"Please, Father... don’t do this to me," Elyra sobbed, her hands clawing desperately at the cold flagstones of the corridor. "He’ll kill me out there! The Lycan King will kill me the second he realizes I have no wolf! Please... I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything you want me to do. I’ll pack my things and leave tonight. I’ll drop your name. I’ll never call you my parents again, I’ll never step foot in Bloodridge, just... please don’t do this to me!"
Lord Veyrith stood over her, his expression cold and unmoving, his heavy leather boots standing inches from her blood-soaked fingers. He didn’t even look her in the eyes; his gaze remained fixed on the far wall as if she were a minor inconvenience blocking the hall.
"You should have thought of that before you laid a hand on your sister," he said, his tone flat and unbothered. He waved a dismissive hand toward the two Gamma enforcers standing beside him. "Take her away."
"Father, no! Mother, please!" Elyra turned her head toward Lady Mirela, her eyes wide, raw, and desperate. "Mother, you know me! You know I couldn’t do this! Look at Elowen! She’s lying to you!"
Lady Mirela didn’t offer a single drop of maternal warmth. She pulled her silk shawl tighter around her shoulders, her nose curling in absolute disgust as she looked down at Elyra on the floor.
"Do not dare address me, you ungrateful wretch," Mirela spat, her voice laced with venom. "For twenty-two years, I have suffered the absolute disgrace of having a wolfless defect in my home. I watched my noble lineage get mocked by the other regional houses because of you. And now, after everything we’ve given you... a roof, clothes, food from our table, you try to murder my child in her own room? You belong in the dirt."
"I didn’t touch her!" Elyra cried, her voice tearing at her throat. "She did it to herself! She hit her own head!"
Standing just behind their parents, dabbing a blood-stained handkerchief to her temple, Elowen took a shaky, frail step forward. She looked like a picture-perfect tragic martyr, her eyes shining with soft, watery tears, her voice trembling with tragic grace.
"Mother, please... don’t be so harsh with her," Elowen whimpered, clutching Mirela’s arm with trembling fingers. "Elyra is just... she’s confused. She’s terrified. Please, Father, don’t send her to the dungeons. If she’s this afraid of going to the north... I’ll go instead. I’ll take the contract. I’ll sacrifice myself so she doesn’t have to suffer."
Elyra froze. She turned her head slowly, staring at her sister in complete, paralyzed shock.
The utter horror of it hit her like a physical blow. Elowen stood there bleeding from a wound she had inflicted on herself, wearing a ripped silk dress, putting on the performance of a lifetime... begging for Elyra’s life so that their parents would feel even more disgusted by Elyra’s ’savagery.’
How could someone be so cruel, so utterly heartless, and yet be so terrifyingly good at pretending to be an angel?
Lord Veyrith placed a gentle, comforting hand on Elowen’s shoulder, his voice instantly softening into a tender tone. "Absurdity, Elowen. You are the heir of Bloodridge. You are pure blood. I will not let a wolfless murderer push her burden onto you. She goes to the dungeons, and tomorrow, she goes to the Lycan King."
Watching the three of them... her mother’s disgust, her father’s cold hatred, and her sister’s subtle, victorious smirk hidden behind her handkerchief, something inside Elyra finally snapped.
The panic died. The crying stopped. The hot, frantic plea caught in her throat and simply withered away.
It was useless. It had always been useless.
Eighteen years of trying to be quiet enough, useful enough, obedient enough... eighteen years of hoping that if she worked hard enough in the kitchens or stayed out of sight, maybe one day her father would look at her with pride, or her mother would brush her hair with tenderness. It was all a delusion.
She was nothing to them. She had never been anything to them.
Elyra let her body go limp. Her tears dried against her bruised cheeks, leaving behind stiff, dusty tracks. She stopped fighting. She stopped speaking. She just lay there, staring at the gray stone floor with hollow, lifeless eyes as the two Gammas grabbed her under her arms and dragged her backward down the long corridor.
Her toes dragged through the dust, leaving thin trails, but she didn’t look up. She didn’t look back at the family that had discarded her.
They carried her down the spiraling stone stairs into the deep subterranean levels beneath the pack house. The air turned freezing, damp, and heavy with the smell of iron, wet rust, and old blood.
When they reached the central torture cell, the guards threw her onto the rough wooden bench in the center of the room. Elyra didn’t struggle as they pulled her arms forward, clicking heavy iron cuffs around her wrists and chaining her ankles to the wooden legs.
Her torn shirt was already stiff with dried brown blood from the thirty brutal lashes her mother had ordered the guards to inflict on her back just yesterday. The gashes were wide open, red, swollen, and sticking painfully to the coarse cotton of her shirt.
