Lorelei POV
Should I say it was a relief?
I an, yeah, I was back to being a maid. But that was all I had known my entire life. So standing in front of what was supposed to be the servant quarters, I felt the tightness in my chest loosen a little.
There were about twenty rooms on this floor alone.
A middle-aged woman who had joined us and led the way stopped in front of one of the rooms. "This is where you will be staying," she said, her attention fixed on while the guards began to retreat down the hallway.
Her voice was as cold and lifeless as the gray concrete walls around us. She was dressed in a pristine dark navy housekeeper’s uniform, her keys jingling sharply against her hip.
"Breakfast is strictly at 5:30 AM in the lower hall," she stated like I was sohow supposed to know where that was. "If you are even a minute late, you do not eat. Your uniform is on the bed. Put it on imdiately."
I swallowed against the dryness in my throat, keeping my eyes glued to the floor, not wanting to give her any reason to dislike already. After all, I had just gotten here. The last thing I needed was unnecessary attention drawn to myself.
"Yes, ma’am."
"The communal bathroom is at the very end of the corridor," she added, pointing a stiff finger down the long narrow hallway. "Showers are restricted to thirty minutes before your shift and thirty minutes after. Do not wander into the main palace wings unless your chore sheet explicitly demands it. If you are caught sowhere you should not be, the guards will not bother bringing you back here. Do you understand?"
"Yes," I whispered.
With one final disapproving glance at my dirt-streaked skin, she turned and marched away.
Left alone, I slowly turned the doorknob and pushed the door open.
The room was not too big, barely big enough to fit the two narrow twin beds pushed against opposite walls.
But hey, I actually had a bed. Between them were two tal lockers and a single small window placed so high up that I would have to stand on my toes just to see the sky.
But my breath hitched when I realized I wasn’t alone.
Sitting on the edge of the mattress closest to the window was a young girl. She couldn’t have been older than nineteen, with wide anxious brown eyes and a fragile fra. She was already wearing the sa gray uniform, and the mont her eyes landed on my bruised arm and swollen wrist, she gasped softly.
"Are you... are you okay?" she whispered, her voice trembling as she cast a fearful glance toward the locked door like she expected the guards to burst back in at any second.
"I’m fine..." I replied casually, stepping further into the room and shutting the door behind . "Where are we?"
"Uhm..." she started softly, no longer trembling as she inched a little closer. "The Lunar Empire."
"What?!"
The second those words left her lips, my eyes widened and all the color instantly drained from my face.
The Lunar Empire.
It couldn’t be.
The Handler’s van had driven for days, but I never imagined he would dare cross into this territory.
Every wolf since we were pups grew up hearing terrifying legends about the Lunar Empire.
It was the largest and most ruthless kingdom in the entire werewolf world, currently ruled by the Alpha King, an absolute tyrant rumored to have butchered his own family just to take the throne.
Oh my goodness.
I stumbled back a step, clutching my chest.
I had gone from the abusive cages of my own family to traffickers, and now... now I was a prisoner in the belly of the beast.
"Hey... please don’t faint," the girl panicked softly, quickly sliding off her mattress. She hurried over and gently grabbed my arm, guiding toward the empty twin bed. "Sit down before you fall. You look like you’ve just seen a ghost."
I stared blankly at the cold concrete floor as my mind began spinning.
This can’t be happening. This really can’t be happening.
"How long have you been here?" I asked quietly.
"Going on two years," she replied, and my brows instantly shot up as I stared at her properly.
"How old are you?" I asked.
"Twenty," she answered.
So we were age mates, but she looked much younger than . Her soft chocolate-brown hair was cut into a ssy uneven bob that frad her round cheeks in a way that made her look almost childlike.
Combined with how petite she was, she looked more like a lost schoolgirl than soone who had survived two years in the most ruthless kingdom in the werewolf world.
Seriously, how had soone this soft even stayed alive here that long?
"How did you get here?" I asked, half expecting her to say she had been trafficked too. But she hesitated, lowering her head instead.
"Well, I..." she whispered, nervously chewing on her bottom lip. "I was arrested near the outer borders of the royal territory. I was part of a gang that used to steal from supply convoys."
That caught so off guard I had to blink at her for a second, just to make sure she was actually serious.
"I know," she said quickly when she saw my expression. "I don’t really look like the type. But I was young and stupid and hungry. My parents died when I was fifteen, and I tried staying out of trouble for as long as I could until my younger brother got sick with silver-rot fever."
Her voice cracked slightly.
"My boss told there were convoys transporting expensive dicine that could cure him, so... I took the risk."
She swallowed hard before continuing.
"We attacked the convoy, but the intel was wrong. There wasn’t any dicine inside. Just weapons. And it didn’t belong to just anyone. It belonged to the Alpha King’s personal armory."
That made physically wince.
"We didn’t even get a chance to run. His guards sward us almost instantly. Most of my crew got executed on the spot, but I was barely eighteen, so instead they dragged here and told I’d be working off my debt for the rest of my youth."
Heavy silence settled over the room after that, and I just stared at her, feeling horrible for her.
"What about your brother?" I finally asked carefully.
She shook her head slowly, wiping at her cheek with the back of her sleeve.
"I don’t know," she admitted, her voice cracking even more. "They locked up imdiately and brought here the next day. I never heard from him again." Her eyes dropped to the floor. "But I don’t think he survived."
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