Plus-Size Sweetheart Over 100 Pounds Down, I Dominated the Pack Hockey League!

My fiancé, Alpha Theron, was the star player on the pack hockey team. Yet even as his mate, the pack mocked me as a fat pig that had wandered in among wolves. But when he was attacked, I was the one who stepped in front of him. Hockey sticks came down on my back and my shoulders. The pain cut to the bone, and I gritted my teeth and took it. That overweight body everyone despised was the only reason not one blow landed on him. It was also what finally made the old Luna nod and agree to let me marry into the family. But while I lay unconscious from my injuries, Theron announced that he would mark my stepsister Hannah, the cheer captain, instead. Not only that. Hannah posted videos online of the two of us practicing cheer routines together. "Who wants to watch a pig dance sexy? The Alpha had his reasons for turning her down." "Look at all that useless fat. Is that really a wolf?" Then, while the mockery was at its worst, she asked me to forgive her, as if none of it had been on purpose. When my heart was already ash, my father and my stepmother threw me out of the house. "All that fat, clumsy and ugly, and she cannot even hold on to her own mate." "She is that fat and still joined the cheer squad. Now the rest of us get mocked too. How humiliating!" As a rogue, I swallowed every kind of suffering there is. In one year I lost over a hundred pounds and became the brightest cheer sweetheart in the league. Then I turned around and cheered for the most valuable player on the ice. Theron heard about it and came running. He dropped to his knees with red eyes and clung to the hem of my skirt. "You were my love, my mate! What does that idiot who can only swing a stick have that I don't?" Chapter 1 Three days ago, Theron announced that he was rejecting the bond and marking my stepsister Hannah. But everyone knew that Theron's mate was me. So when I walked into Theron and Hannah's engagement party, I knew what everyone was waiting for. Almost every guest there was certain I would tear the place apart. Even Theron's face went cold. He pushed Hannah behind him without thinking, his voice a warning. "Aurora, watch yourself. You cry like a heartbroken cow!" Laughter broke out. I swallowed the hurt and forced a carefree smile until my eyes stung. "Congratulations on finding your love. We'll pick a time to reject the bond. This is my engagement gift for Hannah." The room went dead quiet. Even Theron looked startled. "I'm giving you my blessing, so I'm asking you to give me back the ring my mother left me." At eighteen I had sworn an oath with Theron before the Moon Goddess. "Theron, once you put on my mom's ring you belong to me. If you ever lose it, I'll never want you again." "Aurora, I'm sorry! I didn't know this was..." Hannah covered her mouth in fake surprise. The ring with the wolf carved into it sat on her index finger, bright as day. Her eyes went red in an instant and she reached up to take it off. The moment she held it out to me, she let out a horrible scream and toppled backward. "Aurora, what are you doing!" Theron roared and rushed over, pulling Hannah into his arms. "It's not like that... my sister only wanted her ring back. She didn't push me on purpose." Hannah hid behind him, shaking. I never touched her, but nobody was going to believe me. "That fat pig is vicious." "Hurting her own sister like that. She has to be jealous of how fit and sexy Hannah is." "God, Aurora!" My stepmother chimed in, laying it on thick, her face full of hurt as she looked at my father. My father raised his hand and slapped me hard across the face. "You clumsy, ugly thing. How do you have the nerve to stand here and hurt your own sister? Get out right now. You're a disgrace." Thrown out of the house, I was soaked through by the downpour. The pain drove me down into the mud. When I opened my eyes again I was in a hospital room, and a tall man was leaning against the side of the bed. Two buttons at his collar were undone. His pale gray eyes swept over me without much interest. "Beta Aurora. Alpha Theron rejected you for being fat, and your stepmother and your stepsister set you up and got you thrown out of your home." "Who are you? Have we... met before?" I forced myself upright, trying to work out whether I had seen him somewhere. "None of that matters. What matters is whether you have the will to take revenge." "Of course I'm not walking away like this. This is not my ending!" I grabbed a handful of the fat on my thigh and swore to myself I would take it off. The man seemed satisfied with the hatred in my eyes, then said, "Your body has been wrecked for a long time. I'll arrange a few minor surgeries for you. Right now you need to rest." Chapter 2 Five days later I looked at the bandaged, heavy body in the mirror and wanted to go straight back and strangle my stepmother. The man had told me why I had ended up at two hundred and forty pounds. From the day she married my father, she had been mixing pig feed and fattening potions into my food! "Don't get worked up, and don't cry. It slows the healing." He calmed me down. Half a month later, when I had recovered a little, I finally asked him why he was helping me. He never gave me a straight answer. He only said I could help him back. So the two of us founded our own private league of avengers, and he sent me home. My father and my stepmother didn't say anything. I thought the quiet would hold. Then, just as I finished unpacking, laughter broke out beyond my