LILLIAN
The two men don’t bother explaining.
One grabs one arm, the other takes the other, and they haul me out of my room like I’m a sack of grain.
My feet drag across the stone floor because I can barely make them work.
My body still feels like it belongs to someone else.
The fever has broken, but what’s left of me feels hollow and brittle.
“Where are you taking me?” I manage.
“Alpha’s orders,” the one on my left says.
“You’re being thrown out.”
I don’t have the strength to fight them.
And then I hear something that makes me go completely still.
Poor half-breed.
Offended Lady Julia of all people.
This wasn’t even the Alpha’s order.
I blink once, then again, locking my gaze on the guard closest to me.
My heart stutters against my ribs as I study his face, searching for the slightest movement.
Nothing.
His lips are pressed into a hard line, never parting.
Yet the words reach me with startling clarity, as though he’d leaned down and whispered them directly into my ear.
So it’s real.
What the Moon Goddess gave me is actually real.
And Julia arranged this herself—without the Alpha, without Dylan.
She did this on her own.
Before I can process that, another voice cuts through—also not spoken aloud.
This one comes from the guard on my right.
She’s actually beautiful.
Good face, good body.
Shame about the bloodline.
But still…
His eyes slide over me, and what I see in them makes my stomach turn before his thought even finishes forming.
Wouldn’t mind having her before we dump her in the woods.
I look straight ahead.
My face stays blank.
Inside, I feel sick.
This is what the Moon Goddess called a gift.
This is my compensation.
For a moment, I wonder whether the Moon Goddess understands what she’s done.
There are things people carry behind their eyes that are never meant to be heard.
Ugly things.
Rotten things.
And now I have no choice but to hear all of it, with no way to unhear it, no way to turn it off, no way to go back to not knowing.
A blessing, she said.
Compensation.
It feels like another wound.
The pack house disappears behind us, then the outer buildings, then the tree line, and still we keep walking, deep into the forest at the far edge of the territory.
The trees grow thick enough to block the sun, and the undergrowth tangles around my ankles.
No wolves patrol out here.
No one would hear anything that happened out here.
My unease sharpens into something close to panic with every step.
I start talking carefully, casually, as if I’m just making conversation to pass the time.
“So,” I say to the one on my left, “has the Alpha King arrived yet?
I heard he was coming ahead of schedule.”
“Shut up,” the guard on my right mutters.
“I’m just wondering what Lady Julia promised you both for this.” I keep my voice light.
“She’s generous when she wants something.
But she’s also the type to forget people once they’ve been useful.”
A flicker of tension passes between them.
Both guards shift slightly.
A thought surfaces from the guard on my left, quick and suspicious.
What did she promise him?
She said we’d split the reward.
But how do I know he won’t pocket all of it?
I press carefully.
“I heard she paid two people to handle things quietly once before.
They both walked away with very different amounts.”
It’s a complete lie.
But it lands.
The guard on my right stops walking.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The guard on my left tightens his grip on my arm.
“Nothing.
She’s trying to stall.”
“I’m just saying, if one of you has the agreement in writing and the other doesn’t—”
“There’s no agreement,” the guard on my left snaps, but his eyes dart sideways to his partner.
“There was supposed to be,” the guard on my right says.
They’re both looking at each other now instead of me.
The guard on my left has loosened his grip on my arm.
I take one careful step sideways.
Then another.
Then I run.
My legs respond better than I expect—adrenaline, maybe, or pure desperation.
For twenty seconds I actually think I’m going to make it.
The trees are dense here.
If I can get far enough ahead, if I can find somewhere to hide—
My knees buckle.
Not because I trip.
My body simply gives out, still weakened by the rejection.
I hit the ground hard, my palms skidding across mud and dead leaves.
The guard on my right is on me before I can drag myself back up.
He grabs my wrist and wrenches me upright.
His grip is bruising.
“Stupid girl.” His voice has changed.
All the casual indifference is gone.
What’s left is ugly.
“That was a mistake.”
The guard on my left catches up, breathing hard, his expression twisted with anger.
“Do you have any idea how much trouble you just—”
“Doesn’t matter now.” The guard on my right looks at me the same way he did earlier, except there’s nothing hidden about it anymore.
“We were going to be decent about this.
Leave you at the edge of the territory and walk away.
But now…”
I know what’s coming before he finishes.
I heard it in his head less than an hour ago.
“No.” I try to pull my wrist free.
“No!
Let go of me.”
He shoves me down.
I hit the ground again, and this time he doesn’t let me get up.
I catch the flicker of discomfort in the other guard’s expression, but he doesn’t step in or stop it.
I scream.
The sound tears out of me, raw and desperate, even though I know there’s no one to hear it out here.
I claw at his hands, at his arms, at anything I can reach.
My nails break.
It doesn’t matter.
He’s so much stronger than me.
He raises his hand and brings it down hard across my cheek.
The world tilts.
My ears ring.
“Stop fighting,” he says.
“It’ll be easier if you stop.”
I don’t stop.
