The Pack Left Me Behind, So I Claimed My Future Chapter 02

The Pack Left Me Behind, So I Claimed My Future Chapter 02

The next day, I submitted my signed field-placement acceptance form to the Royal Werewolf Academy.

With only a few days left before my departure, I returned to the last of my part-time jobs—Moonfang Tavern in Moonridge Pack’s commercial district.

It was my final day there.

When the tavern closed at ten that night, Mr. Rowan transferred only $120 to me, a single day’s wages.

Mr. Rowan, the owner, knew my family well. I had left all my previous wages with him for safekeeping, a total of $5,400.

I stared at the $120 transfer in confusion.

“Mr. Rowan, I meant all the money you were holding for me. The $5,400 plus today’s $120 comes to $5,520.”

“Your parents came by this morning and collected your previous wages. Didn’t they tell you?”

“They said they were afraid you’d blow through it and that they would keep it safe for you. You’ll have to ask them.”

I walked out of the tavern in a daze. When I was fifteen, my parents had found the allowance I had spent three years saving.

They said they needed to borrow it for Evander’s custom-fitted trial leathers and to keep paying for Nerys’s training in pack court protocol and the arts. They still had not mentioned paying me back.

When I was eighteen, I asked them for the money. Dad stared at me in disbelief.

“You’ve remembered that $1,800 for three years? Money is the only thing you ever seem to remember.”

His tone made me feel as though I were the one who had taken someone else’s money.

“Isn’t helping your siblings what family is supposed to do? Stop being so stingy.”

He had called it helping each other, yet when the school kept reminding me to pay for my course materials, Mom said she was busy and told me not to waste her time with something so trivial.

I asked seven times for the $180 I needed for my school uniform, but not one person in the family responded.

I wanted to ask why helping each other never seemed to include anyone helping me.

Instead, I swallowed the words lodged in my throat. I did not want to be branded selfish and greedy yet again.

I never forgot about that $1,800, but I never mentioned it again.

When I entered the Blackwood packhouse, Nerys was trying on a new formal gown in front of the mirror. An unopened briefcase and an expensive drawing tablet rested on the coffee table.

Mom watched Nerys with a smile.

“Nerys got the best of both of us. She looks good in everything.”

“Evander did too. Both our children inherited our best features,” Dad added.

No one mentioned me. No one remembered that I was their child too, and no one even noticed that I had come home.

“Mom? Dad?” I called, but no one answered.

“Did you take my wages?”

Only then did all four of them turn to look at me.

“Maeve’s back,” Mom said lightly, the way she might casually greet a pack member she barely knew.

Then she turned back and resumed praising Nerys, and the common room filled with lively conversation again.

“Give me back my money.”

Evander picked up his laptop and went to the study. Nerys left to take a shower, Mom carried the new purchases away, and Dad returned to his bedroom with his cup of tea.

On the way home, I had imagined all the ways they might try to avoid paying me back. They might invoke family loyalty to make me feel guilty, turn the situation around on me, or fly into a rage.

The one possibility I had never considered was that they would not even bother with any of it. I would have preferred a furious, self-righteous argument to this complete indifference.

Instead, their indifference left me with no outlet for anything I felt, each silent dismissal cutting into me like another pass of a rusted, dull knife.

The next morning, the four of them went through their usual routines as though nothing had happened. As always, they acted as though I were invisible.

Mom brought five plates of pasta to the table. Pasta was the only food she ever divided into five servings because one plate was always made up of the broken, rejected pieces.

At the table, I brought up my wages again.

“Mom, Dad, what did you spend my money on?”

This time, Mom did not avoid the question. Her brow furrowed, and her expression darkened instantly.

“Why can’t you just let this go? It’s only a few thousand dollars. Are you ever going to drop it?”

She dismissed those thousands of dollars as though they meant nothing. I had earned that money by squeezing shifts into my week at that tiny tavern, burning my hands badly enough to blister six times, and being given a hard time by customers on twenty-one separate occasions.

“I just want my own money back.”

Dad slammed his fork onto the table.

“What do you mean, your money? Do you think all the years your mother and I spent raising you count for nothing? Don’t you have any gratitude?”

I looked down at the slippers on my feet. I had worn them for eight years and glued the soles back on more times than I could count. Grandma had bought them for me.

I set down my fork and returned to my partitioned alcove off the common room. Then I took out my phone with its cracked screen and opened the link from my faculty adviser.

The final acceptance window for the Northern Frontier Wildlands Survey would close in thirty minutes. With my hand trembling, I tapped Confirm.