The Alpha’s Forsaken Vengeance

Episode 2

Aurora POV

It reeked of bleach and crushed dreams in the palace maids’ quarters.

I scrubbed furiously at a blood-red stain on Isadora’s silk blouse, thinking, Surely no one would be able to tell if it never came out. Two weeks of servitude had given me the perfect amount of pressure to apply — just enough to seem fawning, and not enough to actually work. A fitting metaphor for my life at the moment.

"Aurora!" Martha’s voice cut through the laundry room. “Her Majesty needs the new towels. Now."

I shut my eyes, trying to brace against the next wave of searing nausea. The fever that began four nights ago now twisted around my bones like barbed wire, increasing in intensity day-by-day.

"Did you hear me?" The head maid stood in the doorway, her pinched face aglow with the delight of watching royalty being reduced to rags.

"Yes, Martha." I dropped the silk that was spotted, and then picked up the piles of plush white towels.

The hallways that were meant to be my dominion Masters of the Universe stretched before me like a taunt. Every corner held specters of another existence, one in which I walked as future Luna, not squalid maid delivering linen to the sibling who’d snatched all I had.

My old home had been cleared out and sold just hours after Ethan’s coronation. When I’d escaped there looking for refuge, people were already plunking down furniture. Not only had Isadora stolen my future, she’d methodically wiped my past.

I stopped outside the royal suite, towel-ragged arms quaking, and knocked lightly.

“Enter,” Isadora ordered, a honey-coated venom syruping her voice.

She reclined on a chaise, clad only in one of Ethan’s shirts, long legs outstretched like a resting predator. It smelled of s*x and expensive perfume.

“At long last,” she said languorously, unfazed by the near-nude position she had yet to abandon. "Leave them in the bathroom."

I looked down and walked across the room, meaning to ignore the rumpled bedclothes, still warm from their bodies.

"Oh, Aurora?" As I reached the bathroom door, Isadora called. “We’re putting on the Northern Alpha tonight. You'll serve."

My stomach lurched violently. "I'm ill—"

“Who asked for a medical report? Her smile was sweet poison. "You'll serve. In the blue uniform. The one that makes you look particularly... servanty.

I had laid down the towels in the marble bathroom sanctuary and was gripping the sink, my vision swimming with black spots.

Just breathe, Zoey demanded inside. *We are stronger than this. *

But were we? Since that night, my wolf had been oddly subdued, as if the betrayal had cut her too.

"Actually...” Isadora stood in the threshold of the door, her amber eyes measuring. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you, sister.

I twisted myself into a standing position and the room spun. "Yes?"

She c****d her head, studying me with eyes that were so like mine but also leagues colder. “Do you know what it feels like when he calls my name every night? When his body reacts to mine like yours never did?”

The cruel intention was to break whatever spirit I still had.

“Is this what you really wanted?” I asked quietly. “It’s not just him, but to see me broken?”

Something flickered in her face — not remorse, but recognition. All of us have roles we are born to play, Aurora.” You were never meant for his world."

"And you were?"

Her laughter, like shattered glass, cut. "I was created for it. Mother knew — why do you think she made sure I was the one who survived?”

The words landed like physical blows. "What are you talking about?"

Isadora’s expression immediately hardened, the fleeting candor disappearing. "Get out. And don't be late tonight."

By the end of the night, the fever burned hotter. Jessie had found me turned on my side on my thin mattress, shaking violently even though summer heat poured in through an open window.

"Aurora!" Her cool hand pressed my forehead, and she jerked back. "Gods, you're burning alive!"

“Got to work tonight,” I muttered through chattering teeth. "Northern Alpha..."

“You need a doctor, not another shift.” She eased me onto the ground, concern creasing her face. "This isn't normal."

“My life is not normal anymore. The smile I tried to force was like shattering glass.

Jessie—the last friend standing after my tumble—shook her head stubbornly. "I'm covering for you. Stay here."

“Isadora made a special request for me.”

“Then the queen b***h can pull you out herself.” She wrapped the thin blanket around me. "Rest. I'll bring medicine."

Waves of fever dreams crashed over me, violent, pulling me under into visions of silver eyes and midnight warnings. The stranger from the staircase still haunted me, those words echoing in my head: *The true Alpha bloodline. The one they must kill you to take. *

I woke, gasping, my stomach heaving. Somehow I made it to the communal bathroom just in time to violently leave bile.

“This ends now,” Jessie’s voice came from behind, helping me to steady my shaking body. “Royal clinic or not, you need medical help.”

The palace corridors blurred as she half-carried me to the east wing. I had no strength to resist.

Dr. Kings — a man with kind eyes and clinical efficiency — glanced at me before calling for immediate blood work. The nurses drew vials of my blood while I slept in and out of consciousness on the sterile examination table.

“I’ll be back,” Jessie took my hand. “Going to see if Her Majesty has noticed you’re gone.”

