Rebon as the Alpha's "ugly" Daughter

Chapter Two: The Disappointment

I found the kitchen by scent alone — coffee gone bitter on a burner, the green-wood smell of someone's wolf having shifted too close to the stove. My new body knew this house even if I didn't. My feet carried me down a narrow hallway like they'd walked it a thousand times, which, I supposed, they had.

Mira Holt's memories sat in me like sediment — not mine, but available if I reached. A house that never felt warm. A father who looked through her. A brother who didn't look at all.

I rounded the corner and there he was. Alpha Garrick Holt, sitting at the head of a table built for a man twice his presence, reading something on his phone with the particular stillness of a wolf who's spent decades making people wait for his attention.

He didn't look up. "You're late."

Late for what, I had no idea. I let the silence answer for me, watching him over the rim of a chipped mug someone had already poured.

That got his eyes up. Pale gray, assessing, already disappointed before he'd even finished the assessment. "You look terrible."

"Good morning to you too," I said.

His jaw tightened. Mira's memory supplied the reason — she never spoke first. Never spoke back. I'd just broken a rule I didn't know existed, and I found I didn't care even a little.

"Watch your tone," Garrick said. "I have enough to deal with without you adding to it."

Across the table, a second figure looked up from his own plate — broad-shouldered, golden in the literal sense, hair like sun-bleached wheat, the kind of face packs built statues of. Kane. He didn't bother hiding his amusement.

"She's got a mouth on her today," Kane said, like I was a dog that had learned a new trick.

Four hundred years ago, men who spoke about me like that ended up kneeling in their own blood by sundown.

I set the mug down with more control than I felt. Patience, Seraphine. This body can't do what your last one could. Yet.

"I had a strange night," I said instead, mildly. "Forgive me if I'm not at my best."

Garrick's eyes narrowed — not with concern, with suspicion, like strangeness in his daughter was an inconvenience rather than a warning sign. "The Lansing envoy arrives in three days. I need this house presentable. That means you—" his gaze swept me, head to foot, with the flat distaste of a man inspecting a stain "—stay out of sight. Understood?"

The old me would have laughed in his face. The old me had once made an Alpha twice this man's rank apologize on his knees for less.

But the old me was dead, and I was wearing a girl nobody respected, in a body too weak to back up anything my pride might demand. So I swallowed it — the first of what I suspected would be many swallowed things — and said, "Understood."

Kane smirked into his coffee. "Don't worry, Mira. Nobody was going to ask you to do anything else anyway."

I smiled at him. Just a small one. The kind of smile Seraphine used to give men right before their kingdoms ended.

"No," I agreed softly. "I don't suppose they were."

Let them underestimate me a little longer.

It would only make the ending sweeter.