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“Hey! You fucking freak.”
You don’t have to be a bad person to be unlucky, either.
Damn it. I shouldn’t have come this way. I should have gone straight up to my room through the closest door on the ground floor. But no, and now here I am, in the middle of this enormous room with nowhere to hide and Hannah bearing down on me with her friends behind her. The heels of her obnoxious stilettos tap against the floor with every step she takes. She really went all-out to look good tonight—I wonder if she already had the alpha’s son in mind.
I wonder if she caught him looking at me. Oh, I didn’t think of that before. Now I hate him worse than ever for getting me into this, or at least for making it worse.
I sigh, turning on my heel to face her. I’m not about to run away, so I might as well look at her head-on. “Hannah, can we not? Or didn’t you hear everything Daniel was saying in there about us working together now?”
“Don’t you fucking lecture me, you freak,” she snaps, coming to a stop in front of me with her arms folded. Meanwhile, her friends form a loose circle around us—though I know it would tighten up in a hurry if I decided to run away.
“I’m not trying to fight you, okay? So please, just let me go and—”
She’s fast, I’ll give her that. I barely have time to react before she lunges at me and makes contact, making me stumble backward. I don’t hit the floor—no, I hit a body, the body of someone who shoves me back into the center of what is now a ring. I’m not getting out of this without a fight.
“I didn’t choose to stand up there,” I tell her, circling her as she circles me. I need to use what I’ve learned about her during training sessions, but it isn’t easy to keep my thoughts together when I have so many things to worry about at once. She’s not the only threat here—even if I took her down, there would be two or three or a dozen others right behind her, waiting for their turn. I can’t trust any of them to not take a cheap shot when I’m not looking. These people do not believe in fighting fair.
“You’re a fucking joke, and you make us all look like shit. You should’ve been shunned years ago when your wolf didn’t arrive. But I guess things like that don’t matter when you’re the beta’s daughter.” Everybody laughs nastily at this, a few of them faking a lunge like they’re coming for me, throwing me off balance.
She doesn’t have the first clue what she’s talking about, but that’s nothing new.
I’m about to ask why she cares so much when she lunges again, and this time nobody catches me when I fall onto my back. With the pointed toe of her shoe, she delivers a vicious kick to my lower back, laughing when a cry of pain escapes me.
“You don’t belong here. You should have been gone ages ago,” she snarls. “If you were one of us, you could fight back. But you don’t have what it takes, pretender. This is the only way to show you.” The second kick makes me see stars, and not in a good way. Agony explodes in the general area of my kidneys. I’m going to be pissing blood for a while.
“You ought to thank me for doing you a favor, getting rid of you so you can stop giving us all a bad name.” She kicks me again, but I’m too quick, rolling away before she can make contact. She loses her balance and turns her ankle, cursing loudly but regaining her balance quickly. Still, it gives me a little encouragement as I jump to my feet.
I can’t tire myself out on her because I’m going to have to fight the others, too. I have to be smart. How can I do the most damage without tiring myself out?
“Hold her,” Hannah snarls, and before I can move away, two pairs of arms grab me from behind. Of course, she would play dirty. My head snaps to the side when she backhands me, and the taste of blood barely has time to fill my mouth before she hits me again and again. With every blow, there’s another grunted word. Loser. Freak. Pretender. Joke.
Finally, my legs sag, my head hanging low, and all I hear around me is snide laughter. “Not even strong enough to take that,” she announces with a sigh as my captors release me, and I fall to one knee. She grabs a handful of my hair and pulls my head back before punching me full-out this time, her fist connecting with my nose.
