6

Ella’s POV

By the end of the night, every inch of my body was screaming in pain. Alpha Grey lived up to his word. He kept torturing me for two hours with different whips. My back, front, behind, and thighs were all marked by his whips. He left red angry marks everywhere. The worst ones were the 20 cuts on my back caused from my punishment for being late. My vagina was bleeding too. Being forced by him multiple times always caused tears in my walls.

I painfully got up from his bed where he was snoring without a care in the world. I put my clothes on while biting the insides of my cheeks as each movement made me want to scream out loud, but I needed to keep my mouth shut so I don’t wake him. I took one last look at him before I left. He was sleeping like a fucking baby who just drank his mother’s milk and filled his stomach. I silently prayed someone would gut his insides tomorrow during battle.

I went to the kitchen seeing as I will not be sleeping tonight from the pain. I learned some things during the times he purposefully let me leave without his blood, like boiling some herbs in water that prevent infection and ease the pain of the cuts on my back.

I waited for the water to be warm then took a bowl back to my room. It was a very small room in the lowest levels of the pack house just above the dungeons where prisoners are kept sometimes.

I had no bed of course, only two cots on top of each other that sat on the floor near the wall. One of them used to belong to my father back when we shared the room together. After he died, I took his cot and put it on top of mine as mine was getting a little thin from sleeping on it for the past 17 years.

I didn’t have much of anything in my room. There was a small wooden table on the wall opposite the cots, where I kept all of my books that were given to me by the school until I was 10. I would keep reading them over and over so I don’t forget whatever I learned during those years as well as entertain myself when I was feeling bored. I couldn’t exactly watch tv like normal people do seeing as I never had one. Most of the books were too withered now. There was a small wooden closet that had no doors next to the table, where a few of my belongings were folded inside it.

I set the bowl of warm herbs’ water on the floor next to my cot and started to take my shirt off wincing in the process. I retrieved an old ratty t-shirt from the closet that I don’t wear anymore then rinsed it in the warm water. I squeezed the excess water then placed it on my back sighing instantly as I felt some of the stinging lessen a little. I laid on my stomach and soaked the t-shirt every now and then. I was still in pain, but it was manageable, that or my tolerance was getting better, I thought bitterly. Goddess, what I wouldn’t give to sleep through the pain and wake up in a different place where everything was beautiful and men weren’t bastards. That’s right men, plural, I’ve had enough bad examples of men in my life to make up my mind about all of them. Men are vindictive pigs period.

I closed my eyes and let my mind distract me from the constant throbbing on my back. I dreamt about a beautiful wooden house and a garden full of colorful flowers. I dreamt about laughter and joy. I dreamt about safety and warmth. I dreamt about a motherly hug that made all the bad things go away instantly. My tears fell down on the cot as I tried to imagine her face, her smell, even her touch. I started shaking as my sobbing intensified. If she was here with me, she would’ve never let anyone touch me or lay a hand on me. Why did she have to be the one to die? I always dreamt about how my life would turn out to be if my father died before I was born and my mother survived labor. We would have been living in the human world. Life would have been hard, we would have been poor, but we would’ve had each other, and nothing else would’ve mattered to us as long as we were together. I drifted to sleep as I dreamt about my body being soothed by her touch and her humming me a lullaby to ease my loneliness and longing for her.