Total pages in book: 164
Estimated words: 152666 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 763(@200wpm)___ 611(@250wpm)___ 509(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 152666 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 763(@200wpm)___ 611(@250wpm)___ 509(@300wpm)
I see a lot more punishments in my future because fuck Granny. I won’t take the food. If she doesn’t send enough, she’ll lose her prized drug maker. I made that very clear to her. I shouted at her, actually. She can have her dog punish me as much as she wants, it won’t change my mind.
Mama, I’ll probably join you shortly. I will not yield in this.
December 19
Not dead yet.
Plus: I don’t feel pain like I used to. Alexander has to really work for a reaction, and often that gets too close to killing me.
Bad: It’s taken a lot of beatings to get to this stage.
Fuck them both.
January 1
New day.
New year.
I won.
Granny fixed the food situation. She needs me working and when I’m all busted up, I can’t work. She’s also agreed to go back to how things started—fixing up the village and keeping people happy.
I’m pretty well-hated. For a while, she thought punishing villagers, including children, would make me come around. I held firm for the greater good. Even Granny has limits, it seems. Alexander never worked over the children much at all. Spankings and a few bruises. That helped me stay strong. Everyone else has accelerated healing. It helped them to hold out until we got what we needed to live.
I wish I could just leave, but I have nowhere to go. Beatings are still living. Life means mama keeps living through my memories. If I leave, I’ll be killed and so will she. Hopefully it’ll get better.
Her handwriting was hardly legible by the end, simply ending it with “love you Mama.” She must’ve been deeply in pain, broken nearly beyond repair.
My entire body coiled as I struggled with a rush of rage so extreme I could hardly think. My wolf prowled within me, desperate to go back to that village and level it, kill them all. She was so young. Seventeen, judging by the date. Alone. Hated because of how Granny had singled her out and focused on her. Hated even though she was sacrificing herself—her body and her dignity—for that village. It was disgusting. Heart-wrenching.
The lengths she went to push back against the alpha of the village, to her detriment, was awe-inspiring. Her courage was incredible, her morals noble. She was willing to be beat to death to ensure the people and children—children who weren’t even hers—had what they needed to survive. More, she held strong even when others were dragged into the beatings with her, knowing they all had to stand united, unbending, unyielding, against the tyrant in order to claim their victory. Battle commanders hardly had that clear a purpose, nor leaders of great packs, of kingdoms. And she’d been only seventeen with no experience and no training, just her conscience.
Everything in me wanted to go to her now, pull her from her horse and wrap her in my arms. I wanted to ensure she would never, not ever, be harmed like that again. I would protect her, mind, body, and wolf. I would hunt for her and feed her, tend to all her needs, worship her body, make sure she never wanted for another thing as long as she lived.
But that was impossible. I was doing exactly the opposite, now delivering her to a punishment she likely wouldn’t walk away from. Granny had cultivated the problem, and to fix it I had to damn my true mate.
My thoughts and feelings were so fucking conflicted. I hated that I could see both sides of this, not sure which tugged at me more. I had to remember that she’d killed people. She’d saved her village but damned many others. She’d gone through hell—I couldn’t even think about it without the uncontrollable rage—but put many others through hell at the same time and for years to come. She was not innocent. There was a reason I’d been sent to find her.
But gods help me, reading her words, walking in her shoes . . . I didn’t fucking care. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t even understand it. Beating children so Granny could get her way? Serving people rotten food? Incomprehensible. What kind of monster ran that village?
Also incomprehensible was the change in Aurelia’s outlook. She’d seemed to hate Granny in these passages. It didn’t seem like the same woman who had burst into Granny’s cottage with an axe and faced four powerful shifters without flinching. To know her now, one would assume she had a great love for her benefactor. If nothing else, then loyalty and pride in her job. What had changed? How had Granny worked her back around?
I reached for the next page, waiting to hear my wolf grumble. Instead, he was silent. He wanted to know, too. He wanted to piece all of this together, because right now, my heart went out to young Aurelia. She’d had nobody on her side, but she still held firm for the greater good. She believed that their happiness was a direct result of her performance.