AURORA'S POV
It was cold. Very, very cold. The air seemed made of ice and every breath I took in was torture. The hard floor on which I sat was also cold and the coldness seeped through my flimsy clothing and into my skin but I could not move nor stand from my position and even if I could, there was no space to shift to. The cell that I had been thrown in was filled to the brim with young girls that were no more than my age. The only difference between me and them was that I had stopped crying ages ago. Tears hadn't stopped them from throwing me out of the only place I had ever known.
When my rejection and banishment had just taken place, I had cried and cried, thinking that perhaps my tears would move my former pack members and mate, but it had been for nothing. They had thrown me out and turned their backs on me.
I turned into a wanderer, a rogue with no roots. Days and nights had passed with me crying at the edge of our pack borders, hoping and praying they would take me back. Hoping and praying that they realize they had made a mistake and that I had been wrongly accused. My life at the pack hadn't been great, but it was the only life I had, the only life I had ever known.
It had taken me three days to realize that they didn't want me
anymore and that I would starve to death if I didn't leave there and find something to eat. I had wiped my tears and left, my survival now on the forefront of my mind.
Where would I go? Where would I stay?
I had survived and had been surviving until I stepped into the borders of the most vile, most unlawful pack in our history. The BloodMoon pack.
I had been chasing a squirrel, intent on catching it for breakfast that I didn't know when I stepped into their territory, and automatically I knew I had lost my freedom.
The pack members were well-known traffickers, selling most of their captives to breeders or whoever needed them. There were brutal and absolutely without mercy and their women were nothing more than their playthings. They had no say in anything other than the home and raising of their pups.
There was no chance of me ever getting away. I might as well be dead. There would be no one to mourn me anyways. So I would welcome death or whatever hellish world awaits me.
A WEEK AGO: FLASHBACK
I listened quietly as some of the girls in the pack spoke excitedly and gathered around Brie and gushed about how lucky she was that her longtime boyfriend, the Alpha's son, turned out to be her mate afterall.
Brie is the IT girl of the pack. You know, the one that everyone adores and tries to be friends with, so I think it's only natural that she gets the most eligible of the males in the pack irregardless of the fact that she totally despises me.
A whole lot of people don't like me in this pack but I think her hatred overshadows theirs. It wasn't hard to figure out why. Her uncle, the then beta, had been the man my mother rejected as mate. My mom had rejected him because he was a cruel man with no heart, and not only had she rejected him, she had gone ahead to fall in love with a rogue and had gotten pregnant with me. The Rogue, who was my father, had been exiled from his pack after being framed for killing his mother and brother. My father disappeared shortly after I was born.
Gone, they said, but my mother knew that the men she had rejected had something to do with her lover's disappearance. There was no evidence though, so there was nothing she could do. A year later, she died and I was left all alone. So yeah, my life had been bumpy from the beginning.
I tuned into the conversation around me when I realized that the girls had now moved closer to me and were now addressing me.