MASIHAH POV
The harsh, mechanical whine of the alarm clock still echoed in my ears, but the lingering pain of the clinic needles had vanished, replaced by a strange, humming voltage beneath my skin. I sat on the edge of the warped wooden floorboards in the attic, my chest rising and falling in steady, controlled rhythms. The air was biting cold, tasting of dust and stale isolation, but to me, it tasted like oxygen and freedom.
I stood up, letting my full, curvy frame stretch out to its natural height. In my past life, I would have cringed at the soft swell of my hips or the heavy, thick curve of my thighs, hating the body that my mother constantly compared to an ungraceful draft horse. Now, looking at my reflection in the cracked hand-me-down mirror, I saw something entirely different. I saw a survivor. I saw an executioner wearing the face of their favorite victim.
Downstairs, the familiar, heavy thud of footsteps signaled the start of the morning routine. My mother Helen's shrill voice cut through the ceiling boards, screaming my name with the exact same venomous cadence I remembered from before.
"Masihah! You lazy, bloated cow! Get down here this instant! Clara needs her morning tonic, and you have books to pack!"
A dark, humorless smile touched the corners of my lips. “Oh, Mother”, I thought, smoothing down the front of my oversized, drab nightshirt. “You have no idea how eager I am to come downstairs.”
When I pushed open the attic door and descended the narrow staircase into the sunlit kitchen, the air was heavy with the sweet, suffocating scent of freshly baked blueberry pastries. Clara was already seated at the mahogany dining table, draped in her delicate pastel pink sweater, coughing softly into a lace handkerchief with all the theatrical fragility of a dying Victorian doll. Ethan stood beside her, carefully sliding a warm pastry onto her plate with a gentle, purring devotion he had never once spared for me.
"Eat up, sweetheart," Ethan murmured, glancing over his shoulder as I walked into the room. His expression instantly twisted into a sneer as his eyes tracked my heavy hips. "And look at her. Dragging herself down the stairs like an overstuffed sack of grain. Hurry up, Masihah. Don't stand there breathing like an ox; pack Clara's materials and stay out of our way."
Father sat at the head of the table, turning the pages of the morning pack gazette without sparing me a single glance, entirely content to let his wife and son treat me like dirt.
In my past life, this exact moment would have made my eyes sting with humiliated tears. I would have mumbled an apology, grabbed the heavy stack of leather-bound books, and rushed to appease them. But today, as I stood by the kitchen counter, my heart remained as cold and still as a block of winter ice.
"I'm moving as fast as I can, Brother," I whispered, pitching my voice to sound small, submissive, and perfectly broken.
Clara lifted her long eyelashes, offering a tiny, microscopic smirk that only I caught before her face melted back into an expression of sorrowful guilt. "It’s alright, Ethan. Don't be too hard on her. I know Masihah's... constitution is just naturally heavy and sluggish. She can't help it."
"Of course she can't help being useless," Helen snapped, slamming a stack of heavy textbooks onto the counter right in front of my hands. "Now take those to the car, and don't you dare drop a single page, or you're walking the five miles to Alpha Academy College."
I reached out, my fingers curling around the heavy leather bindings. The dead weight bit into my forearms, but unlike before, when my body would have instantly quivered with weakness from their covert poison, I felt only a sharp, electric clarity. My blood was my own again. For now.
"Yes, Mother," I murmured, keeping my eyes cast downward.
We drove to the academy in the same suffocating silence. The obsidian-paneled gates of Alpha Academy loomed ahead, framed by manicured lawns and towering iron spikes where elite students—future Alphas and high-ranking pack heirs—laughed and congregated in the crisp morning air.
As soon as the pack car parked, Ethan hopped out to rescue Clara from the passenger seat, offering her his arm like a knight escorting royalty. Meanwhile, I struggled with the heavy rear door, stepping out onto the paved driveway with a deliberate, clumsy thud.
Around us, the courtyard was buzzing with student life. But as I trudged behind my family toward the grand administrative steps, a sudden, heavy shift swept through the atmosphere. The ambient chatter of the students dropped to a nervous murmur, and several upper-classmen instinctively stepped back, clearing a wide path down the center of the walkway.
I raised my gaze slightly, letting my eyes sweep across the steps.
Standing near the grand mahogany doors were the two apex predators of Alpha Academy.
Ryder stood with effortless aristocratic grace, his tailored uniform immaculate, his sharp silver-gray eyes scanning the crowd with cold, cynical indifference. A few paces away leaned Lucifer, his midnight-black hair falling slightly across his forehead, a permanent, sardonic smirk playing on his lips as his amber eyes tracked the movement around him with violent, unpredictable energy. They were bitter enemies, locked in a silent war for absolute territory dominance, yet they shared one terrifying trait: the entire academy feared them.
For a fraction of a second, as I shuffled past carrying Clara's heavy books, Lucifer’s gaze flicked sideways. His amber eyes locked onto mine. There was no mockery in his look, no casual dismissal, just a sudden, razor-sharp intensity, as if a wild animal had caught the scent of something strange and dangerous hiding beneath the snow.
My heart skipped a beat, but I forced my eyes downward, shuffling past them with the exact posture of an insignificant, heavy-framed omega.
Lucifer frowned slightly, his fingers twitching against the side of his leather jacket. “Odd”, he thought, watching the drab, bulky girl disappear into the double doors. “For a second... she didn't smell like fear at all.”
Across the courtyard, Ryder also paused mid-sentence, his silver-gray eyes narrowing as he watched my retreating back. Something about the heavy, deliberate cadence of my footsteps felt entirely wrong for someone supposedly crushed by weakness.
"Something caught your eye, Ryder?" a nearby beta student asked nervously.
Ryder didn't answer. He simply tilted his head, a slow, dangerous smile touching the corner of his mouth. "No. Just wondering when the mice started walking like lions."
Inside the grand hallway, Clara turned to me with a sharp, whispered hiss while Helen and Ethan were distracted by a group of visiting pack dignitaries.
"Stop lagging behind, Masihah!" Clara snapped under her breath, her porcelain-doll facade slipping for a second to reveal her true, malicious nature. "You're making us look ridiculous. Go straight to the back of the lecture hall and stay out of sight until classes end!"
"Of course, sister," I whispered back, letting a vacant, submissive glaze settle over my eyes.
I turned away, heading toward the dark, isolated corner of the back row in the massive amphitheater. As I sat down at my wooden desk, resting my hands on the scratched surface, I looked out across the crowded room filled with unsuspecting faces, my family, the whispering elites, and the two dangerous Alphas watching from the edges.
A cold, lethal thrill blooming in my chest the past came crawling back into my head