my fated alpha mate

Mia's POV My name is Mia Hawthorne. I am twenty years old, and I have spent my entire life believing I was unwanted from the moment I was born. According to my father, my mother abandoned me only hours after giving birth. She hadn't wanted the burden of raising a child, he said, so she had walked away without so much as a backward glance. That was the story I grew up hearing. It was the only story I knew, repeated so often that it had calcified into fact, though I had never once been shown proof of it — no letter, no photograph, nothing but my father's flat, unbothered voice retelling it whenever I asked too many questions. Maybe that's why I stopped wondering what it felt like to be loved by a mother. You cannot miss something you have never held. Instead, I learned to survive. The Hawthornes lived in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in New York, behind a wrought-iron gate and a hedge trimmed into such perfect right angles that it looked less like a garden and more like a boundary line — a warning to anyone who might get too close and see what was actually inside. To the outside world, we looked like the perfect family. My father, Gregory Hawthorne, was a respected businessman. My stepmother, Selena, was admired everywhere she went for her beauty and her polish, the kind of woman photographers loved and wait staff feared. My stepsister, Lyra, was the pride of the household — the daughter paraded at galas, the daughter whose report cards were framed, the daughter whose name was actually spoken with affection. And then there was me. The mistake no one wanted to acknowledge, tucked into the corners of a house too grand to admit she existed in it. Unlike Lyra, I didn't have a bedroom. My home was the enclosed balcony off the laundry room — a narrow strip of space just wide enough for a folding cot, a cabinet with a handle that had snapped off years ago, and a blanket so thin I could see the weave of it against the light. When it rained, the cold slid in through the gaps in the glass panels and settled into my bones, and I would lie awake listening to the water and telling myself that this, too, was temporary. That balcony was the only place in that house I could call mine. Not because it had ever been given to me, but because it was the one corner no one else wanted. Every morning I woke before the sun did. I made breakfast, scrubbed the counters, washed the laundry, watered the garden, and made certain every surface in that house gleamed before anyone else came downstairs to notice — or, more accurately, to notice if I'd failed. If even one thing sat a centimeter out of place, Selena found a way to make it my fault. "Mia!" Her voice cut through the kitchen like a blade through silk — smooth on the surface, sharp underneath. I wiped my hands quickly on my apron and hurried into the dining room. "Yes, mom?" She glanced at the table, her eyes narrowing the way they always did right before she found something to correct. "Is this how you arrange the silverware? Honestly, you're useless." "I'm sorry. I'll fix it." "Sorry doesn't solve anything." She shoved the tray into my hands hard enough that one of the glasses nearly slid off the edge. I caught it against my chest, and she watched me do it with something close to disappointment, as if she'd been hoping it would shatter. "If you spent half as much time using your brain as you do daydreaming, maybe you'd be worth feeding." I lowered my head, because that was the only response that had ever kept the mornings short. "I'm sorry." She scoffed and swept past me toward the staircase, her heels striking the marble in a rhythm I had memorized the way other people memorize songs. A few minutes later, Lyra came down in a designer dress that probably cost more than everything I owned combined, her hair falling in loose waves that had clearly taken someone else's hands an hour to create. She smiled the moment she saw Selena. "Good morning, Mommy." My step mom's whole face changed. The sharpness dissolved into something warm, something I only ever saw directed at Lyra. "My beautiful princess." She pulled out a chair, brushing an invisible crumb from the seat before Lyra sat. "I made your favorite pancakes." "Thank you." They laughed together over breakfast, easy and bright, while I stood a few feet away with the tray still in my hands, invisible in the way I had learned to be invisible — present enough to serve, absent enough not to matter. No one asked whether I had eaten. No one ever did. I set down the tray, shouldered my empty backpack, and moved toward the front door. "I'll be leaving for work." Dad looked up from his newspaper for less than a second, his eyes finding me and then dismissing me in the same motion. "Don't be late coming home." That was all. No have a good day. No take care. Just another order, delivered the way you'd remind a stranger to lock a gate behind them. Not like I was his daughter. Like I was staff who happened to share his last name. Since my dad refused to pay for my education, I built my own future in the only currency I had: time. In the mornings, I cleared tables at a small café near the subway station, the smell of espresso clinging to my clothes long after my shift ended. In the afternoons, I stocked shelves at a convenience store two blocks over, boxes of cereal and canned soup stacked in my arms until my shoulders ached. At night, I pulled on a black uniform and worked as a waitress in a downtown bar, balancing trays through crowds of people who tipped generously when they were drunk and not at all when they were sober. Every dollar I earned went into a small metal box hidden beneath my cot. College. Freedom. Escape. Those three words had kept me upright through years that should have broken me. One more month — that was what I kept telling myself. One more month of double shifts and aching feet, and I would finally have enough saved to walk out of that house and never look back. I had almost reached it, too. I was so close I could feel the shape of that future the way you feel a room before you enter it — the promise of a lock on my own door, a bed that was mine, a life no one could take an inventory of and find lacking. I had no idea that my dad had already sold that future out from under me. --- That evening, I came home exhausted from my second job, my feet throbbing inside shoes that had long since stopped fitting properly. The moment I stepped through the door, I noticed the silence first — the kind that has weight to it, the kind that tells you something has already happened before anyone says a word. Dad. Mom. Lyra. All three of them sitting in the living room, none of them smiling. Something was wrong. "Mia." My dad’s voice was unusually serious, stripped of its usual boredom. "Come here." I obeyed, because twenty years of practice had taught my body to move before my mind finished deciding whether it wanted to. He placed a thick brown envelope on the coffee table, squaring it with the edge as though its position mattered more than its contents. "I've made arrangements for your future." My brows drew together. "What do you mean?" "You'll be getting married next month." My heart stopped — an actual, physical stop, like a held breath that forgot to release. "...What?" He slid a stack of papers across the table toward me without looking up. "Sign it." My fingers were trembling before I even touched them. Marriage Contract. The words blurred as my breathing turned shallow and uneven. Bride: Mia Hawthorne. Groom: Alpha Harold Westwood.* Age: Eighty. The paper slipped from my hands and hit the floor between my feet. "N-No..." I looked up at my dad, searching his face for even the smallest crack of a joke. There wasn't one. "This has to be a joke." "It isn't." "I don't even know him!" "You don't need to." "I don't want to marry anyone!" Dad's expression didn't so much as flicker. "The contract has already been signed." The floor seemed to tilt beneath me. "What contract?" "The marriage contract." My lips trembled around the words before I could stop them. "You... already signed it?" "Yes." My voice cracked wide open. "You signed my life away — without asking me?" He folded his hands together on his knee, calm in a way that felt obscene given what he was saying. "Alpha Harold Westwood has agreed to pay one million dollars." One million. Dollars. For me. I stared at him, unable to breathe, unable to think past the roaring in my ears. He hadn't arranged a marriage. He had closed a sale.