The Beta's Mate Returns

1

Borjana, 2015

They called me a monster, but I believed myself to be more of a peaceful assassin. 

Sure, I was a murderer, but those people deserved it, or at least, that was what 'he' taught me to believe. Now that I knew the truth, I couldn't fix those lives lost by my thirst for vengeance, but I could spend my life atoning for my sins.

You see, that was the thing about me, I wasn't very good at making my own choices. 

Some people would be sad about having no choices, but I felt comfortable letting other people make my decisions. 

It was a particular weakness of mine to forfeit control over making choices because, if I was being honest, I didn't really know what I wanted. 

I thought the names they chose for me would give me that sense of purpose.

It turned out though, looking into the eyes of my sweet boy, that the names those people chose for me were rather burdensome.

It wasn't just the names, but rather the endless pressure of having to live up to those names that had led me down this path.

Years of relentless torture that I had endured from the people who were supposed to love me, and now I had the scars to prove it.

One of the names that I went by during my innocent days, was Sky. I remembered my mother calling me Sky as a child. She compared me to a bright summer's day, the words that her favorite poet had written long ago. I thought often about the sonnets she used to read to me in the late evenings as she taught me about love, betrayal, drama, and mercy.

Even on her sickest days, I kept myself cheerful for her. I wanted to be the Sky she talked about in her poems. I found that I couldn't fit that role anymore now. I couldn't be the sunny bright girl that she wanted me to because she was no longer here to by my sun.

After my mother's death, things changed. 

It was those saddening days that followed her death that my father called me Price. He couldn't bear to say the name my mother chose for me. It was so painful to imagine my mother's death so he avoided the pain and he avoided me, at least, for a little while.

Even though he avoided the pain, that vile abuser still fell into a terrible and unrelenting darkness. It was a darkness that consumed him, possessed him, and caused him to harm everyone near and dear. If there was anything I learned from the name he spoke was that people could become evil quite easily. 

I also remembered there was a very particular boy, from my days as a slightly less innocent girl, who called me Princess. I wished he could be my prince. I wished he could rescue me from the brutality of a father who forgot my existence.

However, I felt that he too was also trying to tame me. He did this by putting me on such a high pedestal as someone to be idolized. I tried to keep myself on that pedestal but it was too hard and eventually it all came crumbling down

It didn't matter now, because there was that awful night, in which many awful things happened, and now I was here on this godforsaken mountain.

I ran away from home with only the feelings of my guilty betrayal to comfort me. I traveled far away from the forest that nearly killed me as my father slept soundly beside my bloodied body.

It was the last time we faced each other before I gathered my defiled bloody body and disappeared. I stole money and moved to a very quiet far away town in Borjana. I went by another name in this small town. I was welcomed by my Uncle and his sweet mate Hilda. Here they called me Skylar Barros, unwilling to acknowledge my father's vile existence.