Back and Stronger: Alpha's Daughter

If Sophia had thought that she’d been sore and stiff yesterday, it was nothing in comparison to how she felt today.

Like every morning, for as long as she could remember, the moment she walked through the front entrance to Tibald High, Sophia would count the new blemishes she received on her body in the last twenty-four hours that told a story of another day of punishment that had gone by since.

When she walked through these same metal doors the day before – cold and foreboding as always, they beckoned for her to enter the underworld where she paid for her sins each day – Sophia hadn’t had the shiny new bruise on her cheek. It felt almost like a heavy growth on her face as dull thumps of pain shot from there right through to her nervous system, with each and every step she took.

No matter how lightly she attempted to tread down the hallway, it didn’t alleviate it by much. Especially not when shifters didn’t bother to give way to her as they walked. They either bumped into her, or she had to jump out of their way to avoid full-on collisions. On both occasions, she would bother her tender and sore cheek so much that it would reward her with a shock of pain in reprimand.

The bluish-purple color of it had even spread to not only the bank of her left eye during the night, but it had also made its way to the bottom of her jawline. When she tentatively looked in the mirror earlier that morning, she’d been astonished by how it made the entire left side of her face look like someone else’s entirely.

As she walked, Sophia tried to keep her eyes to the floor, letting her oily hair fall forward to cover the bruise as much as she could from prying eyes. She wouldn’t put it past anyone here to not start teasing and taunting her about it. How hideous and disgusting it made her look.

Not that she cared how she looked. Not anymore. Vanity was the furthest thing from Sophia’s mind. It had been like that for a long while, but with such an angry mark on her face, it was begging for attention. And around here – in her case – attention was a bad thing. A very bad and unwanted thing.

For her, it was also a reminder of what happened with this hell’s Prince of Darkness the day before. How he’d made Sophia and her school desk, in the Health and Wellness class no less, have a rough encounter. She still couldn’t completely wrap her mind around the threat he had whispered to her then.

The threat that pushed things too far. The threat that had finally made the frail string of her will to live snap. The threat that had driven her to the edge of a cliff. The threat that had almost made her jump from it. The threat that had sent her desperately looking for another, and more final, version of freedom.

But she’d been denied even that self-sought liberation, still not knowing whether she would actually have done it. The conviction was there. The way out of this life of pain had been clear to her. But would she have actually gone through with it?

Sophia would probably never know the truth, or extent, to that part of her now, but she folded that possible way to freedom like a piece of paper, and placed it inside a folder within the dark confines of her mind. This folder did not have the big red stamp of ‘Denied’ on it just yet, but she tried to hide it from herself as best she could.

While her father had been punishing her last night for trying to run away, she resented the man from her dreams. He had shown up just in time to prevent her from plummeting to the bottom of the cliff that would have taken her away from this purgatory-like life. Instead of allowing her soul to never experience pain in this battered body ever again, he had doomed her to suffer more of it instead.

Sophia resented him with every single blow of her father’s loud leather belt, having landed across her bare back. She hadn’t even bothered to turn her back to the mirror that morning to look at the marks it had most surely left there, but she knew just by the way it felt against her tight school shirt, that she wouldn’t be able to lean her back against the support of a chair for a few days at least.

She wanted to walk up to the new security guard at the school and show him just what he’d done. To show him exactly what his interference had cost her, that he’d been the reason for her having to endure more pain than she hoped to avoid by jumping. By falling. By never having to wake up in agony again. To never be forced to walk these hateful halls again.

But she doubted whether she would have been able to accuse him of anything once she came face-to-face with him again. She knew that she would most likely end up thanking him instead. He had prevented her from selfishly leaving her brother behind to fend for himself, and for that, she ought to have been grateful toward him – not resentful.

In truth, Sophia was still reeling, and most definitely still confused, and incapable of figuring out how she truly felt about being rescued by the man who intrigued and terrified her in the same inexorable breath. There was no denying it. He was, without a sliver of a doubt, the alluring male shifter that had been haunting her dreams most nights lately. And like in the dreams as well, he would make her feel safe and desired, but then do things that scared the living daylights out of her.

