tight against her chest as the icy cold of the stone floor bled right through the straw.
In the dark, total silence of the cellar, Elyra finally let the quiet, broken sob break out of her throat.
"Please..." she whispered into the dirty straw, her voice breaking into pathetic, ragged gasps as hot tears soaked the rot beneath her face. "Please... just let me die... somebody just let me die..."