Bled By My Alpha Parents Adopted By The Lycan King Chapter 01
The Blood Bag Daughter
For eight years, my Alpha parents drained my blood to save their fake daughter—the one who stole my name, my family, and almost my life.
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For eight years, I lived in a room with no windows.
They called me Fifteen.
Not exactly a name, right?
That’s because I was the fifteenth Purebred blood slave they had bred and sold. My blood could pull a dying wolf back from the edge.
And that’s why the Ashborne Pack had bought me for a thousand gold coins when I was ten.
Their precious daughter Vera was dying.
And I was the cure.
Tonight the pack was buzzing with wedding plans.
Vera was finally healed. Marrying Warrior Kade Vaughn in a month.
Which meant they didn’t need me anymore.
I lay on my cot, half-conscious from the morning’s draining, when I heard footsteps stop just outside my door.
Two of them. The Alpha and the Luna. They thought the walls were thick enough. They were wrong.
“Cassius.” The Luna’s voice was low. “After all, she’s our real daughter. Now that Vera’s well, can’t we bring her home? Call her our adopted daughter, at least. Let her sit at our table!”
“Are you insane!?” The Alpha’s voice was a growl. “If anyone ever finds out we bled our own blood to save the adopted one, we lose everything! My rank. My seat at the Lycan King’s council. Rowan’s future. And Rowan told me himself, he only has one sister, and her name is Vera.”
“But she’s—”
“She stays where she is. When Vera marries into the Vaughn Pack next month, Fifteen goes with her. As a wedding tribute. Hidden. If Vera ever falls ill again, we’ll have the cure right there under her roof.”
The footsteps moved away. My Luna, or maybe I should say, my mother didn’t argue.
I lay in the dark and did not move.
Real daughter.
The words didn’t make sense at first.
I turned them over slowly, the way a pup sounds out letters.
Real daughter. My blood. She was talking about me.
I was the Alpha’s real daughter.
The traffickers had taken me from a Pack when I was three. That’s what an older girl in the breeding pens had once whispered to me.
‘You came in wearing silk, Fifteen. Little moonstone pendant around your neck. You must be somebody’s princess.’
I had held on to that for years. The idea that somewhere out there, a family was tearing themselves apart looking for me. That if I just survived long enough, I would find them.
I had survived.
I had found them.
And they had bled me for eight years, and they were going to bleed me until I died.
For years I had listened through walls to the servants gossip. How the Alpha spoiled Vera with every gift the Lycan King sent to the Ashborne Pack. How the Luna picked the silks for Vera’s gowns herself, one-of-a-kind in the capital. How the young heir Rowan brought her stories every night, just to make her laugh.
I used to lie here and imagine what it felt like. To be loved like that.
Turns out it had always been meant for me.
My hand drifted, slow and shaking, to the birthmark on the inside of my left arm.
A small red crescent, just below the elbow. The only piece of me the needles hadn’t ruined.
I thought about the first time the Luna had come to see me.
Eight years ago.
The healers were prepping my arm for the first draining, and she’d stood in the doorway.
When they rolled up my sleeve, she’d gone white as bone.
She’d turned around and walked out.
She never came back.
Not once, in eight years.
I had thought she couldn’t stand the sight of blood.
It turned out that… she’d known. She’d known from the first minute.
And stil, she’d let them shove needle after needle into my arm. Still she’d kept me locked in this dark room, three halls from the sunlight. Still she’d sent maid after maid to drain me every time Vera’s cheeks lost their color.
My arms were a map of scars. Wrist to shoulder. Half-healed. Never closing.
I laughed once. It came out cracked and dry.
Fifteen years. Fifteen years of holding on to a family that had been three rooms away the whole time.
Something hot rose in my chest, sharp and burning, and I couldn’t tell if it was grief or fever or both.
The room tilted.
Blood pounded behind my eyes.
Then everything went black.