Chapter 1

EMILIA POV

“How many times have I told you—” a painful lash came upon my back, “—that you shouldn’t be far from perfection?!”

“Please! I’m sorry!” I apologized aloud, my throat tightening like a knot as if something heavy was clogging it. My bare back was on fire. I could feel the sting of each tear caused by the whip against my back.

Carlos, the man who had adopted me into his home after the death of my parents, came down on me repeatedly with a whip, seeming to get pleasure out of it than for the sake of punishing me for what I had done.

“You are the adopted daughter of a general! Act like it!” He screamed, lashing my back for the last time before he flung the whip aside and took deep breaths.

I laid on the ground, unable to move past an inch every five seconds without feeling pain. I had counted how many lashes Morgan, my adopted father, had given to me – one hundred and two.

I heard the scraping of a chair against the floor until I saw the legs of the chair in front of me. Morgan sat on the chair with a sigh, his right hand holding a glass of clear alcohol and a look of distaste in his eyes as he watched me helplessly groaning and writhing in pain on the floor.

“Emilia,” he called out to me, his voice treacherously soft after what he had just done to me. “Everyone in our small pack of Fangsbane knows you as my daughter, the daughter of the pack’s war general.”

I wanted to cry loudly and tell him that I knew that, and that it was one of the biggest regrets of my life. A person as weak as I was, could not be the child of a great warrior, especially in a pack like Fangsbane, which was known for its consistent triumphs in battles and wars.

“I have set you up in eight mock battles,” he continued. “Each of those battles you have fought, your opponents got weaker and weaker, but you have lost each and every single one of those battles.”

He shifted forward and stared hard at me in serious assessment as he said, “If you weren’t my brother’s biological daughter, I would never have adopted you after his death to bring this amount of shame upon myself. Your weak blood most definitely came from that mother of yours.”

At the mention of my dead mother, I sniffled and whimpered in the pain of the memories that had now joined hands with the physical pain all over my back.

Carlos stood up and stretched. He set the glass of alcohol aside and started walking away.

“Get yourself cleaned up,” he instructed before he crossed the door. “I want you to go into the training room and train as hard as you can. Remember that the Alpha’s meeting is today. You have to attend it first.”

“Yes, sir,” I responded weakly, picking myself up and hissing through the pain as he walked away.

With winces and hisses of pain, I managed to clean up my wounds and watch them heal rather slowly before I got ready for the Alpha’s meeting with his subjects.

As soon as I got to the Alpha’s meeting, all heads turned in my direction as I seemed to be the last person at the meeting. I held my head down as I saw people whispering and muttering to each other about things I didn’t want to hear.

“...that it is necessary to hold festivals like this, not just for fun, but because the entire werewolf community needs to build a strong relationship,” Alpha James continued his speech without batting an eye at me.

“And so, we need volunteers for the fight. I would very much like for us to win this, so may the bravest and strongest of you step forward!”

“They’re organizing fights for the blood moon festival.” I froze as I heard Carlos’s cold voice behind me. “The people from our pack will fight with the people from other packs who will be visiting. It’s only fair that the known daughter of the general joins in the fight, or I will be put to shame. Step forward.”

My eyes scanned my surroundings as people proudly poured themselves out of the crowd and volunteered to fight for their pack.

“Do not hesitate more than you already have. Go,” he ordered.

As quietly as I could, I stepped forward, and more murmurs and whispers spread through the air. Some people even began to laugh.

“I would like to volunteer,” I spoke, putting my hand up in the air and looking at the floor in front of me when the laughs got even louder.

“Silence, everyone. I believe we have all the people we need,” Alpha James noted, looking at us. “You will all be trained by official warriors before the day of the festival, and I hope you’re all ready.”

“Yes, Alpha,” we chorused, even though all I wanted to do was turn around and run out of the gathering room, never looking back.

Soon after the meeting was over, the volunteers were taken to the training field, where each of us was set up with a sparring partner. Unfortunately for me, my sparring partner was Beta Seth, who didn’t hide how much he detested my weakness.

“Could you at least pair me with someone who will give me a hard time?” He said to the pairing master with a tone of annoyance.

“Sorry, Beta. You’re the last two left.” The master shrugged, walking away and announcing for us to warm up for our first fight with our partners.

Beta Seth glared at me with his arms crossed as he said, “You had better warm up. It’s easy to make a mistake during a mock battle and kill your partner.”

I would have taken it as some sort of joke, but I knew that the last thing Beta Seth would do, was make a joke with me.

He was going to kill me in a few minutes.