The Alpha's Cursed Queen

2

“The cops are going to want to talk to you,” Sam says as he hands me a towel to wipe the soup remnants off me.

I glance anxiously back at the door leading to the small hallway that opens into the dining area. “It’ll only make things worse for me, Sam. Just help me get cleaned up so I can—”

He gives me an angry look. “You can’t seriously be planning to let her off the hook again! Have some self-respect, Alice! The woman is a menace. She keeps coming in here with new men and making a scene.”

I study him, my insides churning with humiliation and anger. “You think I don’t want her to pay for what she’s doing to me? She’s got backing, Sam. Her father is the beta of the pack. He’ll make my life a living hell if I get his daughter arrested. He already had the pack stop my college funding because I made a fuss over Willow harassing me last year. I can’t afford—”

I don’t get the opportunity to finish my sentence because the kitchen door is pushed open and a police officer walks through. He wipes the sweat off his forehead and looks around. When his eyes land on me, he blinks. “You the server who had the soup dropped on them?”

I’m about to say no, but my appearance is a dead giveaway.

“Do you need to go to the hospital?” He gives me a once-over. “You don’t look too good.”

I shake my head. “I’m fine. I don’t want to press charges.”

“You don’t?” The officer sounds incredulous. “From what I just heard, you had scalding hot soup thrown on you.”

“It was a misunderstanding. The customer’s hand slipped,” I tell him quickly. “It wasn’t his—”

“Sure,” the officer says casually, glancing around the kitchen once more. “Where’s the security footage? I noticed you guys have cameras here.”

The blood drains from my face, and Sam gives me an apologetic look. I don’t understand why till he gestures with his hand. “Right this way, Officer.”

I feel the knife digging in my back. How can he do this? He knows what the Moonlight Pack will do to me if Willow gets in trouble!

I quickly step in front of the policeman, wiping my face with the towel again. “I don’t want to press charges. Shouldn’t that be enough? It’s my choice, right?”

“I’m afraid not.” The man doesn’t look like he cares what I want to do. “I have to file a report.”

“But if I don’t want to press charges, there’s nothing you can do about it,” I argue, feeling foolish as I say the words.

He eyes me. “You look young, so let me give you a word of advice.”

The guy can hardly be a year or two older than me!

“I understand that this job may be important to you, but if someone assaults you, you shouldn’t protect that person. Now, let me do my job.”

After sharing the most useless bit of advice I’ve ever heard, he nods at Sam.

I watch in dismay as Sam leads him to the back office where the security monitors are.

I am so screwed.

*****

I was never loved as a child.

I was never wanted.

My parents abandoned me on the doorstep of the Moonlight Pack’s orphanage when I was just a month old. It’s bad enough if you’re an orphan in a wolf pack, but if you don’t have a wolf spirit, you are at the bottom of the pecking order.

Growing up, I was told I should be grateful I wasn’t killed when the head of the orphanage found me. I was raised alongside the other orphans, but once they picked up on how I was being treated by the adults, they too found a target for their abuse.

Wolf shifters value strength and power. Even when it comes to picking mates, they prefer to choose those who are strong, who can bear powerful offspring. I probably would have been handed over to the human authorities if I had not displayed the other traits that my kind has. I may be slower than a wolf shifter, but I’m faster than a human. And I am pretty strong.

Sam, on the other hand, has only the strength of a human. He has shifter blood in his veins, but he has never displayed any characteristic that would force the Moonlight Pack to focus on him. He has been allowed to live as a human, the pack never interfering in his affairs. It’s almost as if he doesn’t exist as far as they’re concerned. Nobody is rude to him. Nobody treats him like a pariah.

However, he has been denied treatment from a healer for his mother. Humans who sleep with wolf shifters and give birth to their children have a very low survival rate. Human bodies are simply not meant to host foreign DNA.

Sam doesn’t understand my position in the pack since he has never suffered the treatment I receive on a daily basis. Like I’m sure I will today. As I walk over to Thomas Elvin’s office, I’m trying to prepare myself for what’s to follow.

His daughter got taken to the human police station in the back of a cruiser yesterday. It doesn’t matter that I refused to press charges against either her or Flint. The humiliation alone is enough.

As the beta of the pack, Thomas is the second-in-command after Alpha Patrick Black. And he’s very protective of Willow.

He once watched his daughter punch me in the throat as a child, and he just chuckled. He’s well aware of the abuse she doles out on me, but he has never intervened to stop her. What he did do was tell the principal of our pack school not to allow me to be part of a local mathematics quiz tournament, simply because his daughter, who is several years older than me, did not make the team.

When Willow complained that a teacher had praised my performance in a play that all the grades participated in, Thomas had a talk with the drama teacher, who then proceeded to make my life a living hell till the end of the term. That had been the one class I actually enjoyed. All because Willow did not like that I was doing better than her.