Lord Veyrith stepped into the room, his heavy leather boots clicking against the flagstones. He grabbed the heavy leather whip studded with silver barbs from the rack, testing its weight in his palm.
"Will you obey?" he growled, stepping up behind the bench. "Will you sign that marriage contract without causing a scene?"
Elyra rested her pale cheek against the rough, splintered wood, staring at the flickering orange torchlight on the wall.
"I won’t go," she whispered into the timber, her voice devoid of fear, devoid of warmth, completely dead. "I will never sign it."
Lord Veyrith’s face twisted in dark, frustrated annoyance. "You arrogant little leech."
He reeled back his arm, snapping his wrist forward with violent precision.
WHACK.
The lash tore straight through the thin cotton, landing square on the raw, open wounds from yesterday’s fifty blows. Flesh tore apart. Fresh, hot blood exploded across the wood, spraying in dark droplets over the stone floor.
Elyra gasped, her eyes flying wide open, her fingers clawing frantically at the edges of the bench. Pain... blinding, liquid fire, surged through her nervous system, so sharp it wiped out her vision for a terrifying second.
"Will you obey?" her father barked, stepping closer.
"No..." she choked out through her teeth.
WHACK.
The whip struck the exact same shredded stripe. Muscle tore deeper.
Elyra opened her mouth to scream, but as the agonizing sound tore out of her throat, something fundamentally shifted inside her chest. She wasn’t screaming because of the silver cutting her skin. She wasn’t screaming because of the physical agony ripping her back to ribbons.
She was screaming at herself.
She was screaming at twenty-two years of pathetic, desperate hope... screaming at every single night she had spent praying for a crumb of love from a family that considered her a mistake.
She had thought her quiet obedience mattered. She had thought Elowen had a soul. She had believed that blood meant something.
By the fifth lash, as hot blood poured off the sides of the wooden bench and splattered against the flagstones like rain, a strange, wet sound bubbled up from the back of her throat.
It wasn’t a sob.
It was a sharp, broken giggle.
WHACK.
The heavy lash slammed down again, and the giggle split wide open into a rasping, trembling laugh.
"Heh... aha..."
WHACK.
"Haha... ahahahaha!"
The sound filled the damp dungeon cell, high-pitched, wild, and devastatingly unhinged.
"What is so funny to you, girl?!" Lord Veyrith snarled, his forehead slick with sweat as he yanked the whip back, his eyes flashing with sudden, uneasy anger.
Elyra couldn’t stop. She pressed her bleeding face against the rough bench, her whole body shaking violently as hysterics tore out of her chest. Tears of blood and saltwater streamed down her hollow cheeks, pooling on the splintered wood beneath her mouth, but the laughter just kept spilling out of her... manic, loud, and choked with blood.
"Aha... hahaha!" she gasped out, choking on her own saliva. "It’s... it’s so funny... it’s so damn funny!"
All her life, she had held onto a tiny, quiet dream. She had dreamed of finding her true mate... someone who would look at her wolfless, fragile body and love her anyway. Someone who would choose her. She had spent cold nights staring out her attic window, holding onto that one tiny light in the dark.
And here she was. Bound face-down on a torture slab by her own biological father, getting peeled raw to be handed over as a sacrificial bride to a Lycan monster who would probably slice her throat before the ink on the contract dried.
WHACK.
"Hahaha! Ahahaha!" Her laughter echoed wildly off the subterranean stone, raw and shattering, drowning out the wet snap of the leather.
The two Gamma guards standing near the iron door shifted uncomfortably. Thomas turned his head away, his hands clenching into tight fists at his side, his jaw working as he stared at the floor.
They had watched prisoners get whipped a hundred times... they had seen hardened warriors weep and rogue Alphas roar in pain. But a wolf could heal. A wolf had an inner beast to shield the soul.
Watching a fragile, wolfless girl laugh hysterically as her back was flayed into red ribbons, her eyes completely vacant and unhinged, it made their blood run cold.
It wasn’t justice. It was an execution.
By the thirtieth lash, the wild laughter began to fracture, breaking down into wet, shuddering hitches in her chest. Her clothes were soaked through, turned into dark, dripping rags of crimson. Blood pooled around the bench, thick and heavy, running down the legs onto the floor.
By the twentieth lash, the laughter was gone. There was no sound left in the room at all... only the heavy, winded panting of Lord Veyrith and the sickening, wet strike of silver-threaded leather against ruined flesh.
Lord Veyrith wiped his brow with the back of his arm, tossing the bloody whip carelessly onto a stone table. He glared down at his youngest daughter’s motionless body. She wasn’t moving. Her matted dark hair, heavy with silver strands, lay frozen over her face. Her chest barely rose against the wood.
"Unchain her," Lord Veyrith ordered, his voice cold and raspy. "Throw her into the end cell. Leave her there until the Lycan procession arrives tomorrow night."
