Marked and Rejected by my Stepbrother

CHAPTER 1 Raine's POV I stood in front of the mirror in my room and regarded my reflection. With trembling hands, I anxiously straightened imaginary creases out of my dress. I still couldn't decide if my hair looked better up or down. In reality, there was nothing wrong with my appearance. I looked perfectly fine. My hair was shiny and bouncy, my dress clung to my petite curves, and my face was glowing. The reason I was so nervous was because I was turning eighteen—a big milestone for any girl. Most would be excited. I should have been, too. Every girl in the world dreams of turning eighteen and stepping into adulthood, into power, into freedom. The only difference was, I wasn’t just any normal girl—I was a werewolf. Well, sort of. My mother was a werewolf. My father was a human. I didn’t inherit the shifting gene. I was born without it. A half-breed, as my dear stepfather liked to call me. It wasn’t always like this. My mother, Liana, was once one of the strongest unmated she-wolves in her pack. She was ambitious, driven, fiercely intelligent, and beautiful—not the kind of woman you expected to fall in love with a human. But she did. She met my father, Andrew Jones, while studying at a university outside of her territory. She’d wanted to learn about the human world, immerse herself in it, and maybe find something more than pack politics and matesque traditions. My father was a professor’s assistant in her economics class—a man who was calm where she was fire, methodical where she was instinct. Their connection was undeniable. Every time she told the story, back when she actually used to talk about it, she described their relationship as something inevitable. It didn’t matter that he was human and she was wolf. Where it counted, they were equals—in intellect, in drive, in heart. The pack had protested, of course. A human mate? It was unthinkable. But my mother had already made her choice. She left her pack and started a new life with my father in the city, away from pack laws and judgment. Her wolf had accepted him, even if the rest of the world never would. They were happy. For a while. When she found out she was pregnant with me, she was overjoyed—though, I sometimes wonder if that joy ever truly lasted. I was born under a veil of tension. Half wolf, half human. No wolf gene. Everyone kept waiting for it to show, or to hide. It never did. My father adored me. He used to say I was “the best of both worlds.” My mother loved me, in her way, but her bright fire started to dim the day she realized I would never shift. That I would never be a full member of the life she'd once known. Still, we were a tight family. Until the accident. I was ten when my father died. A car crash. Sudden. Brutal. I still remember the smell of hospital antiseptic and the way my mother stood there, clutching his ring like it might bring him back if she just held on hard enough. Everything changed after that. With her mate gone, her world eroded. The fire in her went dark. Her old pack—Bloodstone—swept in like vultures welcoming back one of their own. Samuel, the Alpha, had always liked her. That was no secret. He’d proposed to her in her youth, but she had rejected him—even spat at him, I’d once heard whispered. Now, a widow with a child and no resources, she had little choice but to accept his second offer. Two years after burying my father, she married Samuel—one of the most calculating, arrogant, ego-driven Alphas this region had ever seen. Rumor was, he married her out of insulted pride, to prove he could still possess what had once turned him down. Love had nothing to do with it. He hated me from the start. To him, I was a reminder of her shame. A living symbol of her betrayal. The human she’d loved and the child she’d made with him. And my mother? She changed. She became eerily silent. She’d look at me with an emptiness in her eyes, like she didn’t know what to do with me anymore. Like I didn’t quite belong to her past or her future. We were never close after that. She raised me out of duty, not love. When she died suddenly five years ago, I wasn’t surprised she left everything—my father’s company, our home, any sense of safety—entirely to Samuel. He scooped up the inheritance and left me behind as if I were nothing more than a loose end in someone else’s story. Samuel is a mean and arrogant man with a massive superiority complex. Despite how he treats me, my mother loved him, for reasons that are still foreign to me. Even though she never said it out loud, I knew that she saw me the same way that my stepfather did. A weak half-breed. An embarrassment. Then, five years after marrying Samuel my mother died, leaving my father's entire empire to the arrogant Alpha, and me with nothing. Samuel allowed me to remain in his house, but he treated me like a piece of gum that stuck to the bottom of his shoe. He was constantly trying to get rid of me and never letting the opportunity to tell me just how useless he thought I was pass him by. He enjoyed having a go at me like it was his favorite hobby. He hated me, and I felt exactly the same way about him. I couldn't wait to get away from him. As soon as I graduated high school, I planned on leaving for college and I had absolutely no intention of ever returning. There was nothing here for me anyway. I wanted to make a new life for myself somewhere else. Samuel might have my real father’s company and all the money he left me, but at least I still had the will to make something of myself. That was something that he could never take away from me. But I still had one thing she and Samuel couldn’t take away—my will. I planned to leave the moment I turned eighteen and build something better with it. Taking a deep breath, I looked at myself in the mirror again, turning my body from side to side. Fidgeting wasn’t helping my nerves. Wolves, even ones who couldn’t shift like me, were expected to find their mates when they turned 18. The worst part was that we had to go out in front of the entire pack and wait, hoping and praying that one of the other wolves actually felt the pull of the mate bond. It was a horrible tradition, one that I have been dreading for as long as I could remember. Being a half-breed, I didn't even know if it would be possible for me to find a mate. Would I be able to mate to someone without having the werewolf gene? Would another wolf be able to sense a bond to me? What if I stood there, in front of the entire pack, waiting for it to happen and it never did? I would be absolutely mortified. I would never be able to live down the shame. I had half a mind to just lock myself in my room for the rest of the night and wait for my birthday to be over, but Samuel would never allow that. He was probably hoping that I wouldn't find a mate and that I would be embarrassed in front of the entire pack. I sighed heavily as I resigned myself to my fate. There was no point in trying to postpone it any longer. Might as well just get it over with. I crossed over to my bedside table and picked up the framed photo of my father. I touched my fingers to his smiling face, thoughtfully. Tears pricked the corners of my eyes as I thought about him. I missed him terribly and wished, more than anything, that he was still here. I couldn't help but wonder how different my life might have been if he were still around. I wiped the tears away from my cheeks, thinking that the make-up I spent hours applying was probably ruined now, and put the picture down again. Whether I wanted to or not, it was time to go.