Wolfless
745 Words
Evelyn POV
They report that the rogue pack saved my life.
But I know better.
They did not receive me as an assistant or a person to take care of. They brought me here since I was alive since my flesh could still be utilized. Everything about me was easy to them as soon as they knew I was wolfless.
A wolfless girl doesn’t fight back.
A wolfless girl doesn’t matter.
That’s how I became a slave.
The term wolfless trails me in all directions and sticks to me like dirt. Instead of calling me by my name, they use it as though to say anything else would be to imply that I was a person. Similar names are reserved to belong, wolves.
The most used is Alpha's sister. She pronounces it gradually and with a smile, relishing it. Wolfless. It's similar to how I never had a name in the first place.
I wonder why it does not make me angrier sometimes.
But it seems a futile anger when you are thrown away.
I am bending down by the workplace trying to clean a broken wooden tray out of grime, but my mind is taking me back to Lunar Crest-back to the time when everything was over. The evening I would have been Luna. The night when my parents stared at me and said that I never belonged to them.
They said I was adopted. That my true parents, in the war nearby, had died, bitten by wolves. That they accommodated me since I was alive. Because I cried.
and then they sent me away as a wrong that they had by last succeeded in rectifying.
“Hey.”
The voice comes behind me, and it is quick, sharp, and familiar.
“Wolfless.”
I don’t turn right away. I already know who it is.
She comes closer, anyway, crunching her boots in the dirt, and halts just near enough to remind me that she can. She is pretty--that much they all say. The type of pretty that the male rogues gazed upon too long, the type that causes them to forget that she is a slave like the rest of us.
Her name is Mira.
I know so because I have heard them whisper it, and they have their mouths open and may as well be saying it is sweet in their mouths. I do because she makes everybody know it.
Mira puts her arms across and gazes at me. “You’re slow today.”
I say I am working and continue staring at the tray.
She laughs quietly. “So am I. Why you will get mine out, said she.
She leaves a parcel of dirty labour at my feet, hefty stuff, wet stuff, and stuff that will not come to a finish in hours and will have my hands trembling. I am looking at it, and then gradually at her.
“That’s not mine,” I say.
She throws her head back and examines me as though I were something that is uninteresting and can be easily substituted. “Everything here is yours. That’s how this works.”
I watch her closely now. The way she stands. The manner in which she is aware that nobody will stop her. How she realizes that the males around her are listening but are not being obvious about it, and their eyes are already roving over her figure.
“You don’t want trouble, Mira adds, lowering her voice just enough to sound kind. You have enough attention by existing alone.
I sense it now--the oppression of being observed. Measured. Judged. Desired in ways that do not involve choice.
I turn my head over my shoulder and take up the work.
Not because I agree.
Since to live here was to know when the resistance would only prove more expensive.
Mira smiles, satisfied. “Good girl.”
Hips swinging, she switches and walks off, pulling each and every gaze back to her like the force of gravity. The pack folds around her in different ways - she desires it, she despises it, she shields it.
I watch her go for a moment.
Mira, I think.
She still has the name of her own.
I head back my job with already sore hands as the cold drains into my bones.
Wolfless.
Slave.
Adopted.
Banished.
All true.
But I’m still here.
And as long as they shatter me into bits, that will be all I can do.
- Writer
