A Rogue's Redemption

Chapter 1- Blackrose

Scarlett

You never really know how your life is going to turn out. You just hope for the best...and pray to the goddess you don't get the worst.

There was a time that I believed that I didn't pray hard enough...but not anymore. I realize now that being rejected by my mate wasn't the worst at all...in fact, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Being rejected by my mate and disowned from the pack may seem awful...but it gave me something I never knew I lacked.

Freedom. Independence. Power.

The day that my Alpha and mate Stephan threw me to the rogues like garbage, casting me out of the Shadow Mist pack that had been my home since birth, I thought I lost everything...but I found out later on that I gained everything from it.

He said I wasn't fit to be a Luna. That the child of a vampire and a she wolf would tarnish his family's lineage...and the pack reputation.

He was right. At least about the first part anyway...I was never meant to be a Luna.

I was always born to be an Alpha.

The wolves he threw me to weren't the heartless beasts he made them out to be. Instead, they were the first wolves to ever show me kindness, display loyalty, give me respect. The majority of them were just heartbroken souls who lost their mates or their packs, and sometimes both. Pained warriors who just longed for a place to belong to...

Wolves just like me.

It was in that time that found the part of myself that I'd been denied...the piece that I had always been missing. I also found the truth...that I was spared a life of misery and pain when I was rejected, I never would have been happy with that stupid Alpha.

And I certainly didn't need him to be followed by a pack.

So, with the sixty rogues I befriended, I moved down to New Orleans, claiming the oddly undesirable state of Louisiana as mine with the secret inheritance my vampire father left me in his will, and built my empire along with the wolves by my side. Our new home spreading from the forest to the coast...and every swamp in between.

In the two years it's been since then my pack, Blackrose Swamp, has only grown larger as more rogues and hybrids have joined, now closer to two hundred and eighty rather than sixty, and I take them in as quickly as possible, knowing the longer they stay rogue the more likely they would become insane...and inconsolable. I take in rogues with all kinds of backstories, but I do not take in killers of the innocent or cannibals...never. That is my only rule.

Anyway, I came up with the name for the pack after I changed my name from Scarlett Thomas to Scarlett Blackrose, taking my fathers last name now that I no longer have to use my mothers maiden name...and when I was practically given the abandoned pack house and territory, on the land owners account that it was haunted by the former pack that occupied it before they were killed or disbanded, it seemed only right to put my name on it...as well as the location it was in.

The mansion is old and historic, it creaks at night and it needed some cosmetic and plumbing repairs...as well as appliance updates and TLC...but it grew on me very nicely. It's history and prestige seemed to be holding up the place up along with the columns...and despite what the former owners told me...it was a beautiful place with a lush forest and a garden full of wildflowers. The swamps, though discouraging for most, make a good protective detail considering they are confusing to navigate through if you don't know the way...as well as being quite beautiful in an eerie, empty kind of way...