Chapter 3

That single word — weak and sorrowful — was devastating.

Father frowned at her. "What did you just call me?"

She lifted that scarred face, eyes full of tears. "Father. I'm your real daughter. The nursemaid switched us at birth. The girl living as the Pack's second daughter is Livia's child. I've been suffering under Livia's hands for fifteen years."

I quietly tugged Petra's sleeve and nodded toward Mother's wing of the house.

Petra understood immediately and slipped away.

Father was too stunned to speak. But his eyes moved slowly over Elena's face.

I put on a troubled expression. "Father, she wouldn't let go of me at the dressmaker's shop. I'd never seen her before — but she knew exactly where I was from. And if you look past the scars, her face looks about seventy percent like mine."

Father's expression shifted several times. He still didn't say anything.

Then Petra came back with Mother, moving quickly. The moment Elena saw Mother, she burst into harder sobs. "Mother!"

Mother stared at Elena for a long moment, then let out a cry and collapsed.

The commotion brought Grandmother down from her private retreat.

Grandmother rushed back to the manor, had the Pack Healer tend to Mother first, and then arranged a bloodline verification ritual.

Once it was confirmed that Elena was the Calloway Pack's true second daughter, Grandmother sent people to "invite" Livia — the former nursemaid turned dressmaker — into the estate.

Maybe she knew there was no way out. Livia confessed everything.

Facing the furious Calloway Pack, she broke into a wild laugh. "Gerald, you killed my husband because you wanted me. You forced me into your bed and then abandoned me. After your child was born, you made me a nursemaid. But even after your real second daughter came into the world, you still wouldn't give me any standing. My daughter is your blood too. Why should she live as a nobody? Why didn't you care about her at all?"

"I found out later that Clara was known throughout the territory for her jealousy. Six women had already died in this house before I ever came along. If I had become a concubine, my daughter and I were as good as dead. So I did what I had to do."

Livia's eyes were red as blood. "Clara, how does it feel to have loved the wrong daughter for fifteen years? Gerald, how does it feel to have fire break out in your own house? You both brought this on yourselves."

Mother wept while touching the scars on Elena's face.

Father raised his sleeve to cover his eyes.

Zara stared at Livia in terror. "I'm not your daughter. I'm the Alpha's daughter. Father, Mother — make this woman leave!"

Grandmother let out a long sigh, her eyes full of disappointment. "Zara, I never expected you to be so cold-hearted you'd deny your own mother."

Zara's face went pale. She finally understood that her days of being spoiled rotten were over.

Three days later, Livia was brought into the Calloway estate.

She was Gerald's wronged woman — that was the reality. Grandmother forced Father to take Livia in as a low-ranked Bond partner, and she warned Mother not to have her killed.

But what Livia had done to the Calloway Pack's rightful daughter could not go unpunished.

After Mother put her through several rounds of Pack discipline, Livia's back was broken. She spent the rest of her days bedridden.

Mother assigned two of the roughest servants to look after her, and they were not kind. Nearly every night I could hear sounds of pain and begging coming from Livia's wing.

When I thought of what her pins and knives had done to my skin in my previous life, I found those sounds very pleasant to listen to.

Day by day, Livia died under the slow misery of it. The servants wouldn't clean her properly, and the smell from her room grew unbearable. That wing of the estate became a place no one in the Pack ever went near again.

One enemy from my past life was gone. Something heavy in my chest lifted a little.

To hide the family scandal, my parents registered Elena as the Calloway Pack's third daughter when she took her place in the family. They told outsiders that Mother had given birth to twins, that a rival family had bribed the midwife to take the younger one away and abandon her in the wild, and that a village woman had found her and raised her until now.

There was no welcome ceremony. No apology. No compensation of any kind.

In this life, Elena had none of her past-life beauty. Not only was her face destroyed, but Livia had also cut the tendons in her hands and feet when she was young. Even with her memories from before, she couldn't play music or dance.

Elena, as she stood now, was just a daughter with nothing to offer.

The vast difference between how she had been treated in that life and this one twisted something inside her. Every time she looked at Zara — spoiled for fifteen years straight — there was undisguised hatred in her eyes.

When Petra told me that Elena had gone to buy a lust potion from black-market traders on the Pack's outskirts, I couldn't help curling up my lips.

This dog-eat-dog show was finally starting.