I keep struggling, keep fighting, even when my arms go weak and my vision blurs.
I keep fighting because stopping feels like giving up on myself, and I have spent eighteen years being given up on.
But not by me.
“Please,” I gasp, not to him—he’s past hearing.
To anyone.
To the trees.
To whatever listens out here.
“Please, someone.”
The air changes.
It happens all at once—a shift in pressure, as if the atmosphere around us has changed.
Heavier.
Electric.
The hairs on my arms stand straight up.
Then a voice cuts through the trees, carrying the kind of authority that doesn’t need volume to land like a hammer.
“Stay away from her.”
The guard on my right goes still.
The one on my left takes an instinctive step back.
The man standing at the tree line is tall—broad across the shoulders.
He’s dressed in dark travel clothes, his coat hanging open, and he looks at the two guards the way you’d look at something unpleasant you’ve stepped in.
He’s the most striking man I’ve ever seen.
Dark eyes, a sharp jaw, features clean and severe.
Beautiful in the way a blade is beautiful—precise, dangerous, not made for gentleness.
There’s a stillness to him that seems to press against the air around us.
The guard on my right straightens up, because apparently he hasn’t learned anything tonight.
“This doesn’t concern you, stranger.
The girl’s in heat—she is the one who asked us to fuck her.
Walk away.”
The guard on my left nods, already trying to look like someone who had no part in any of this.
“Move along.”
The stranger doesn’t move.
His eyes shift from the guards to me, and something in his expression changes so quickly I almost miss it.
A flicker, almost like recognition, except that makes no sense.
He doesn’t know me.
He’s never seen me before in his life.
But I know him.
Not his face.
Not his name.
His scent.
It hits me the way his voice did—all at once, drowning out everything else.
Pine and midnight rain and something warm underneath it, something that reaches into the hollow place the first rejection carved out of my chest and pulls.
My wolf, battered and weakened as she is, stirs for the first time since last night.
Mate.
I see recognition register in him too—a slight tension across his shoulders.
“Release her.”
The air in the forest seems to compress around those two words.
Power rolls off him like a physical force—Alpha Intimidation, but stronger than anything I’ve felt from a pack Alpha before.
It reaches somewhere deep and primal, pressing down on every instinct that says submit, back down, run.
The guard on my right loses his bravado instantly.
He staggers back from me like I’ve burned him.
The guard on my left drops to one knee before he seems to realize he’s doing it.
I’m still on the ground.
I haven’t moved since the stranger appeared.
Some combination of shock, exhaustion, and the mate bond humming through my nerves has pinned me in place.
Now that the threat is gone, everything I’ve been holding back rises at once.
My father’s voice in the dungeon.
The whip.
Julia’s nails on my chin.
Being dragged out before I’d even had a chance to recover from my first transformation.
The guard’s hand on my face.
Eighteen years of keeping my head down and swallowing everything and telling myself it would get better, it would change, one day it would be different—
I press my hands flat against the cold ground and I start crying.
Ugly, shaking sobs that come from somewhere deep in my chest where I’ve been storing all of this for years.
I haven’t cried like this in front of anyone since I was small enough not to know better.
I stopped because crying in front of people in that pack always made things worse.
They used it against you.
They called it weakness and they weren’t wrong.
But I can’t stop it right now.
I have nothing left to hold it back with.
I’m still crying when I become aware of him—the stranger, crouching a few feet away, watching me with an expression I can’t fully read.
He reaches out toward me.
My whole body seizes.
“Please.” The word comes out broken, barely a breath.
“Please don’t.
Please, I know what you’re going to say.
Please don’t reject me.
I can’t—” My voice cracks apart.
“In my condition, if you reject me right now, I don’t think I’ll survive it.
I’m not asking to be your mate.
I’m not asking for anything like that.
I’ll be your servant.
I’ll work for you.
I won’t be any trouble.
I just—please don’t say those words to me.
Not right now.”
He doesn’t speak for a moment.
Then his hand moves.
He grips my arm gently and draws me up from the ground, steadying me on my feet with a care completely at odds with how he handled the guards moments ago.
He shrugs his coat from his shoulders in one smooth motion and settles it around mine.
The warmth of it hits me so hard my eyes blur again.
“I’m not going to reject you,” he says.
His voice is quieter now.
“But I can’t take you with me based on what happened tonight alone.
I need to speak with your Alpha and your family.
I can’t take you into my territory without knowing the facts.”
I nod.
I don’t trust my voice.
A branch snaps somewhere behind us.
Footsteps—more than one set, moving fast.
I tense, but the stranger doesn’t.
He straightens slightly and turns toward the sound, unhurried.
Dylan breaks through the tree line.
He looks wild—breathing hard, jaw tight, his eyes moving from me to the stranger to the two guards on the ground.
Fury and confusion flash across his face.
And then something else entirely as he takes in the stranger’s face.
Dylan stops.
He drops to one knee.
His head bows.
His voice comes out stiff with a respect he clearly wasn’t expecting to show tonight.
“Greetings, Alpha King.”