LOGINSold by the man who swore he loved her, Seren Ashvale arrived at Vord territory expecting death. Instead the twin Alphas wanted her for one purpose, an heir their dying bloodline desperately needed. But the bond that bound her to both men was forbidden by law and impossible to deny. Pregnant, hunted by the council, and finally chosen by two Alphas at once, Seren had to fight to keep a love the world said could not exist.
View MoreSeren’s POV
“She actually believes we are moving into the upper district next month,” Davan’s voice boomed through the speaker of his phone, followed by a sharp burst of laughter.
I froze in the middle of the kitchen. My fingers, still damp from the rain outside, tightened around the strap of my errand bag. The flat was dark, save for the pale light leaking from the kitchen counter where Davan’s phone sat. A live call was running. The screen glowed with three names I recognized—his closest friends from the warrior circle.
“No way,” Jax laughed from the speaker, his voice distorted by static. “She really thinks you're taking her with you?”
“I swear to God,” Davan said. I could hear the clink of ice in a glass from the bedroom down the hall, followed by his heavy footsteps. He didn't know I was back. He thought I was still running across the pack territory to deliver his medicine. “She already started packing her old sweaters into boxes. It is hilarious.”
My breath caught. A cold, heavy weight dropped straight into my stomach. I stepped closer to the counter, my boots making no sound on the worn linoleum floor. I reached out to press the red button to end the call, to stop the noise, to pretend I hadn't heard anything. But my hand shook, hovering an inch above the glass screen.
“You play too much, Davan,” another voice, Torin, chimed in. “But for real, what are you going to do with her when Zola officially joins the pack house tomorrow? Zola won't tolerate an unranked girl hanging around your space.”
“There is nothing to do,” Davan replied smoothly. He sounded so calm, so entirely different from the man who kissed my forehead before I left an hour ago. “Seren is going back to the low-rank dorms where she belongs. I already signed the transfer papers.”
“Did she ever suspect anything?” Jax asked.
“Suspect what? That an elite warrior would actually choose an unranked, unshifted orphan?” Davan chuckled, a sound that felt like a physical slap across my face. “Girls like Seren are grateful for any attention you give them. You give them a warm meal and a place to sleep, and they will swallow every lie you tell them. She was perfect practice, honestly. She kept my bed warm and my clothes clean while I waited for Zola to come back from the southern academy. I needed to sharpen myself for a real woman.”
“That is cold, man,” Torin said, though he was laughing too. “But fair enough. Zola is an Alpha’s daughter. You need that bloodline if you want to climb the ranks.”
“Exactly,” Davan said. “Seren was just the stepping stone. Easy to fool, easy to please. It is over now.”
The line went silent for a second before Jax spoke again. “Well, don't let her catch you slipping before tomorrow. You know how emotional those unranked types get.”
“She won't catch anything,” Davan said confidently. “She is too stupidly in love to see what is right in front of her. I’ll tell her tomorrow after the ceremony. Now let me get some sleep. I have a long day with Zola.”
The call beeped and ended. The kitchen fell into a dead, suffocating silence.
I stood completely still. The grocery bag slipped from my hand, dropping onto the counter with a soft thud. I did not cry. My eyes felt dry, almost burning, as I stared at the blank screen of his phone.
My mind instantly went into overdrive, fighting against what I just heard. No, a small voice whispered inside my head. There must be a mistake. He was just showing off for his friends. Men do that. Davan loves me.
I tried to pull up the memories of the last two years to protect myself. I remembered the night he brought me here from the crowded orphan dorms. I remembered him sharing his rations with me when winter hit the low-rank district hard. He told me I was his anchor. He told me that my lack of a wolf didn't matter to him.
But as I stood there in the dark kitchen, those memories began to shift and warp. The warm looks he used to give me suddenly looked like pity. The way he kept me hidden from his family wasn't to 'protect me from pack politics' like he claimed—it was because he was ashamed of me. The way he always left the room to take certain calls.
Every single nice thing he had ever done cracked open, revealing the ugly, rotten truth underneath. I was his maid. I was his practice.
A sudden, violent urge flared up in my chest. I wanted to storm down that hallway, throw his bedroom door open, and scream until my throat bled. I wanted to tear his face apart. I wanted him to see the exact moment he broke me.
But my feet felt like they were glued to the floor. I couldn't move. A deep, heavy shame wrapped around my throat, choking the anger out of me. If I walked in there now, I would have to face the fact that I had given two years of my life to a man who viewed me as a stray dog he fed out of boredom. I was not ready to let myself feel that broken yet.
Then, something happened.
Deep inside my chest, right beneath my ribs, a sudden pulse vibrated. It was low, heavy, and completely foreign.
I gasped, clutching my stomach as the strange sensation rippled through my blood. It didn't feel like a normal muscle spasm. It felt alive. It was a dark, heavy heartbeat that did not belong to me, waking up from a long sleep.
A wolf?
