Chapter 1: You Just Want to Get Rid of Me

POV: Nyx

"I would rather die than marry him"

The words slipped out of my mouth before I could stop myself.

Silence fell across the study and Edric Calloway didn’t flinch like what I had just said didn't matter to him.

He just kept writing.

"Three days" He said calmly, like I hadn’t just chosen death over obedience and him some seconds ago.

Like the words *you are marrying Lucian Crane* weren't the kind of words that could stop a heart cold.

My stomach twisted in shock and annoyance. Three days??

Three fucking days???

That was all the time I had left before my life stopped being mine. Before I and my life belonged to that monster.... Alpha Lucian Crane.

I stared at him from across the study. Edric Calloway. The man who collected me at four years old and called it charity. He made me pay for it every single day since. He sat behind his desk like a king, hands folded, eyes already moving back to the papers in front of him. Like I was already dismissed.

"No," I said.

He didn't look up. "It's done."

"I said NO!." My voice came out steadier than I felt. Good. Let him think I wasn't shaking. "I'm not marrying anyone in three days. I'm not marrying *him* in three days. Lucian Crane is—"

"The Alpha King." Now he looked up. Slow and patient. "The most powerful wolf alive. And he has agreed to take you."

Take me?. Like I was furniture being rehomed.

"Agreed to take me," I repeated. "Not that he wants me. Not that I have a choice but He agreed to take me."

"Watch your tone."

"My tone is the only thing in this room that's honest." I stepped closer to the desk because I couldn't stand still. Stillness felt like surrender and I had learned early that surrender meant you stopped existing. "You can't do this. You can't sell me off to the scariest man in the werewolf world because it's convenient for you."

He gave me nothing. Not even a flicker.

That was always the worst part about Edric Calloway. He didn't get angry when I pushed. He got still. Like I was a problem he had already calculated the solution to and was simply waiting for me to exhaust myself.

"You just want to get rid of me, right, Papa?" The word sat wrong in my mouth the way it always had. Papa. Like he had ever been that. "Just say it. Say it out loud, that you never wanted me, that I was always just—"

"You will go," he said. "You will go and you will be grateful."

"Grateful?" I laughed. It came out sharp and a little broken. "I curse the day God gave me to you. You know that? I curse every single day of it."

The silence that followed was two full seconds long.

Then he stood up.

I didn't move but I should have. Some part of me that still remembered being small knew I should have stepped back, dropped my eyes, made myself smaller but I didn't.

“TAHHH” The slap hit the left side of my face hard enough to snap my head sideways. I tasted blood instantly, copper flooding across my tongue from where my lip split against my teeth.

"You fucking ungrateful slut." His voice was completely calm. "You will go to Lucian Crane and you will be grateful that a man of his standing wants anything to do with a girl like you. You are nothing. You have always been nothing. He is doing you a favor."

I straightened up slowly and looked at him.

I did not cry. I had not cried in front of Edric Calloway since I was seven years old and figured out that tears were the only currency he actually enjoyed collecting. I was not going to give him that. Not today. Not ever again.

"Fine," I said. My voice didn't shake. I was almost proud of it.

I walked out.

Down the hall. Past the portrait of Ren at sixteen that hung where a portrait of me never would. Past the staircase and up it, one step at a time, my hands loose at my sides, my chin level, my face giving absolutely nothing away.

I made it to my room and I closed the door.

“AHHHHHH”.

One long, raw sound that started somewhere in my chest and came out like something that had been trapped there for years, and maybe it had been sitting right there waiting for a door to close so it could finally get out. I pressed both hands over my mouth after and stood there breathing hard through my nose, eyes burning, refusing to let the crying happen but it came out anyway. I broke down.

I slid down the door until I was sitting on the floor.

The blood on my lip had dried a little. I touched it with two fingers and looked at the smear of red there in the dim light from the window and thought about every meal where Ren was called by his name and I was called *the other one*, my birthdays that passed without a word, the way Isolde looked at me sometimes, like I was a stain on something she was trying to keep clean, the fact that I had a sharp mouth and a fast brain and I had built both of those things specifically because they were the only things no one could take from me and they had still never once been enough to make me feel like I belonged anywhere.

I sat there on the cold floor and I let myself feel all of it for exactly sixty seconds.

Then I stopped.

I pressed the back of my hand against my lip and I took a deep breath. I looked at my reflection in the dark glass of the window across the room, the girl with the torn lip, red eyes and the spine that was still straight even now, even after everything.

"Fine," I said quietly to whatever was listening. "But I don't go quietly. I never have."

I held my own gaze in the dark window.

"And Lucian Crane is about to find that out.”