As three of the males from my former pack surrounded me in the center of the clearing I knew I was in trouble. As an unmated female, I was considered free meat, at the mercy of the males around me. No, wasn't a word they were used to hearing.

In our pack females are considered free game until the moment they are mated. So when at barely 18 years old I had turned down the advances of the Alpha's son, it had not gone over well with the rest of our pack.

I was shirking tradition, breaking the rules, rebelling, and worst of all thinking for myself all things that females in our pack did not do. These things made me not only a bad influence but something to fear. So I had been beaten and then thrown out, immediately closed off from the only family I had ever known. In an instant with just a casual thought from our Alpha, my world had gotten utterly silent, for the first time in my life I couldn't hear the thought of the others.

For weeks I had stumbled through the forest in wolf form allowing my body to heal quicker and the mind and soul of my human form to rest and regroup. Even though those weeks had been the absolute hardest of my life I knew that I had made the right decision.

Our laws were outdated, ancient, and absolutely wrong. Females were considered inferior and second class citizens in comparison to the males around them.

I never understood how our parents could be okay with their daughters being paraded around like trophies, used for breeding, dehumanized, and basically raped after turning 18 and until they became mated, and sometimes even after if it was advantageous to their mate.

My entire life my greatest secret, buried deep in the recesses of my mind, where the others wouldn't be able to detect it had been that I never intended to allow myself to be treated that way. I would have rather died and very nearly did.

If it wasn't for my wolf form I would have died in that forest from my injuries and exposure to the elements.

But I had made it, I had survived and started to build myself a little home in the woods. Even with my wolf raging against me on the inside for alienating us and not having found a mate, I knew that I had made the right decision.

In those moments when it was freezing cold and it felt like the silence of the forest was a living breathing thing closing in around me, I reminded myself how special it would be and how good it would feel to someday come before my mate pure and untouched by another wolf.

On that fateful day, I had been in human form foraging in the clearing for food when I had sensed them closing in around me.

I stood to see Jang, the Alpha's son, and two of his friends standing several feet away in a circle, guaranteeing that I couldn't run without heading straight for one of them.

Even in human form, our males are stronger and faster, natural predators, and they are raised their entire lives to see females as property. So I knew that I was going to have a hard time getting out of this unscathed.

But I didn't expect them to advance on me so quickly. Without saying a word and before I had even realized what was happening Jang had advanced on me, dolling out a blow to my temple that had my vision flickering and my knees buckling.

"That was for not knowing your place." He screamed as he stood over me a look of utter hatred and contempt on his face.

"And what we do to you next will be for embarrassing me in front of the pack." He said as he began unbuckling his pants and as his friends transformed into wolf form. "By the time we're done with you, you'll be so unrecognizable no man will even be able to tell that you're a female."