I sat alone in the silent room, counting ceiling tiles to maintain consciousness. Twenty-three across. Twenty-seven down. Six hundred twenty-one total. Numbers didn’t hurt you like people did.

Dr. Kings reappeared with a tablet and an unreadable expression. “Ms. Aldrich, it’s… astonishing, your results.”

"I'm dying, aren't I?" The question sprang forth in bemused calmness.

He blinked, then laughed — a disbelief, real laugh. "No. Quite the opposite." He turned the tablet around to face me. "You're creating new life."

Time stopped as I looked at the hormone levels, turned red. "That's impossible."

“Three weeks pregnant, in fact.” He swiped to another screen. "And that's not all. “Your wolf is undergoing physiological changes that are usually associated with —

“There’s been a mistake,” I blurted, panic rising. "Check again."

His expression softened. "I ran the test twice. The results are conclusive."

My hands shook as I took the printout: Aurora Aldrich, pregnant, 21 days gestation.

Ethan's child. There could be no other.

Dr. Kings kept talking about prenatal care and follow-up appointments, but his words were drowned out by the thundering heartbeat in my ears. I fell off the exam table, holding the results like a life preserver.

"Ms. Aldrich, you need rest—"

Yet I was already on the move, pulled by primal instinct. I needed some space to process this life changing news. I stumbled outside and the night air slapped my fever-flushed skin.

Stars spun above, cold and far away. No moon tonight — she had left me too, like everyone else.

Not everybody, Zoey stirred in me, stronger than she’d been in weeks. *You will never stop being the child. *

My hand drifted to my flat abdomen. A child. Ethan's child. Our child.

Would this change everything? Were he to choose, more or less reject Isadora, what they had for the unborn, their pup, their mate bond?

Hope, that insidious emotion, fluttered in my chest.

“Don’t be naïve,” Zoey warned. *He made his choice. *

But I forced myself to make one last desperate play to salvage some piece of my broken life.

Resolutely, I returned to the palace and favoured myself with the comforts of Ethan’s own vacated study whilst he enjoyed dinner with the Northern Alpha. His leather-bound planner was opened and spread across the top of the desk — he glanced at it religiously each evening, a creature of habit despite his recent empowered status.

I typed all of this — trembling fingers, attached the medical results and slipped it into the planner where he would see it alone.

Then I waited, flickering between feverish hope and icy dread.

Hours crawled by. The grandfather clock chimed midnight, then one, then two.

When the knock finally came, it wasn’t Ethan but a guard with a stone face bearing an envelope sealed with the royal crest.

I was alone in my tiny room, and I broke the seal with trembling hands, my heart about to crash through my ribs.

The note inside was short, scrawled in Ethan’s sharp, angular script:

Aurora,

*This is your final sorry attempt at manipulation. Whatever game you play, whatever you say you bear, I deny it utterly. If — on the 1 in 7 billion chance that your claim has merit — you will kill it dead. *

*This is not a request. This is an Alpha command. *

*Defy me, and your final visage in this world shall be my face, I swear it. I will not have my bloodline sullied by your the child by a disgraced wolf. *

Never speak of this again.

—E

The paper crumpled in my hand and something deep inside me broke — not my heart this time, but something more elemental.

Instead, an icy rage began to crystallize.

I moved on autopilot, cramming what few bits of my life I could fit into the tattered backpack I’d arrived with. The entirety of my life here would now fit in one bag.

As I crammed in clothes, a flash of silver caught my eye on the windowsill — an object that hadn’t been there a moment earlier.

A compass. Old, heavy, with unusual spiky letters engraved around the rim that seemed to change when not looked at directly. On the inside of the lid, an inscription:

*Take true north when you are finally ready to step into what is yours *

Beneath it, a folded note:

*He loses his crown, the father who sows his blood. The sister who betrays her blood pays with her life. Both crimes demand payment. *

*I told you they were hiding something, little wolf. *

—M

The compass seared in my palm even through the night’s cold. North. I needed to go north. Away from the betrayal, the lies, the broken shards of my old existence.

My other hand moved instinctively to my belly, pressing gently. A raw, animalistic protectiveness flooded my body.

“We’re going,” I whispered to the life within me, my voice shaking but my resolve not. And we’re not coming back.

The trees outside my window shivered in a sudden gust, but it was the wind that made me shiver. It was the pulse of power coming alive inside — inside us.

Nevernot, Zoey’s voice echoed in the fabric of my mind, sharper and clearer than I had ever heard it. She dropped my phone and held me tight and her presence shrouded me like armor and I felt forged from broken pieces.

We will return.

My heart raced, visions flaring through my mind — faces twisted with disbelief, terror. The turncoats groveling on their knees before us.

Zoey’s growl rumbled through me, low and dangerous.

And when the do... they shall kneel.

The wind shifted. The night held its breath.

Somewhere in my blood, something stirred — ancient, powerful, awakening.

And I headed north, clutching my silver compass.

And ran.