This root post is just a single scene + some context.
There’s a magical race whose most powerful members are capable of mind control, and its leader – who is afraid of raising an heir in the normal way, due to risk of assassination and values drift – is secretly training up an heir to replace him and Unite The Factions and so on.
He’s raising her almost entirely among humans, and he sends her to a new school every six months and tells her to rule the pack by the end of those six months. At the end, he brings in all the key members of her peer cohort and mind controls them into saying their honest opinion of her – explaining why they don’t like her if they don’t like her, what they think she could have done to make them her followers in truth, what life circumstances and psychological weaknesses they have going on (some of which she could/should have detected on her own and used as levers).
She never has normal human relationships for the rest of her life because she can’t exit a control frame. When she’s an adult, I think an older lover worries out loud that she’s trying to get around his preferences, and she says: if I wanted to get around your preferences, I would just… make you have different preferences.
This one childhood scene that's clear for me, where her adoptive father mind controls a bunch of children into giving her brutally honest feedback before tearing her away from the current group to start over somewhere else, feels like a potent and unique core wound for a protagonist.