99 Times Repeated, Not Once Did They Say I Love You Chapter 10

99 Times Repeated, Not Once Did They Say I Love You Chapter 10

I stopped anyway.

When I turned around, my mother was glaring at me, her face full of resentment.

Her voice tightened. “She’s nothing but the Alpha of some third-rate pack, and you treat her like gold. You’ve

never once smiled at me like that.”

“But you see me, and you can’t even say hello. You turn around and walk away.”

She stared at me as if I were the cruel one. “Have you forgotten, Hazel? I’m your real mother.”

My eyes dropped again to the pale blue dress over her arm.

She was my birth mother.

But wasn’t she standing there shopping for someone else?

What right did she have to accuse me?

I met her gaze, and my voice came out flat and hollow. “Mrs. Lioraen, I think you have the wrong person. I’m

not your daughter.”

She froze for a second, then let out a long sigh. “So it’s still about Maeve, isn’t it?”

“Hazel, I raised Maeve with my own hands. You can’t hold a child for twenty years and then say you feel

nothing for her. How could I, after all these years?

“And her parents are gone. If she left us, how would she survive? Why can’t you understand that?”

My fists clenched.

My nails dug into my palms until the pain went numb.

Every wound in my chest turned savage, as if something alive were tearing at my heart.

Even I could hear that my voice had changed. “I can’t. I can’t understand it.”

After Maeve’s mother sold me, the trafficker sold me again, to a family out in the backwoods.

They had no children of their own.

They bought me as a good-luck charm to help them “get pregnant fast.”

In less than a year, the woman got pregnant and had a boy.

From that moment on, I was worthless to them.

I ate watery oatmeal and stale cornbread. I slept on a pile of straw with nothing but a thin towel over me.

In summer, the bugs bit me until I was covered in sores.

In winter, the cold wind came through the cracks in the walls, and I lay there until my hands and feet went

numb.

I also had to cook for the whole family.

I was five years old.

I had to stand on a stool to reach the stove. The pan was so big I needed both hands on the spatula to flip

the food.

In the dead of winter, I washed all their clothes by hand until my fingers cracked and swelled.

Every night, I cried in secret.

I couldn’t understand why my parents treated me that way.

Then one night, I overheard them planning to sell me again for money. That was when I finally understood. I

wasn’t their child at all. I had been kidnapped.

Maybe it was karma.

That night, an earthquake buried the three of them.

It spared only me.

After the rescue workers dug me out, I was an orphan, and I drifted until I ended up at Dreadmoor Pack.

With no parents, I grew up under other people’s cold stares and cruelty, and little by little, I shut myself off.

Once, a girl in my class called me a monster with no mom and no dad, and she said plenty worse. I hit her,

and I was about to be expelled.

Seraphine happened to pass by, and she asked me gently what had happened. I refused to explain, and she didn’t punish me. She went and looked into it herself.

When she found out the truth, she stood in the principal’s office and told everyone she was my mother. She made them apologize.

That was the first time I let myself open up again,

When I finished, my mother stood there hollowed out, staring into space, unable to speak.

I wiped away the tears I couldn’t hold back and drew a slow breath.

“In your eyes, Maeve is the child you raised with your own hands. She’s the treasure you hold in the palm of your hand.”

My throat was tight, but I forced myself to finish.

“In my eyes, because of Maeve’s mother, I lost my home, my childhood, and every bit of warmth that should

have been mine. I suffered for years because of that woman.”

I looked at her calmly. “I can’t live under the same roof as the daughter of the woman who ruined my life.”

“So no, Mrs. Lioraen. We’re not the same kind of people.”

The last tears burned at the corners of my eyes, but my voice stayed cold.

“Next time we meet, we’re strangers.”