The two Gammas moved quickly, unlocking the heavy iron cuffs. Elyra’s limp frame slithered off the bench like a corpse, hitting the stone floor with a dull, sickening thud. She didn’t even groan.
Thomas knelt down quickly, sliding his arms beneath her waist and legs to lift her. He tried to be careful, but his hands were instantly slick with her warm blood. They carried her down the dark, narrow passage and unlocked the furthest cell... a damp, pitch-black stone box with rusty iron bars and a pile of filthy, molding straw.
Thomas laid her down as gently as he could on her right side, keeping her ruined back away from the icy stone.
As he pulled his hands back, Thomas hesitated. He reached for his leather belt, unclipping his canteen of fresh water. He unscrewed the cap, leaning over her still body to bring the rim to her cracked, bloody lips.
CLANG!
Marcus slammed his heavy iron vambrace hard against Thomas’s wrist, sending the canteen flying. It hit the floorboards, bouncing away into the dirt as fresh water spilled uselessly into the mud.
"Are you out of your mind?" Marcus hissed under his breath, his eyes wide with warning. "Did you forget the Alpha’s direct command? Two days in here. No food. No water. No medical treatment."
Thomas stared at the wet dirt, his chest heaving, his eyes darting to Elyra’s lifeless face. "Look at her back, Marcus! She has no wolf! She can’t heal this! If we leave her in the cold for two days without water, she’ll die before the Lycan King even crosses the border!"
Marcus stared down at the bleeding girl on the straw, his expression hardening into a blank, unfeeling mask.
"Then she dies," Marcus said flatly.
He grabbed Thomas by the shoulder of his chestplate and yanked him backward out of the cell, pulling the heavy iron door shut. The lock turned with a sharp, heavy CLICK, and their boots receded up the winding stone stairs, leaving the dungeon in suffocating, absolute darkness.
Inside the pitch-black cell, Elyra lay frozen on the rotting straw.
Marcus’s words... Then she dies, echoed faintly in her fading mind. But they didn’t hurt. They couldn’t hurt. Her parents had already said far worse to her face.
Perhaps death would be kinder than giving in, she thought weakly, her consciousness floating in a cold, numb sea of pain. If I die in this cell, Father gets nothing. Elowen gets nothing. The treaty breaks, and they will have to face the Lycan King themselves.
It felt like a small, silent victory. She closed her eyes, letting the freezing dampness of the dungeon floor numb her burning skin, ready to let the darkness drag her under for good.
Two days passed in complete, pitch-black silence.
By the afternoon of the second day, the air in Elyra’s cell smelled heavily of copper, rot, and damp rust.
She hadn’t shifted a single inch from the position the guard had left her in. She lay on her side, her cheek pressed into the filthy straw, her body terrifyingly still. Her skin had turned a translucent, ghost-like white, her dark hair now heavily streaked with stark, bone-white strands that seemed to have multiplied under the trauma.
Her back was a gruesome nightmare. Without an inner wolf to knit her flesh back together, the wounds had festered in the damp, freezing air of the subterranean cell. The blood had dried into hard, black crusts over torn, swollen muscle, glueing the shredded cotton of her shirt directly into the open flesh.
Every agonizingly slow breath she dragged into her lungs felt like broken glass sliding down her throat.
Her mouth was completely parched... so dry that her tongue felt like rough sandpaper against the roof of her mouth. She couldn’t swallow. She couldn’t move her fingers. She couldn’t even flutter her eyelids open. Her organs were slowly shutting down, cell by cell, drifting toward the silent edge of death.
She was dying. And for the first time in her life, she felt a strange, cold peace settling over her mind.
Then, the heavy iron lock at the top of the dungeon stairs clicked.
Heavy, deliberate footsteps began to descend into the damp gloom. They weren’t the hurried, nervous steps of the Gamma guards, nor were they the arrogant, heavy strides of her father.
These footsteps were slow. Measured. Unbearably heavy, like iron boots crushing the stone beneath them.
The air in the dungeon instantly changed. The temperature plunged by ten degrees in a matter of seconds, frost creeping rapidly across the damp stone walls of the corridor. A thick, suffocating aura... darker, colder, and immeasurably more ancient than anything Lord Veyrith possessed, flooded into the corridor, filling every crevice of the stone dungeon.
The heavy footsteps stopped directly outside her iron bars.
For a long, agonizing minute, there was only silence. No breath. No movement. Just the terrifying presence of a massive shadow standing over her cell.
Then, a deep, raspy voice tore through the darkness... a voice like grinding stones and dark velvet, low, dangerous, and completely devoid of warmth.
"Have you reflected on your mistakes?" the voice echoed softly in the quiet cell. "What’s your choice?"