By the time Ella was ten years old, she could already tell which pack member was walking down the hallway just by the rhythm of their boots.
The human mind was a remarkable thing when survival demanded it; where others relied on the sharp, instinctual snarl of an inner wolf to warn them of danger, Ella only had her ears and the cold stone floor beneath her palms.
She knew the sharp, dragging step of Beta Jackson meant he was drunk, unpredictable, and looking for someone to punish for the day’s perceived slights.
She knew the light, arrogant stride of the Alpha’s son meant it was time to press herself so deeply into the shadows that she became invisible, holding her breath until the air burned in her lungs.
In a pack that treated omegas like stray dogs, learning the sounds of her predators wasn’t a hobby.
It was the only reason she was still breathing.
Now, at seventeen, the heavy, vibrating thuds echoing through the floorboards told her Beta Jackson was back.
And he was very drunk.
Ella curled tighter beneath the rusted sink in the packhouse kitchen.
The space was cramped, smelling of mildew and old pipes, but it was a temporary sanctuary.
She pulled her knees tightly to her chest until the frayed denim of her jeans strained against her skin, stitching pressing hard into her bruises.
The sour, sickening stench of cheap whiskey and wet fur drifted down the dark corridor, growing heavier, turning the air thick and unbreathable.
Every uncoordinated step he took made the metal plumbing above her head rattle.
Her palms went slick against the cold linoleum floor.
If he came in here to raid the fridge, she was dead.
Or worse.
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to shrink her small frame, willing her heartbeat to slow down.
She wanted to disappear, to dissolve into the rot eating away at the baseboards of the kitchen walls.
He stopped right outside the kitchen threshold.
Ella held her breath, a silent, desperate plea repeating in her mind.
Please, not tonight.
Just pass by.
While the rest of the Silver Ridge pack slept upstairs in their warm, luxurious beds, Ella was still awake, working in the dark.
It wasn’t like she had any other choice.
Cleaning up after their midnight feasts and muddy tracking trials meant she avoided the heavy hands of the Alpha and the rest of the pack members.
It was a vicious cycle of survival, finishing today’s agonizing list of chores ensured that tomorrow’s workload wouldn’t double into something physically impossible to survive.
A low, guttural grunt vibrated through the hallway.
Jackson paused, boots shifting, before his footsteps finally began to recede, moving away from the kitchen toward the back exit.
Ella let out a long, trembling breath, her shoulders sagging against the pipes.
The immediate danger had passed, but the work remained.
She still had to mop the massive kitchen floor.
Crawling out from beneath the sink, her joints popped in the silence.
She looked up at the grandfather clock ticking against the far wall.
1:40 AM.
Her mind did the frantic, math she performed every single night.
If she was fast enough, if her aching muscles didn’t fail her, she could drag herself to bed by 2:20 AM.
That would give her what, two hours of sleep, at most?
before she had to drag her body back out here to start prepping the massive breakfast buffet for hungry wolves.
As if on cue, her stomach growled, a sharp, hollow ache that made her double over.
Ella couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten a full meal.
It wasn’t like she didn’t make enough food for everyone, she cooked mountains of meat and sides every day.
But the pack had a cruel, way of dealing with her.
Just that afternoon, Celia, the Alpha’s daughter, had marched into the kitchen, eyes flashing with anger over a fight she’d had with her brother, and deliberately spit directly into Ella’s small bowl of leftover stew.
That was what they all did.
She was the pack’s punching bag, a sponge meant to absorb everyone else’s displaced aggression.
When someone offended them, when a hunt went poorly, or when the weather was bad, they passed the misery down to the lowest rung of the ladder.
To her.
She used to spend long, crying nights wondering why they couldn’t just hold the actual offenders accountable instead of taking it out on a defenseless omega.
But she had stopped asking those questions years ago.
This was her life, and she didn’t have any choice whatsoever.
Ella gripped the worn wooden handle of the mop and began to push it across the tiles.
She had to be meticulous about it.
If there was a single streak left on the floor, a single smudge of grease near the stoves, pack members would notice by morning, and it would earn her another beating.
When she was finally satisfied with the gleaming surface, she rinsed the mop in the sink, her hands turning red and raw from the harsh bleach.
She poured the dirty water away into the outdoor drainage grate, the splash echoing loudly in the dead of night, before carefully storing the equipment in the utility closet.
Dragging her exhausted body out of the main packhouse, she stepped into the biting night air, heading toward her quarters.
If you could even call it that.
Home was an old, abandoned storage unit at the very edge of the packhouse entirely detached from the main house.
It was a skeletal structure, a concrete box where the pack dumped their discarded stuffs, rusted lawn equipment, broken furniture, moldy clothes, and anything else they deemed trash.
Inside, the air was perpetually freezing, thick with the heavy scent of damp concrete and oxidized metal.
Stacks of rusted tools and collapsed, water-logged cardboard boxes created a labyrinth of jagged shadows, making the already tiny space feel claustrophobic.
The only thing resembling furniture was a thin, salvaged mattress resting directly on the bare floor.
