TEMPORARY MATES PERMANENT CRAVINGS novel Chapter 314

Three hundred and fourteen

Isabella POV

The taxi pulled away, leaving me standing outside my father’s familiar white duplex.

It had only been a month since I last stood outside this house, yet my chest tightened as though years had passed.. The freshly cut lawn looked the same, and the flower beds were perfectly trimmed as the groundskeeper pushed the mower across the lawn without sparing me a glance.

The house looked respectable from the outside, but inside, it had been hell.

The memories I’d spent weeks trying to bury rose in my throat like bile.

I was the bastard, the child who should never have been born.

The whore’s daughter.

They started calling me those names when I was still small enough to believe adults always told the truth. Then Beatrice and Barbara ate proper meals while I picked through cold, greasy leftovers. Sometimes there weren’t even leftovers. If Stepmother Gwen decided I’d been too visible that day, I simply didn’t eat. 1

My sisters’ old clothes became mine after they’d been worn nearly to rags. Plastic shoes split beneath my feet, leaving my heels cracked and bleeding. Every chore belonged to me.

Barbara never needed a reason to beat me. Looking at her too long, answering too slowly, breathing too loudly; anything was reason enough.

She’d drag me by the hair and beat me with a belt, a stick, or whatever lay within reach. One beating left me curled on the floor, vomiting until my stomach was empty.

Her mother never stopped her. Beatrice was rarely home, and although she never abused me, she treated me like a ghost. Looking back, it was obviously to avoid her mother and sister’s wrath.

I lifted my gaze toward the attic window. That tiny window overlooked the room where I’d spent countless nights convincing myself tomorrow would somehow be kinder.

Father was always away, and his absence made the house even colder. During one of his trips, they locked me outside while rain poured over me. When they let me inside, I slept on a thin mat while everyone else disappeared into bedrooms behind locked doors.

Eventually they sent me away, dumping me with my mother’s relatives, who had even less than us. They weren’t cruel people. They were simply too poor to notice another hungry child.

Then my body began to change, and boys noticed.

Then older men, like Alpha Desmond.

Coming back pregnant earned me even more hatred. Stepmother Gwen called me a prostitute loud enough for the whole house to hear. Barbara spat at my feet and said my baby would grow up to be another bastard.

Beatrice had only been dead for months, and somehow I became the place they emptied all their grief and bitterness. When the pregnancy slowed me down, they increased my workload.

One of the older maids, Eliza, stood there, her face lighting up with surprise.

“Bella, you came.”

Her hands cupped my cheeks and turned my face from side to side.

“You look so healthy. The Alpha House has been good to you. I still can’t believe you’re living with Luna Lisa.”

She said it as though I’d stumbled into a fairy tale, as though the disgraced daughter of this house had somehow wandered into one.

“How’s Maverick?”

“He’s doing well,” I replied, giving nothing else away.

Another maid, who’d never liked me, appeared from the hallway.

“They’re waiting upstairs,” she said flatly, and walked away.

Eliza squeezed my hand. “I’m really happy for you.”