Like with the flip of a coin, his beautiful and gentle eyes could instantly shift to something carnal and violent. This was what terrified her the most. The potential of danger was so evident and undeniably within him. A darkness that would devour her. And despite her instincts telling her to stay the fuck away -- far away -- Sophia suspected that she would willingly let it… Let him...

As she walked down the long hallway to her first class for the morning, going past the cafeteria and the midsection gardens, passing by more connecting hallways and bathrooms, she would find herself glancing toward all the spots where she knew the security guards were mostly seen stationed throughout the school. She even checked where she had run into him yesterday.

Nothing.

She hadn’t spotted him at the entrance where they scanned the students and their backpacks for any hidden weapons as she made her way through there just now either.

Had she imagined the whole thing? Sophia started to wonder. Vaguely thinking that it was a much more believable explanation if it had been her imagination that had conjured him up out of desperation.

Was he even really there last night?

He must have been. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been able to walk these school halls at that very moment, would she?

The sensation of a thousand stinging pinpricks, peppered all across her back, being fired off with every movement of her shirt against her skin, was a testament to that as well. The beating the Lucian pack Alpha had unleashed on her after she got home was proof that she had been punished for coming back alive. It must have been real then. The security guard had truly saved her. She was scanning the school buildings for now.

Sophia found she felt differently about the new marks on her back, and the stinging currents emitting from it, for some strange reason. She wasn’t sure why, but maybe it was because she felt that it had an entirely unique story to tell. It differed from the perpetual punishment and bullying accounts the marks on her skin would usually remind her of.

No, this time she felt pain on her skin because she had elicited it for once. She had done something and then paid the penalty. In a weird way, Sophia found that preferable to just being beaten for something she hadn’t done.

And don’t even get her started on the horrible state of her nails! After her father left her alone, and whimpering, in her basement room last night, Sophia had kind of lost it once she knew the Alpha had left the house again to go see unfinished work at the Lucian Headquarters. Something has been going on lately. Something that demanded a lot of his time and attention. Something that brought him home angrier and later in the nights than ever before.

Similarly, she’d been feeling angrier too. As though it had been building and building slowly within her. She had been keeping it at bay though, but last night, alone in her room, she snapped. Her frustration levels had reached a point where she just couldn’t hold the sluice gates up with the sheer power of her will anymore.

Anger and grief had somehow merged into one violent storm within her, and Sophia had taken it all out on the basement wall across from her mattress before she even knew what she was doing. Just thinking back on it now filled her with unspeakable horror. She hadn’t known that she was capable of doing something so … savage.

Blind with something Sophia could only explain as unmitigated fury, she had scratched, punched, and scratched, and scratched, and scratched. Right, left, right, left, and she had no clue as to how long it lasted, but the tips of her fingers were practically shredded and angry as hell from the inflammation that she’d noticed had flared up with a vengeance this morning when she woke up. But it was safe to say that the wall had suffered greater damage than she had.

Sophia tried not to think how good it had felt to get it all out. She attempted to forget how utterly out of control she’d been, and how altogether freeing it had been.

After she had realized what she’d done – to her hands – the cement block wall – she sat on her dirty mattress for the rest of the night, staring wide-eyed at the damage she inflicted there. At some point, she had fallen asleep, but it had been a very restless night that had remained after that. She knew she would get a beating for what she’d done to the wall too, but she hardly cared about that anymore.

All she could think about was Ailis’s warning about the full moon, and that with each one there was the chance of any of them having their first ever shift into their wolf forms. The full moon was the following night.

Could this mean that I’m going to have my first shift? Sophia wondered as she thought about the unrelenting destruction she dealt upon that wall where the poor little mouse lived. The terrified critter must have thought it had been Judgment Day or something.

Maybe that had only been a sample of what was to come… The anger and the surprising strength it brought. No wonder they’d felt the need to build something like the Sanctuary, with its steel fortified cell blocks. And no wonder the shifter kids moving around her seemed more ‘abuzz’, and some even more angsty than usual.

Every shifter was feeling it. The coming full moon. The moon’s unseen forces were already exerting her effects on their unique shifter wolf physiologies.

Like with every full moon, the Goddess will choose some of them for their first shift. After that, they would be destined to shift with every full moon that followed.

Would Sophia’s basement room be enough to keep her inside and safely away from her brother, if she gets chosen and involuntarily ends up shifting next?

