A Vow of Eighty-Nine Thousand Scars
The night before the Beta selection, my mate and my mother conspired to cast me into hell.
They injected me with wolfsbane, locked me in the alchemy lab, and let the silver-laced flames consume my skin and my future.
I clawed desperately at the door, my nails splintering against the wood as the searing heat roasted my skin.
I listened to my mother's fake sobs as she claimed she had accidentally activated the lab's lockdown protocol.
But as my wolf was about to shatter from the agony, I heard her—whispering with my mate, my Alpha, Rhys.
My mother’s voice was a nervous whisper. Was this too cruel? Destroying me with silver fire just to let Dahlia get ahead?
But Rhys's voice was ice. It was my debt to Dahlia, he claimed. A price the ambitious Avalon had to pay. He would shatter my pride, break my power, and then chain me to his bed, mark me, and make me his broken, beautiful, exclusive property—a gift, he called it, to a defective thing like me.
His words pierced me like silver needles. The family I had loved, the mate I had trusted with everything—they had joined forces long ago to build my tomb.
I bit my lip, trembling, tasting blood, bitterness, and betrayal. A single thought cut through the haze of pain: the man who swore he loved me, the mother who gave me life—I was done with them both.
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