His Cold Heart, My Broken Fate

6

Chapter 6 — Mira

He threw his shirt aside.

I screamed until my throat gave out and then I just made sounds, raw and broken, while he reached for his belt. The buckle hit the grass. His trousers went next, down to his knees, and he looked at me the way something looks at food.

I kept moving. I kept fighting. My body had nothing left but I kept moving anyway because stopping meant accepting it and I could not accept it.

He grabbed my dress and tore it open with one pull.

The sound it made was the worst sound I had ever heard.

I cried. Not from the pain. From what it meant. I was exposed and freezing and completely helpless and I cried because there was nothing else left to do. I could not let this happen. I could not let him be the one to take that from me. Not like this. Not him.

He said something ugly about how I looked. I stopped hearing words after that.

I felt him reach for my underwear.

I felt everything that came next.

And then mercifully, slowly, the pain and the exhaustion and the darkness behind my eyes rose up and swallowed me whole and I stopped feeling anything at all.

---

I came back to the sound of voices.

Several of them. Close.

My head was a single throbbing point of pain and my eyelids were so heavy I had to fight to get them open. The light hit like a fist. I blinked and blinked until shapes formed above me.

Someone standing over me. Looking down at me.

I knew that look. I had been looked at like that my whole life.

I sat up.

My body screamed. Every part of me. But the moment I became aware of where I was and what I was wearing, or wasn't wearing, I sat up fast, instinct overriding everything else.

I was half naked on the ground. My dress was in pieces around me. The pain between my legs confirmed what I already knew.

There were people everywhere.

"She has no shame."

"I always thought she was strange. Didn't think she was that kind of girl."

The voices came from all directions, low and satisfied the way people sound when they think they have figured something out about someone they already looked down on.

I pulled my underwear up with shaking hands and covered myself as best I could and looked around.

He was standing nearby. Dressed. Upright. Talking to a group of pack members with the easy confidence of someone telling a story he had already decided the ending of.

I stood up. My legs shook badly and I nearly went down again but I locked my knees and stayed upright. The anger that moved through me was the only warm thing in my body.

The crowd shifted. People turned to look at something behind me and stepped aside to make a path.

My father walked through. Celia beside him.

Celia's hand went to her mouth. "Oh my god," she breathed, staring at me.

My father stopped and said nothing. Just looked at me with his mouth open and his eyes already filling with something that was not concern.

I turned and pointed at the man who had done this to me and opened my mouth to speak.

He pointed back first.

"Your daughter drugged me!" he shouted, loud enough for everyone. "She brought alcohol and I drank it without knowing and then she threw herself at me!"

The words hit me like a physical thing. I stood there with my mouth open and nothing came out.

The crowd murmured. Heads turned between us.

"Mira."

My father's voice. Low and furious and completely certain already.

Then another set of footsteps and the crowd parted again and Alpha Jack walked through. He stopped when he saw me. Something crossed his face, surprise, discomfort, and he looked away quickly. Then he pulled off his long coat without hesitating and threw it to me.

I caught it and wrapped it around myself and held it closed with both hands.

"What happened here?" Jack asked, his voice quiet and carrying the kind of weight that made the crowd go still.

"She came to me," the man said again, performing it now, voice rising. "Drugged my drink and started coming on to me. I didn't know what was happening until it was too late."

"He is lying." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "Every word of that is a lie."

"Liar!" he shot back.

"He attacked me last night in the forest behind my house." I looked at Jack when I said it. Then at my father. Then at anyone whose face showed even a flicker of uncertainty. "I fought him and I screamed for help and nobody came and I passed out. That is what happened. That is the truth."

Some of them looked at the man. Really looked, for just a moment.

I held onto that. It was the only thing I had.

I needed them to believe me. I had never needed anything more in my life.