No, that was impossible. I was nineteen. The shifting age for our pack came and went at sixteen. I had been tested by the pack doctors three times, and every time, the result was the same: my blood lacked the spiritual spark. I was unranked. A human in a world of monsters.
But the pulse came again, stronger this time, reacting directly to the raw, suffocating agony in my chest. It felt like something massive was pressing hard against the inside of my bones, trying to break through a wall. It lasted for five seconds before it faded back into the dark, leaving my skin tingling with a terrifying heat.
The exact moment my heart broke, something else woke up. I didn't know what it meant, but the strange heat staying in my veins told me everything had changed.
I forced my hands to stop shaking. I picked up Davan’s phone, placed it exactly where it had been on the kitchen counter, and walked slowly down the dark hallway.
The bedroom door was slightly ajar. I pushed it open an inch and looked inside.
Davan was sprawled across the mattress, sleeping soundly. His breathing was slow and even, his face completely peaceful. He looked like a man who didn't have a single care in the world, completely unaware that he had just destroyed my entire life with a five-minute phone call.
I stared at him, my heart turning into a cold piece of stone. Then, my eyes drifted down to the floor beside the bed.
His leather gym bag was tossed carelessly against the wardrobe. Poking out from underneath the heavy strap was a thick, cream-colored folder stamped with a seal I recognized all too well—the official crest of the Pack High Council.
Seren's POVThe formal registration was set for the last week of the thirty days, even though Davan's claim had already been thrown out. Ashgrove insisted on it anyway. Said a verbal ruling in a sealed hallway wasn't the same as a bond confirmed on record, and until my name sat in the registry beside Caelum's and Rysen's, nothing about my life here was actually safe on paper.I hated how much that word, safe, had started to feel like a moving target.The week leading up to it passed strange and slow. Caelum threw himself into preparing for the hearing the way he threw himself into everything, controlled and exhausting and quiet about it, like if he just worked hard enough none of us would have time to be scared. Rysen handled it differently. He kept finding reasons to touch me, a hand on my back passing through a doorway, fingers laced through mine at dinner, like he needed the constant proof that I was still there, still real, still his to reach for.I noticed things about my own bod
Seren's POV Three days after Davan's letter, the answer came from a place none of us expected. I was in the library when Rysen found me, a book open on my lap that I hadn't read a single page of, my mind circling the same fear it had circled for three days straight. He didn't say anything at first. He just sat down across from me, elbows on his knees, and studied my face like he was trying to decide how much of what he'd learned I could survive hearing. "We found something," he said finally. "What kind of something." "The kind that ends this." He leaned forward, and for the first time in days there was something other than fury in his eyes. Something closer to hope, careful and unpracticed, like he wasn't sure he trusted it yet either. "Caelum pulled the original sale documents. All of them. Every version, every draft, every signature." "And?" "Davan didn't just undervalue you, Seren." Rysen's jaw tightened. "He knew about the anomaly clause before the transfer. There's a
Seren's POV The house didn't go back to normal after Ashgrove left. It just went quiet in a different way. The kind of quiet that comes after someone shows you exactly how easily they could burn your whole life down, then walks out smiling about it. I spent the first two days of the thirty pretending I wasn't counting them. Caelum buried himself in paperwork I wasn't allowed to see. His jaw stayed tight every time he passed me, like he was holding something back with his teeth. Rysen tried harder to act normal. He dragged me into the training yard, tried to teach me to throw a knife properly, laughed too loud at things that weren't that funny. I let him. Watching him try to carry the fear off my shoulders was easier than carrying it myself. It was working. For two whole days, it was actually working. Then Della knocked on my door with a letter in her hand, and her face told me it was bad before she said a single word. "It came by courier," she said, not quite meeting my eye
Seren's POVSunlight. Warmth. Someone's arm heavy across my waist and someone else's fingers loose around mine, like even asleep he hadn't trusted his hand to let go.For one whole minute, I let myself have it. The quiet. The thread under my skin humming low and content instead of screaming. I lay there memorizing it, because some part of me, the part that had spent nineteen years being told I was broken already knew a morning like this one didn't come free.I was right.The pounding on the door ripped through the room and Caelum was up before I'd even processed what the sound was. Rysen came up half a second later, knife already in his hand, some animal reflex faster than his own waking brain."Alpha." A guard, voice cracking. "Council delegation. Already past the gate."Caelum went so still it scared me more than his shouting would have. "That's not possible. No one requested a visit.""They didn't request one, sir." A breath. "The wards flagged an unregistered shift signature two n
Welcome to GoodNovel world of fiction. If you like this novel, or you are an idealist hoping to explore a perfect world, and also want to become an original novel author online to increase income, you can join our family to read or create various types of books, such as romance novel, epic reading, werewolf novel, fantasy novel, history novel and so on. If you are a reader, high quality novels can be selected here. If you are an author, you can obtain more inspiration from others to create more brilliant works, what's more, your works on our platform will catch more attention and win more admiration from readers.