The Goddess and The King

The putrid smell of stale beer hit my nostrils like a ton of bricks. It took everything in me to hold back the bile that threatened to come up my esophagus. I held my breath as I walked into the den, tip-toeing as I stepped over limp, hung over, sweat-covered bodies. Nothing was worse than waking up after a night of my half-wit brothers partying. Robert and Caleb could not care less about cleanliness, they only cared about ecstasy, the partying, the drinking and the s*x. I, on the other hand, was the one that got to clean up after them. And that was not getting started for a few hours, it looked like, as I tried to find the best strategy to get around the mass of bodies in the doorway of the kitchen. Why did my brothers have to have parties where the rest of the family slept? Our father was the Beta of the Twilight Dawn pack, one of the mightiest and most terrifying Werewolf packs in the world. As beta wolves, my father and my mother were rarely home. When they were, my dad ignored me and trained my brothers. My mother would focus her attention on me and gave me boring and tedious lessons on how to run a home and how to keep a mate. Fat chance I would ever get a mate. I was a weak wolf. School was hard on me. From the moment the pack knew I had no wolf, they started the torment. The alpha’s son, James and all of his cronies would corner me in the most precarious place, hold me down and start slashing my skin with silver blades. I would come home in tears, my shirts soaking in blood. My mother would look at me and tsk, hurrying me out of my father's sight as I bled all over the living room's Persian rugs as tears rimmed my eyes. “If you are going to be weak,” he said angrily. “Then you need not to cry about it.” It had been a whole year of torment. A whole year of pain. Amethyst, my wolf, named for her beautiful amethyst eyes, she frequently tells me that our mate will save us and we will not be weak for much longer. If only I believed her. I finally jumped over the grody bodies and made my way into the kitchen, only to find a different horror story in the kitchen. Unidentified juices were all over the countertops, more naked bodies laid on the floor with Goddess-knows-what plastered all over them. Several were snoring. And in the middle of the mess was the man I loathed the most, James. James was a good looking boy. Sunny blonde hair that fell just above his eyes in a boyish manly way. Chiseled cheek bones of an alpha, with hard crystal blue f**k-me eyes. He was a God. He was an ass. I groaned. This morning could not get any worse. Tip toeing through the heaps of naked gross bodies, I slowly and quietly pulled open the back door and stepped out into the fresh air and inhaled deep. I closed the back door softly behind me. Anger ran through me. These were the men who were going to run this pack one day. And I knew they were going to run it into the ground. Thinking about how I needed to escape this hell hole of a pack, I missed the white jets soaring over my head. Instead, I reached up to my neck and slightly grazed the intricate celtic symbol that I had around my slender neck. All I thought about as I watched a single package fall out of the sky was the mysterious man who gave it to me. The man’s eyes were dark, not quite black but a dark, dark, very dark brown that made me feel like I was drawing in those orbs every time we met. His hair was as dark as his eyes, clean cut and styled in a business man’s part. He held himself professionally. That is, until he met me. When he visited my family’s home, he would bow to my father as most would, since he was the Beta. He would say his formalities to my brothers. Then, from the first day I felt his dark, seducing orbs lay their sight on me, he would smile and relax. His words were always the same, “what a beautiful girl!” My father, if he were there, would interject, without fail, that I was weak or I was getting ready for a betrothal that never came to fruition. He would try his hardest to get his eyes off of me, but the man never could stop until something more exciting or unsettling would happen. That man visited quite often after our first initial meeting. He would come at times father was busy with our Alpha, Alpha Marin. He first would spend time with me in the garden adjacent to the Beta’s home. But as we spent more time together, he would often take me to his temporary residence in the pack. Telling me it was our secret place where we can be ourselves without worrying about what the world thinks. The last day he was in our pack, he found me in the garden again. His eyes darted around looking everywhere and only relaxing when he recognized my face. Hurriedly, he sauntered up to me and grabbed my hand and placed a small cold object in it. Slowly, I opened my hand and viewed the Celtic pendant that he laid there. “Danica,” he said, quietly. His words came out of his mouth low and urgent. “ I need you to promise me that you will wear this at all times.” His eyes showed great worry. “I will, Killian,” I promised, just as quietly and urgently. He nodded, deciding that was enough. Smiling, he took my hand and kissed them softly, stating that whatever was going on with us was not over yet. We said our goodbyes that day. And I have not seen him since. That was also a year ago. Shortly after was my sixteenth birthday, the day we got our wolves. That was the day the whole pack found out my wolf was weak. She did not want to show herself to her alpha. And thus the torment started. Those dark, almost black-eyes were the last thing I thought about as the package made contact with the ground around me. My ears started ringing as pain flooded my body. Then black.