Rejected By Wolves, Claimed By The Vampire King

en. The vampire slave. I was on my hands and knees at 6 AM, scrubbing the marble floor of the main hall. The floor was already clean. There was a cleaning robot that could do it in ten minutes. But

ont of me. He grabbed my collar and yanked me up into the air. The silver burned, sizzling, smoke coming off my neck. The smell of my own burning flesh filled my nose. "You are what we say you are," he hissed into my face. His teeth were growing longer, his eyes yellow. "You are a slave born in the house of wolves. You have no pack. You have no clan. If we throw you outside, the vampires will kill you too because you smell like a dog. Remember that, pet." He threw me to the ground. My head hit the marble. Blood trickled from my forehead, and instantly, my fangs - small and weak because of the collar - slid out on their own. "Lock her in the basement," Marcus said without emotion, already turning away. "So she doesn't try to run and embarrass us." Two young wolves dragged me by the chain of my collar like an animal down to the basement. Concrete room. No windows. A bucket. A thin blanket. The same room I had lived in since I was seven years old. The iron door slammed. Lock clicked. I lay on the cold floor and tried to cry, but no tears came. Vampires don't cry easily when collared. We bleed instead. I pulled out the jade pendant. In the dark basement, it was glowing. Faintly, pulsing red, like a heartbeat. Thump. Thump. Thump. It had never glowed before. Never in nineteen years. Outside, through the tiny vent window near the ceiling, I could see a sliver of the moon. Tomorrow was full moon. The wolves would be at their strongest. Their howls would shake the whole city. And they would gift-wrap me and give me to a sixty-year-old monster. If I stayed, I would die. Or worse, live as his tortured bride. If I ran, where would I go? The wolves always told me no one wants a half-breed slave. The human world would not want me. The vampire world would kill me because I smell like wolf. But anything was better than being a bride to a man who kills his brides. I made a decision. I would run tonight. Right now. I held the pendant tight and whispered to my mother, to whoever she really was. "If you were a princess, help me. If I am a princess, give me strength. Please." The pendant suddenly burned hot - so hot it burned my palm. I gasped and dropped it onto the concrete. And then something impossible happened. _Crack._ A tiny, hairline crack appeared on my silver collar. A puff of black smoke came out of it. The collar made a hissing sound. The silver collar had never cracked. Never. Not even when Ethan once tried to cut it with a silver knife to scare me. My heart was beating so fast it hurt. I touched the crack with shaking fingers. Underneath, my skin was not burned. For the first time in nineteen years, the skin under the silver was pale and clean, not red and scarred. From upstairs, a howl started. The pack was starting their pre-full-moon chant. The whole house vibrated with their howls. Awooo! I stood up. I grabbed the broken leg of an old wooden chair - the end was sharp. With all my strength, with all nineteen years of anger, I jammed it into the crack of the collar and pulled outward. Pain. Fire. White light. My neck felt like it was being ripped apart. I screamed, but the howling upstairs was louder and covered my scream. _CRACK! - CLANG!_ The collar snapped in half and fell to the floor, still smoking and spitting sparks. Instantly, air flooded my lungs like I had been underwater for nineteen years. Power - wild, hot, cold, ancient power - flooded my veins. My back arched. My head snapped