Its surface was worn, stained, and mapped with age, a stark, mocking contrast to the polished luxury and Egyptian cotton sheets of the main packhouse.
Without the natural, furnace-like warmth of a wolf, the chill of the concrete seeped right through the thin padding every night, turning her sleep into a brutal test of endurance.
Ella stared at the bare, stained mattress.
It wasn’t something she could ever sleep on bare.
She was constantly terrified she would catch a skin disease or some deep bone infection from the filth.
Werewolves didn’t get sick.
They didn’t catch infections, and they didn’t suffer from human ailments.
But Ella was a genetic anomaly.
An exception to every rule of her kind.
She didn’t have a wolf.
At the age of thirteen, wolves usually shifted for the first time, experiencing the painful, glorious awakening of their wolf and meeting the voice in their heads.
But for Ella, thirteen had come and gone in absolute silence.
She didn’t know what had happened, or what mistake had been made, but she blamed it on her cursed luck.
She was the only person in the entire history of the Silver Ridge pack to remain entirely human past the age of shifting.
Without a wolf, she possessed no aura, no strength, and no defense.
It only made the pack members prey on her more, viewing her lack of a wolf as a curse.
The storage unit was always thick with dust because of the rubbish stacked around her.
She had tried to clean it out once, dragging the old tires and broken chairs to the perimeter fence.
The Alpha had caught her and given her a beating so severe she still saw flashes of white whenever she thought about it.
There were a lot of beatings she could never forget in her short life, but that day topped all of them.
He had told her she had no right to alter pack property.
She was trash, and trash belonged in the garbage.
Moving with agonizing slowness, Ella began to strip off her soiled clothes to wash.
There was no bathroom here, no hot running water.
She had to perform her basic hygiene at night using a bucket, praying no one wandered to this edge of the woods.
As she pulled her shirt over her head, she gasped, a sharp whimper tearing from her throat.
The cheap cotton fabric had stuck to the open wounds on her back.
She had to peel it away slowly, a different kind of torture that left her trembling and sweating in the cold.
These injuries were three days old, and they were still red, raw, and weeping.
She didn’t have the rapid werewolf healing that could close a gash in minutes.
Her injuries took weeks to heal the slow, painful, human way.
She couldn’t even go to the pack doctor for a simple ointment; the Alpha had strictly forbidden the medical staff from ever treating her.
Standing in the center of the dark storage unit, the absolute lack of a wolf’s presence was felt most in the silence of her own mind.
While others had the constant, comforting internal hum of a lifelong companion, Ella only had the quiet, crushing weight of the night.
She had to find her own strength to continue, relying on nothing but her own stubborn will to survive.
Every night, she prayed to the Moon Goddess that her eighteenth birthday would come sooner.
If she could just survive until then, she might find her fated mate.
A mate from another pack who would see her, protect her, and take her away from this living hell.
It was the only dream she had left.
She filled her bucket from the outdoor spigot and brought it inside.
When the freezing water touched her raw back, the pain was blinding, white-hot needles radiating across her skin.
She forced herself to be quick, biting her lip until it bled to keep from screaming.
Once finished, she tied a threadbare towel around herself and searched through one of the discarded cardboard boxes.
She managed to find an old, oversized shirt and a pair of worn jeans.
She dressed practically for the morning; when she woke up, she wouldn’t have time to change.
All she could do was brush her teeth and run straight to the kitchen.
By the time she finally climbed onto the mattress, pulling a thin, blanket over her shivering shoulders, the small, cracked clock by the window read 3:00 AM.
Exactly two hours.
She had to wake up at 5:00 AM while the rest of the pack didn’t even begin to stir until 7:00 AM.
It was so profoundly unfair.
She was always the absolute last to sleep, and always the first to wake up.
Closing her heavy eyes, she let the darkness take her, praying for a few minutes of peace.
“ELLA!”
The roar shattered the silence like a gunshot, vibrating through the thin metal walls of the storage unit.
Ella bolted upright, her heart hammering violently against her ribs.
The sudden movement ripped the scabs on her back, sending a wave of agony through her body, but the adrenaline pumping through her veins completely drowned it out.
“Get your useless ass out here now!”
It was Beta Jackson’s voice, booming and laced with a vicious hangover.
But beneath his voice was another sound, the deep, terrifying rumble of Alpha Richard.
Ella’s eyes darted to the cracked clock on the windowsill.
Her breath caught in her throat.
The digital numbers glowed in the darkness.
4:08 AM.
She wasn’t late, it was way too early.
She hadn’t overslept her alarm, and everywhere was still too dark.
“Ella!” the Alpha’s voice boomed closer now, the sheer force of his Alpha command rattling the loose screws in the concrete walls.
Even without a wolf, the raw power of his voice made her knees buckle as she tried to stand.
She had answered them too late.
The heavy, unmistakable sound of Jackson’s dragging boots was already marching across the frozen dirt toward her door, and this time, he wasn’t just looking for a snack.
Hi guys.
My name is Kiara and I am a new author.
I hope you enjoy reading this novel as much as I enjoy writing it.
Don’t forget to add to your library.