Looking down at her hands now, tenderly holding her school textbooks to her chest, she couldn’t help but note the foreboding confirmation there. However, she cringed at how ridiculous her fingers looked with the band-aids stuck around each end. Sophia quickly hid her hands from sight again before anyone in the hall walking by her could notice them.

The way the beige-colored band-aids made the tips of her skeletal-looking fingers appear completely out of proportion, as though she had small knobs covering the ends of them. Sophia had no freaking idea how she was going to hold a pen, much less write a single legible page with her fingers like that.

She held back a bubble of laughter that threatened to surface the moment she realized what the sight of her hands reminded her of. She recalled a certain friendly alien’s hands in an old film she used to love watching over and over again as a child – ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ the movie had been called. She could still remember how she and Leo used to enjoy watching it together. It was one of the fondest memories she had from a time when things had been so much simpler. Happier. Gentler. Quieter.

Deep in thought, and trying to make herself invisible to the shifter kids around her, who had until that point not said or done anything to her yet, Sophia noticed something in the periphery of her vision, and it instantly drew her attention to it.

Unable to help herself, she whipped her head around to it. She realized that hope had given off a tiny spark within her chest, but died the moment she saw that the security guard uniform that had caught her interest didn’t have the right occupant in it.

It’s not him, Sophia concluded, more disappointed about it than she wanted to admit, and returned to her thoughts as she kept moving toward History class.

“Were you looking for me just now?”

The voice was low and gravely, easily identifiable, and definitely not coming from the male she had been hoping to see all morning. In fact, he was exactly who she hoped she wouldn’t have to deal with today.

Sophia stayed on mission and kept walking though, pretending that she hadn’t heard him. Pretended that her whole body hadn’t just put the temperatures at the highest peaks of Antarctica to shame.

Satan fell into step half-behind, and half-beside her and befittingly whispered to her over her shoulder, “We were looking for you last night, you know?”

Yes, she knew. She’d seen and heard them from the security guard’s car. She even felt disquieted by it again just remembering how their predatory snarls had spoken volumes about what they had planned to do to her if they’d found her the night before, and not the other man.

“Too bad we didn’t find you,” Matthew Ballen said, his voice becoming hoarse, and she could practically feel his eyes on her and how they had darkened on cue. “We had such fun plans with you.”

Dread gripped Sophia’s heart like a vice, but she kept walking. Kept pushing her weak legs that had gone very numb suddenly. She silently prayed to the Goddess to not let her stumble.

“We thought we’d take a few samples of you and get a taste of what’s to come,” he breathed closer to her now, the suggestiveness at that last word abundantly clear – just in case she hadn’t gotten the message already. Disgusting pig.

Sophia could feel his hard chest against the back of her shoulder now, and had to remind herself not to show any emotion, especially not the fear she felt. She refused to let him know the terrible effect he had on her.

“I know, so sad, right? But don’t worry, the good news is that the game is this Saturday, so you won’t need to wait too long–”

Sophia heard her own startled gasp, dropping her books and almost toppling forward to the floor when Matthew’s rough hand slipped underneath her dress from behind, and harshly touched her there between the legs.

Still reeling in utter shock, she heard him laugh and watched as he stalked off, but not before he turned and gave her a wicked sneer and wink.

Not knowing what else she could do but hold back the bile rising as she bent to pick up her books from the floor. Sophia tried to ignore the stares from the shifter students around her. They had also seen what the overlord had done, and they seemed to have mixed feelings about it as well. They were looking around at one another, and then back at her with uncertainty in their eyes, but did or said nothing.

Matthew had never gotten this way with her before. Not sexually ribald and lewd -- not explicitly so anyway. And then there had also been the new threat he’d whispered to her yesterday, and reminded her of just now – the one that had almost sent her over a cliff only a few hours ago.

What had gotten into him so suddenly?

Why would he even want to go there with me?

Sophia had always had the impression that she disgusted him so much that he wouldn’t even have thought about wanting to touch her in any suggestive manner. Especially not there.

Whatever must have happened that had changed that small mercy she unknowingly thought she had, she couldn’t begin to know, but it scared her.

It scared Sophia Tibald immensely…