The Rejected daughter chosen by the Alpha (Maya and Atila) novel Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

~ MAYA

I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore.

Northumberland cold didn’t bite—it sliced. The wind coming off the hills felt like it had picked today to move into our yard for good, all because Alpha Átila decided he was finally going to pay us a visit.

Perfect.

He lived in a place where night never ended and the sky practically obeyed him, but he still had the nerve to show up at our house expecting a warm sitting room like we were lucky to host him. Typical Alpha.

I leaned over the chopping block and swung the axe again.

The log split with a clean crack.

I scooped up the pieces and stacked them beside the growing pile, already picturing what it would look like inside: the fireplace blazing, my mother wearing that flawless, fake smile… my sisters lined up like offerings…

…and me, the daughter who technically didn’t exist, hauling firewood like a servant.

“All this for the great Alpha,” I muttered. “What an honor.”

The yard smelled like frozen earth and old smoke. Morning fog still clung to the trees, thick and stubborn, like it refused to leave. I tugged my coat collar higher and rolled my neck, trying to ignore the itch that had been crawling along my skin for days.

The necklace.

That stupid blue stone had been heating up more and more every morning, like someone was lighting a match inside it. At first it was just strange—almost kind of comforting.

Then it started to bother me.

This morning, it was unbearable.

I pressed my fingers to the pendant and flinched.

It was pulsing against my skin.

Hot. Too hot.

It burned.

“Ow—” I hissed. “Not again.”

I lifted the axe for another swing, but the heat climbed up my throat, flared behind my ear, and suddenly the world tilted. I dropped the axe handle and grabbed the necklace with both hands.

“Enough.”

I didn’t think. I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t hear my mother’s voice in my head telling me never take it off.

I just ripped it off.

The clasp snapped open, and I threw the necklace onto the gravel like it was poison. Cold air hit the skin underneath, and I let out a long, shaky breath.

“Oh…” My eyes fluttered shut. “Finally.”

The spot still throbbed, raw and sensitive, but the pressure was gone. Like someone had loosened a hand around my throat.

I breathed in the icy air like it was the first real breath I’d taken in days.

One second.

Two.

Three—

My eyes snapped open.

“Oh my God.”

The curse.

My stomach dropped.

“Oh my God, oh my God—” I dropped to my knees, clawing through pebbles and dead leaves. “Where did you go? Where are you?”

My hands shook as I searched the ground, panic crawling up my spine.

“I’m going to die if I don’t put it back on,” I blurted out loud, because fear makes you stupid. “She said I’d die. She said it protects me and if I take it off—”

But time kept moving.

Nothing happened.

A minute passed.

Then another.

And I was still breathing.

Still alive.

I blinked, stunned.

“I… didn’t die.”

A laugh slipped out of me—small, disbelieving, almost hysterical.

“So it was all a lie?”

My heartbeat slowed just enough for me to actually look.

The necklace was right there, wedged between two stones like it had rolled into hiding.

I grabbed it and stared at the crystal.

It was warm in my palm.

Still pulsing faintly.

“So this whole time,” I whispered, “you were just a necklace. Just something to scare me into behaving.”

I shoved it into my coat pocket, gathered the wood, and went inside.

The second I pushed open the back door, heat wrapped around me—fireplace warmth mixed with expensive perfume and my mother’s voice slicing through the house like she owned every breath in it.

“You took long enough, Maya,” she said without even looking at me. “The Alpha can’t walk into a cold home.”

‘Then tell him to stay in his moonlit castle,’ I thought.

I smiled anyway.

“The wood is here,” I said, dropping it beside the hearth.

My mother finally looked up, her gaze sweeping over me like she was inspecting something she’d bought and didn’t like. My coat, my boots, my hair tied back in a messy knot.

“Go wash,” she ordered. “And put on something that doesn’t look like you crawled out of a barn. Even if you won’t be in the sitting room. I won’t have him thinking House Melrose is careless.”

“You can’t be here,” she hissed. “Move. Now. We don’t have time.”

“Mother—wait—you’re hurting me!”

“Don’t make me repeat myself.”

She dragged me down the hallway like she was pulling a stain off the floor. My sisters stared, wide-eyed, but none of them said a word.

They never defended me.

Not once.

My mother shoved me up the service stairs—the ones no guests ever saw—and into the cold upstairs corridor. She yanked open the attic door and shoved me toward the ladder.

“Mother, I’m not going to die,” I insisted, voice shaking. “I took it off and nothing happened—”

“Enough,” she snapped, voice low and vicious. “You don’t understand what you’ve done.”

The attic was freezing. Worse than outside. The air felt old and stale, like it had been holding its breath for years.

She pushed me inside, and I stumbled onto the wooden floorboards.

“Do not come out until I come for you,” she warned.

I sat down hard, pulling my knees to my chest.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Okay, Mother…”

Her eyes turned colder than the winter outside.

“And don’t call me that,” she said. “No one knows you’re my daughter.”

Then the door slammed.

The lock turned.

Darkness swallowed the attic.

Silence followed.

But not the quiet kind.

The kind that sits in your chest and makes you feel hollow.

I pressed a hand to my arm, then wrapped my arms around myself as the sounds downstairs drifted up—laughter, excitement, my mother’s perfect hostess voice.

The house getting ready for the Alpha.

For my sisters.

For the daughters that mattered.

And sitting there in the dark, the necklace warm in my pocket and my heart aching like it had been split open, I finally understood the truth.

The real curse wasn’t the stone.

The real curse was being born a Melrose…

and still having to pretend I wasn’t.