Abandoned by All Until the Mad Alpha Claimed Me

Ophelia

Today, I will be sold.

No one needed to tell me. I could sense it in my bones--that my fate was about to change.

The handmaidens who had always looked at me with cold contempt were now fussing over me with unsettling attentiveness, lacing me into an elaborate gown I had never been permitted to wear.

Their hands moved with deliberate care, as though afraid to leave even the faintest mark on my skin.

As though they were making the final preparations for a sacrifice.

Such a reversal could only mean one thing: the day had finally come. Someone had offered my father a price he found satisfactory.

As a princess, I was allowed to be covered in bruises.

As a commodity, I could not have a single flaw.

"Smile." The handmaiden arranging my hair said it flatly, with the particular distaste one reserves for a well-trained animal.

Smile. That, at least, came easily.

I pulled the corners of my mouth upward, and the girl in the mirror transformed--perfectly compliant, perfectly pleasing, wearing the smile I had spent a decade crafting for the benefit of men I had no choice but to please.

My fingers drifted instinctively to the scars on my wrist--barely visible now, pale threads against pale skin. The price of that perfect smile. Even now, touching them summoned the memory of the despair that had carved them into me: the slow, methodical erasure of everything I had once been, until all that remained was a doll that smiled on command.

This is my fate, I told myself. Not to want. Not to feel. Only to perform.

"Your Highness." The attendant outside the door sounded slightly uneasy. "The Queen has arrived."

She didn't wait for my answer. My stepmother swept into the room wearing the smile I had seen ten thousand times--warm for the world, hollow at its core.

She crossed to me, and the moment her back was to the other women in the room, the performance dropped entirely.

Her fingers closed around my jaw like a vice, cold and precise.

"Ophelia." Her voice was low, almost gentle, which made it worse. "You are finally going to be of some use to this kingdom. Go and please your new..."

She paused, a flicker of something crossing her face.

"...your new lord. Remember everything we taught you."

Your new lord.

The way she said it--I had never heard that particular tremor in her voice before.

As though even she was afraid of what that word contained.

A cold foreboding settled in my stomach. But I lowered my eyes and nodded, as I always did, as I had always been made to do.

My fate had been written the day I turned seven.

I had not been foolish enough to hope otherwise for a very long time.

The memory surfaced the way it always did--swift and cutting, like a blade drawn without warning.

I had snuck away to the training yard. I wanted to practice swordsmanship, the one thing I loved above all else. I never learned how my father found out.

But he came, and he made certain I would never forget.

Crack.

"You are a girl!"

Crack.

"Your body IS your ONLY weapon!"

Crack.

"Learn what you are meant to learn--and never forget it!"

Each strike landed in front of his assembled soldiers. Each one carved something out of me that never grew back.

I still remembered kneeling before the statue of the Sun Goddess afterward, blood soaking through my dress and pooling on the cold stone floor.

The golden goddess looked down at me with eyes that held no mercy--as though she, too, found my defiance laughable.

I nearly died in that temple.

Fever, blood loss, starvation. I had thought--almost hoped--that I would.

But they brought me back. Not out of love. Only because I still had value.

"Your instructor will begin tomorrow," my father said from the doorway of my sickroom, looking at me the way one looks at inventory. "She will help you understand what you're worth."

He never came back after that.

And so Mora became the architecture of my existence.

She taught me everything my father's words had implied--that a woman's only currency was the pleasure she could give a man.