door. "God! Why would Miss Hannah wear something like that?" "You don't think that's how she got the Alpha, dressing like..." I opened the door and found Hannah in a slip dress that barely covered the parts that mattered. She was standing outside my room, her face burning with shame and anger. She didn't start crying until she saw Theron coming down the hall. "One of the maids said my sister wanted me to wear the dress she gave me, so I put it on..." Theron pulled off his coat without a word and draped it over her shoulders. When he looked at me again, his eyes were full of rage. "Aurora, I thought you'd come back with some sense. Instead you're still pulling filthy little tricks behind everyone's back!" It felt like something had torn my heart wide open. I tipped my head back and forced the tears down, then answered him calmly. "I never gave her that dress, and I never sent anyone with a message. "That's not how I work. When I say I'm done with something, I'm done. Why would I go to all that trouble to fight for it?" Theron opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came. Hannah took the opening. She brought out a gift box, her voice guilty and confused. "I'm sorry, Aurora, maybe I heard it wrong... The maid pushed two boxes at me. Maybe you meant this one instead?" She opened the box as she spoke, but her hands suddenly shook and she dropped it. A sex toy rolled out with a note, and the note said, "Scheming slut, if you want it that badly go play with yourself. Keep away from Aurora's man!" Hannah shook from head to foot, then shrieked and fainted. Theron scooped her up in his arms and looked at me with contempt. "Look at yourself, Aurora. You let yourself go. I couldn't get hard looking at you naked. "I'm a man with needs! That's why I picked Hannah. What was I supposed to do, sleep with a wall? "You're not just clumsy and ugly. You're vicious to the core!" I shook my head over and over, trying to explain, and then I pulled out my medical report. "There's something in my food. My stepmother and Hannah have been drugging me for years. You..." The sound of tearing paper filled my ears. My father ripped the evidence to shreds right in front of me. "Enough!" He cut me off, disgust all over his face. "Hannah wouldn't hurt an ant. How many more ridiculous lies are you going to make up!" Chapter 3 I stood in front of the two of them with my suitcase in hand, still wanting to explain. "Get out of the way. Don't keep Hannah from resting." Theron let his Alpha power crash down on me, then kicked me hard in the shin. I lost my balance and went rolling down the long staircase. The surgical wounds tore open, and blood soaked through the hem of my dress. I lay on the floor looking up at those cold, contemptuous faces, and the last of my hope burned away. I dragged myself up, wiped the blood off my mouth, turned around and walked out the front door. From that day on I had nothing to do with any of them. The man seemed to have known this was how it would end. He had a new room ready for me long before I needed it. After another two weeks of treatment, my weight finally came down to two hundred and twenty pounds. I went to Gordon, Hannah's cheer coach, and handed him the file I had put together. He was thrilled. "You choreographed all these steps and the extreme lifts?" I nodded and admitted it freely. These were only a fraction of what I had in me. Coach Gordon held enormous standing in the hockey world. The squads he trained were fought over by every pack in the league. "You're Hannah's sister? I heard her sister was also..." Gordon looked at the mask over my face and asked carefully. When I didn't answer, he didn't push. He just went on talking. "Honestly, I never thought Hannah should be captain. She is always pushing the hard elements onto the other girls. Werewolves are naturally resilient, but she still put one of my athletes through hip-reconstruction surgery. Yet for some reason, Hannah was the one who hobbled on crutches for the cameras." I knew the routine Coach Gordon meant. The girls would stand shoulder to shoulder in a line, their arms draped over one another's shoulders. They would jump into the air, land, and finish in a perfect split. "Worse, she looks the other way while the pack hockey team's senior vice president of public relations and communications secretly films my girls. And there is more... but I do not have proof of that yet." Coach Gordon stopped himself. I wanted to hear more, but he grabbed my hand instead, gripping it hard. "You're Aurora, aren't you? I knew it the second I saw this choreography. "Hannah could never create work like this. She cannot even land a back tuck. If you are willing, I can use your routines to train a brand-new cheer captain!" I was grateful to Coach Gordon for the chance, and glad to give him every idea I had. Walking out of the training center, I felt lighter than I ever had. But on my way back to the hospital, Theron's men grabbed me and dragged me to his estate. "Aurora, you've got some nerve. "How dare you use my name to pressure the squad into cutting Hannah? You've broken her!" Chapter 4 I had no idea what he was raving about. I only wanted to leave. Theron seemed to have expected me to deny it. He sneered. "I saw you coming out of Coach Gordon's training center. You're eaten alive with jealousy of Hannah, and that's why you did this. "Since you're so determined to destroy the job Hannah loves, you can find out what losing something feels like!" He nodded at his Gamma, and a crate of my mother's belongings