1. Lyra

Panic is rising. You can smell it in the air. There are maybe only hours until the Freeze descends. Every servant, including myself, hurries goods down into the packs underground concrete base for the next six months.

Luna Corina still has trunks of furs and gowns to transport. We are her, vile, scuttling bugs. We say nothing because her slaps and pinches are nothing compared to her father. To be truthful,he is my father too, not that he has done anything but add to the suffering in my life.

Valdis is a tyrant of an Alpha, delighting in the life or death power he wields. 

Especially at this time of the year. Metres of snow is due to fall any day. Vast, lethal ice fields form that even the thickest, furriest wolf cannot withstand. We are hundreds of miles from the next settlement. 

Once that bunker door slams shut, you can’t hear the begging of those trapped outside. Those first burials are the worst jobs of spring. It never gets easier. Alpha Valdis was more willing to make an example of an unfortunate slave who caught his eye.

Above ground was a stone fortress, the packhouse for the other months of the year. I stood in one of the turrets, gathering piles of furs in my arms. For the briefest moment I paused and gazed at the view. Nothing but cragged, snowy black mountains for miles. 

Getting through each Freeze was like surviving a shipwreck and not being eaten by sharks. Except we have to keep going through it every year.

How much fear can you endure before your brain is rewired to trust nothing?

My silver-haired friend Elvie and I had extra work due to Mara being taken to Valdis’ quarters again last night.  To refuse was death, to attempt escape this close to winter was no better.

Numbed by fear, we long stopped dreaming beyond the cragged mountain horizon. So with a trembling head of golden blonde hair and tearful blue eyes Mara had silently stumbled towards his chamber.

Elvie and I stayed up waiting, praying that the screams we heard were from an injured animal and not our best friend. 

Female servants wear long plum velvet gowns with gold-buttoned fronts. Luna Corina wore rich silks, warmed by the immaculately pale polar furs. She draped them over her bare skin, the ice princess. 

We shared long, raven-black hair and green eyes. I sometimes wondered if we would have looked alike had I been fed properly during my younger years. Instead I was a petite figure, enabling her to always look down on me.

The apple of the Alpha’s eye, Corina had eagerly developed his taste for cruelty too.

I am thankfully safe from the Alpha’s vicious sexual interest. Only because I carry the shame of being his offspring. The daughter of a madman. I was born from one of his many previous assaults on other servants during his twenty year reign. 

Guilt that I was safe pushed me to care for all of his victims. Nurse of the whores Luna Corina once described me. 

I never get used to seeing what he is capable of. Even with shifter healing, poor Mara was a mash of purple, green and brown bruises today, one blue eye swollen beyond recognition. 

I guided Mara into the dark backrooms of the underground bunker. Dragging her mangled frame down the stairs broke my heart as she tried to muffle her cries. 

“Lyra, he will kill me soon, I can’t do another Freeze down there, with him…” she whispered. A sickly cough from being forced to crawl back to us in the cold left her spluttering.

“I won’t let it happen, I’ll always try to look after you,” I soothed, adding some minted balm to her sores.

Softly whimpering under her tattered blankets, blue eyes wide and frightened. “What can we do though?”

For that I had no answer.

With regret in my heart, I had to leave Mara and return to work. Musty air, grey brick walls and red, painted concrete floors. Strip lighting above. Once the huge metal vaulted door shut  this was our world. Protected from the deathly cold outside by entombing ourselves.

“Lyra!” came Elvie’s shrill cry from the bottom of the stairs. “I’ve got to prep the Black Hall, can you handle the rest of the furs on your own?”

Looking out from Luna Corina’s turreted bedroom window the sun was already setting, soon it would be so cold every limb prickled agonisingly. “Yeah, sure, I’ve got it!” 

Setting up the Black Hall gave me the creeps anyway. When the full moon hits and a load of Alpha and Beta hormones combine with cabin fever it turns crazy. The Black Hall is where anything goes for a night.

Pulsing music, hardly any light and soft furnishings allowed sweating, grunting knotted couplings to take place under a veil of semi-anonymity. Its power thrills and terrifies me.

Once the full moon's power ebbed away, nothing was discussed. Real relationships underground were completely forbidden. Every woman was claimed as Valdis’ property already anyway. Only on a full moon did his men cut loose and they took every minute of it.

My fear of the Black Hall is why I risk my life at the back of Luna Coraline’s tower. During summer I tend to a small, lavender like bush called monk's pepper. It has medicinal powers, but mainly, it lowers one's sex drive. 

I make a strong, foul-smelling tea with it and it takes the edge off, just enough to keep myself sane and out the Hall. Seriously, painfully aroused, but sane. 

Without it I dread what my wolf would succumb to. Never again I mutter. Harvesting the final pale purple flowerheads a few days ago, they hang in a small bag flat to my waist.

Our cruel Alpha suspended the Black Hall one month during the last Freeze. Two fired-up Beta’s killed each other over nothing. Without a way to disperse the full moon tension even his most steadfast Beta’s could turn savage. 

Valdis spent most of the freeze in his luxurious, cosy, fur-lined chambers. No concrete misery in his world. He wore his long dirty black hair plaited into huge twisting coils. He stank of sweat, musk and filth. He enjoyed being an Alpha with no class. Those long, matted coils move like snakes down his muscular, tattooed back. 

He was Alpha not because of his superior bloodline, but because he was a brutal, murderous psychopath. Over twenty years ago he murdered the ruling Ragnar family and took over. Corina was the product of him assaulting the dethroned Luna after his victory, proclaiming her a princess. 

I am merely one of many accidents from his obsession with servants. The others illegitimates all tripped up in some small way and found themselves dead. Only Corina and I remain. 

Surviving amongst the violence of a bloodthirsty Alpha has left me hardened. There is a shell around me that nobody will ever break through. Trust nobody. Not even Mara and Elvie, though I love their company. 

It is how I survive this so-called life of mine. No physical contact with another soul if I can help it. Mates, love, adoration, they’re for the others in this world. The ones I dare not envy for fear my sanity will break.