I always imagined meeting my mate would be the best moment of my life. I was right about it being unforgettable. I was wrong about everything else.
It started, as most disasters in my life do, with me being completely unprepared.
***
The packhouse kitchen smelled like lye soap and yesterday's dinner, and my knees had gone numb on the stone floor twenty minutes ago. I shifted my weight, wrung out the rag, and kept scrubbing.
Five a.m. The kitchen had to be done before the house woke up.
This was my life. Had been since I was twelve, when the Night Shade Pack took me in after the death of my parents. Dad died first, working himself into the ground trying to keep us fed, his body just giving out one Tuesday morning like a light switch flipping off. Mom lasted three more months. The healers called it illness. I called it what it was–she missed him so much she followed him.
I didn't blame her for it. I tried very hard not to blame her for it.
The pack separated me and my twin sister, Lana, a month after the funeral. Standard procedure for orphaned Omegas with no next of kin was being reassigned to work within the ranks. Lana was blonde and blue-eyed and so pleasant to look upon that the Braxton family–Beta rank and filthy rich–took one look at her and decided she had no business being a maid. They took her in as their daughter.
I wasn't so lucky.
That was five years ago and I had scrubbed approximately eighteen thousand square feet of the pack house's floors since then, by my rough estimate. Somewhere around year three, I made a decision.
I was going to get into Greymoor Academy, and I was going to get out.
And three weeks ago, I received the Lycan Queen's scholarship, against all odds. Burning my fingers with the midnight candle. Dragging my near dead exhausted body after work to the attic to study with less than four hours of sleep daily. It paid off, and even if Alpha Dante Hayes wasn't pleased when he found out I took the exams after he'd expressly told me Omega maids didn't get to dream of grand futures and forbade me from taking the test, he couldn't refuse my summons from Greymoor. It would be a direct disrespect to the Queen.
But what he could do was triple my chores and make it nearly impossible to attend school.
But clearly, he had underestimated how determined I was to change the trajectory of my life.
Greymoor Academy was the kind of school that took future Alphas and sharpened them into leaders, future Betas and taught them how to counsel. Gammas, how to enforce. Girls from good bloodlines went there to marry up. Bloodline mattered more than brains within those walls. But if you could graduate at the top of your class, the most powerful packs in the world would come looking for you. Real careers. Real money. A real life completely unlike the one I was enduring.
That was my plan. Graduate as the top student and change my life.
In twelve hours, I would be eighteen. In twelve hours, one of two things was going to happen. Either I would find my mate and he would be my ticket out of this life or I wouldn't, and Greymoor would be. Either way, everything changed in twelve hours.
The kitchen door swung open.
I didn't look up. Looking up was something you learned not to do as a maid.
Unhurried footsteps crossed the kitchen. The toe of an expensive boot stopped six inches from my hand. The boot glided over and pressed over my fingers, hard.
I winced, sinking my teeth into my bottom lip as I sat back on my heels.
Cole Hayes, son of Alpha Dante Hayes, and future Alpha of the Night Shade Pack, looked down at me with the perpetual sneer he saved for things he'd found on the bottom of that expensive boot.
He had been doing this since we were children. The bullying, the derogatory comments that started when I was thirteen, stress-eating through my parent's death anniversary and not holding it together very well. Fatso. Ugly. Pig. Oink, oink.
Anorexia came at fifteen. By the time the Head Maid found out what I was doing to myself, the severity of the damage was so great that even three years later, even if I was now perfectly healthy, I still hadn't gotten my monthly cycle and I couldn't shift.
Cole didn't know that last part. Nobody knew except Lana. In Ashbourne, being wolfless was worse than being a rogue. It didn't matter that I did have a wolf, but just couldn't shift. It all fell under the category of wolfless. If Alpha Hayes found out, my pack membership would be stripped and I would have nothing. Not the packhouse. Not the scholarship. Not even the floor I was currently kneeling on.
It was a secret I guarded with my life. Lana finding out had been as a result of my fifteen year old naive self who still regarded her twin as her best friend crying to her about it. She had mocked me for it.
Well, at least, she didn't tell anyone.
Cole lifted the glass from the counter. "Congratulations on the scholarship, Fatso. Though, I wouldn't get too excited. Your mother was an Omega maid. Her mother was an Omega maid. The misfortune mustn't be as hard to scrub free from your dirty blood as it must be to scrub out these floors."
He lifted his boot off my throbbing fingers and kicked the bucket violently, causing the contents to splash over my skin. "Start over," he said and walked out.
I sat there on the wet floor in the dripping silence of the empty kitchen, water running down my face, and I did not cry. I had made a rule about that years ago. Not in this kitchen, not on this floor, not where any of them could walk back in and see it.
I reached for the rag.
Twelve hours, I told myself.
I started over.
***
Lana was waiting at the packhouse gates under the light drizzle as I rushed out to catch the bus to the Academy.
She leaned against her sleek black Bentley in white heeled boots, a cropped jacket and a short leather skirt.
Lana had always been stunning. Her blonde hair sat perfectly smooth, the perfect bone structure, the mile-long model legs and baby blues that made boys and girls alike forget themselves. She was perfect, in the ways I could never be.
Regina's theory was that Lana came out first and simply took things we should've shared.
I thought she was probably accurate, considering I looked like a hot mess.
I had sandy brown hair that woke up every morning with a completely different personality, electric blue eyes that Jenny once called too intense to be pretty, which actually makes them better, and a body that I had spent years at war with and was only now beginning to negotiate a peace treaty with.
I understood Lana's need to pretend I didn't exist, but it didn't make it sting any less.
"Happy birthday," she said.
There was a time, during our childhood, when those words from her would have meant something. We used to say them together, pressed against each other in our parents' bed.
"Happy birthday," I replied.
She looked me over. The Greymoor sweatshirt I had on because I couldn't afford anything else. The baggy pants. The bag on my shoulder packed with the six textbooks I'd saved four months to buy. My unruly, frizzy hair.
"You actually got the scholarship," she murmured.
"I did."
Something moved through her expression. It looked like resentment. "I'll be there, too."
I nodded. All of Ashbourne's elite would be there, and Lana Braxton–no longer Lana Adams–was one of the elite.
"Don't approach me at school. I have a position to maintain." Her eyes lingered on my worn out sneakers. "You understand that I can't be associated with a common maid. I can't have your dirt and skunk following me around."
She slunk into the car without waiting for a response, like she couldn't spend one more second being seen with me. And as she sped past, her tires sprayed a fresh wave of muddied water against my clothes.