was hauled out. I froze. "Burn it." "No!" I screamed and lunged for the crate, but he crushed me to my knees with the force of his Alpha power. I turned and caught the hem of Theron's coat, begging him through sobs. "Theron, I was wrong! I'm sorry, I'll apologize right now... please don't burn my mother's things..." Theron didn't move. He gave the order to his Gamma. "What are you standing there for? Do it now!" "Please, don't—" I knelt there in despair and watched the pack Gamma pour the fuel and light it. The flames shot up and swallowed the little bear my mother had sewn for me, the small dresses she had made me... all of it. When there was nothing left but ash, I finally stopped fighting. When I got back to the hospital, the man was already waiting in my room. "Aurora?" He immediately sensed that something was wrong. The tears came and I could not stop them. I begged him to create a weight-loss plan that would make me healthy. I needed to become strong enough to survive the pain of rejecting the bond. Somewhere in all that regret and crying, I learned that his name was Everett. That reminded me that he had once played on the pack hockey team, and that his sister Camilla had spent time on Hannah's squad. I was grateful to this man for giving me a second life. Once my body had healed enough, Everett had the doctors put together a new set of medications for me. At an age when I understood nothing, my stepmother had forced me to eat and eat. I wasn't only fat on the outside. Everything inside me was rotted through. Two months of treatment and care later, my body already felt much lighter. "For the next ten months you'll train sixteen hours a day, brutal flexibility and explosive power work. I'll be tracking your health, your food and your sleep the whole way." I watched him lay out the plan in detail, and the joke I had been about to make died in my throat. Sub-zero stretching, hypergravity resistance work... The training days were hard, but nothing compared to what I carried inside. Three months later, I had just climbed out of an ice bath when Everett came bursting in. "Aurora, something's happened!" I still didn't understand what was going on, so I answered lightly. "Don't tell me my stepmother and Hannah grew a conscience and turned themselves in?" His face had gone ashen. When he finally spoke, he looked deeply uncomfortable. "Your father is dead." Chapter 5 "How is that possible?" It felt like the sky was coming down on me. My father had treated me horribly, but I still wanted him to go on living the ordinary life he had. I was going to tell him the truth once I was strong enough to take on Hannah and her mother. How had it come to this so fast? "Your father went to see Coach Gordon. A few days after he came back..." Everett had no idea how to comfort me. He rested his hand on my head and told me I could take tomorrow off. But I couldn't wait a single moment. The number on the scale started dropping fast enough to watch. At a hundred and seventy pounds I finally couldn't stand it and went to see Coach Gordon. When I saw him, I noticed that he was in far worse shape than before, both his spirit and his body. "Coach, what is going on in this pack! And my father... Alpha Marcus, how did he die?" I was desperate for the truth, and I was done hiding who I was. Coach Gordon smiled at me for a long moment, then waved me over to sit beside him. He took a photo of the two of us together, but the smile was gone from his face in a second. "Aurora, I knew it was you. You're the only hope pack hockey has left." He took my hand with a father's tenderness. From what he told me, I learned the side of pack hockey and the cheer squad that nobody sees. "So Alpha Theron has no business being a star player, and after what Hannah has done she has no business being captain. If this keeps up, our whole athletic program is finished!" I went back to the house Everett rented for me in a daze, and the moment I saw him the tears came and wouldn't stop. "How could she use the girls on that squad to pave Theron's way! "So many girls. My good friend Kate suffered a serious tear while covering Hannah's hardest elements, and she had to pay for the cartilage-repair surgery herself... "And the wages Theron and Hannah pay them are pathetic. Less than a full-time worker makes at the fast food place downstairs. "Hannah is the captain. She knew every step of what those bastards were doing to the girls... no, it was her, she was the one handing girls over to those bastards on the sports committee, trading them for Theron's star player title, filling the pack's pockets..." I clamped a hand over my mouth. What they had done made me sick to my stomach. "My sister, Camilla, was one of the girls they assaulted." It took Everett a long time to get the words out. I put my arms around his neck, sick with guilt. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, Everett! I didn't know. I never knew they were doing any of this." "None of it is your fault, Aurora." There were tears standing in his eyes. After Hannah traded Camilla away, Camilla had barely come of age when she killed herself with a silver dagger. I swore an oath under the full moon: I would expose every one of their false faces. Then I would make pack hockey and the cheer squad clean again. My weight fell to a hundred and twenty, a hundred and ten, a hundred and five, a hundred pounds. With Coach Gordon's help, I performed at cheer events for pack after pack. My name was starting to eclipse Hannah's. I knew it. It was time to spring the trap!