Both women broke into giggles.
Dakota paused, taking a deep breath to calm herself and wishing, not for the first time, that she didn’t have such freakishly good hearing.
And she bristled at the unfairness of what the women were saying. Her father insisted that everyone in their pack serve her hand and foot. She would love to do her own laundry and clean her room and cook for herself, but if she tried, the pack members practically fell over themselves to stop her. Then they complained behind her back about what a spoiled brat she was – like she had a choice in the matter.
She stalked down the hall, past the laundry room, and Vinessa and Tiffani saw her and hurried out.
“Oh, Dakota! I didn’t see you!” Tiffani said with a big, bright smile. “You look so great today. Love your skirt.”
Usually she just let things like that go, but today she was in no mood. “Thanks,” she snapped. “I bought it at the Short and Fat outlet.”
Tiffani’s face went pale. “You’re not going to tell your father what I said, are you?”
Dakota ignored her and stomped into her room and slammed the door behind her.
She heard Vinessa mutter “bitch” under her breath. Then she heard them hurry down the hall and shut the door, and she was alone.
Her room was the ultimate gilded cage. Most of the furniture had been picked out by her father, although he’d let her keep a few old pieces that her late mother had bought for her. The furniture that her father had selected was in an elaborately carved baroque style, gilded and overstuffed and more suitable for seventeenth-century French royalty than for a twenty-first century woman. The massive vanity with the bowed legs and the inlaid mother of pearl, the ivory silk bedding, the velvet curtains…a pack member came in every day and spent hours dusting every gleaming inch of it.
However, she hadn’t felt comfortable complaining when he’d moved it all into her room on her sixteenth birthday. How ungrateful would it have been to say that her furniture was too fancy?
She scowled at herself in the enormous floor-length mirror. Round face, curly brown hair that frizzed in the summer heat. Nothing special about her looks. Nothing special about her, except that she was an Alpha Prime’s daughter, which meant that she was a commodity to be bartered off to the highest bidder.
She glanced at the oil painting of her late mother, who’d died in a car accident when Dakota was fifteen. Dakota looked just liked her, and when she felt low, she usually reminded herself that her mother had been the most magical, wonderful, gorgeous creature in the world, and that must mean that she was pretty too – no matter what people whispered when they thought she couldn’t hear.
Today, nothing could make her feel pretty or magical. She felt dull and hopeless. And trapped.
She paced the floor of her bedroom, wondering what to do. No phone, guard at the door, marriage from hell right around the corner…
She would not marry Roy, no matter what. It just wasn’t happening.
But if she didn’t, her father would kick her out of their pack. And it would be impossible for her to find another pack that would take her in anywhere on the West Coast – all the other pack members were afraid of her father, for good reason. He’d fought in several dozen death challenges over the years, and he’d never lost. He was sixty now, but age had not weakened him.
If she didn’t have a pack to protect her, she wouldn’t be able to work anywhere, or rent a home. Humans were aware of shifters, and they maintained an uneasy truce, but they didn’t hire shifters or rent apartments to them. Shifters built their own towns and lived in areas far removed from humans. There had been an out-and-out war in California between shifters and the humans who’d tried to take their territory about fifty years ago, and humans still bore a grudge.
So she’d basically be living in a tent in the woods and hunting her food. Also, she didn’t know how to pitch a tent and she wasn’t a very good hunter and she really preferred pasta to raw rabbit.
Also, she didn’t own a tent.
And now that she thought of it, where could she pitch a tent even if she had one? Not on human lands, or she’d risk ending up the victim of an “accidental” hunting incident. Not on shifter lands, because if she didn’t belong to a pack, she couldn’t stay on their property.
And that was the least of her problems. Without the protection of a pack, she’d be vulnerable. There were packs that were known to kidnap lone shifters, so most likely she’d be forced to serve as some Alpha’s concubine and scrub his floors.
She finally got tired of pacing, grabbed a box of cookies from the small pantry located next to her walk-in closet, and flopped down on her four-poster bed. She was lying there eating cookies and glumly contemplating her bleak future when the bedroom door swung open and Tina marched in.
Dakota sat up. “How did you get in?” she asked her. “My father has the door guarded and he said I can’t have any visitors.”
Tina plopped down in the chair facing her. “I just batted my eyes at that idiot Drew, and he melted. Typical guy – thinks with the wrong head.” She smirked. Then her expression grew serious. “So, I’d ask how it went with your father, but from the expression on your face and the guard on the door, I already know the answer.”
“Yep, you were right and I was wrong. It went about as well as could be expected,” Dakota muttered as she shoved another cookie in her mouth.
“Well, first of all, are you sure Roy cheated on you?” Tina asked. “What did the picture show, exactly? Was it him with another girl?”
“No, just him, naked and asleep on his bed. But it was very clear that he’d just had a good time with someone else.”
“And your father wouldn’t listen to you? That sucks,” Tina said sympathetically.
Dakota shook her head. “So does my entire life, now. My father said I still have to marry him, and moved the wedding up to next week. He crushed my phone. He has me under house arrest. I mean, I could sneak out – I’ve done it before – but where would I go? I don’t know what to do.” She grabbed another cookie, and Tina snatched it out of her hand.
