CLAIMED BY THE FOUR ALPHA BROTHERS

Calla's POV“Time is running fast. Hurry up, Calla. The priest won't be happy with us if we get there late.”“Oh, fucking goodness, I forgot to let you know. Your presence is needed at the meeting that'll be held tonight. I'll take you in my car, or you can go alone if you choose to.”“Pardon me, I didn't remember food is essential for survival. The maids will come in with whatever food you need to stay active and fulfill your duties.”I placed both my palms over my ears to silence Draven's voice from the past. The remarks he made weeks and days before we became mates flooded my mind as I hurried to grab the couch to steady myself.My head was spinning again, but this time, not because of his dangerous stare. As I spotted the ledger on top of my shelf in the short distance, the spinning resumed as my wrist tingled. The mate bond glowed brightly as my eyes closed.“Hold my hand and let's get inside. These people won't strike a deal with us if we don't do what they want.” Draven had sai

Calla's POV“You can't afford to take me to that mini hell!” I tried to free myself from the guards' tight grip. “You can't watch me burn inside that hot, cramped room. Let me talk to Draven! Let me talk to the Alpha!”“I'm sorry, but we really cannot afford to watch the mate bond on your wrist burn to ashes,” the guard said as we took the last turn toward the suppression room. “This is how liars get punished. You should have done your best to remain innocent from the start.”“I'm fucking innocent. Can you just hold on a second?” I shoved the guard beside me, causing him to stagger and fall to the ground. “I said, wait a second, and listen to me. Does your job matter more than my life? Do you know how hellish that room is?”“We should ask whether you really understand what orders mean,” the second guard said. “It is less about our jobs and more about our lives. If we let you go, we'll be executed as soon as they find us.”“Then run away with me!”“We don't want to disobey the Alpha's

Calla's POVThe lock stopped turning.And it wasn’t because Soren let go. It was because someone caught his wrist hard enough for me to hear it, the wet crunch of bone finding its breaking point, and Soren didn’t even scream.He just went silent in that horrible, contained way men do when pain is only a small part of what is happening to them. “Draven.”His voice was flat, measured when it came out. “Let go of me.”“Tell me what you were about to do.” My mate’s voice. Soft and cold, the coldest I had ever heard it. Colder than when he learned of my lie. Colder than our wedding vows promised he would ever be while I stood within three feet of him, a door between us. “Tell me now or by the goddess--” “She’s dying in there!” Soren’s control snapped like brittle plastic. “You put her in a suppression cell for a lie someone else told you, you left her there to die while you--” The next noise wasn’t a word. It was the thud of a body hitting metal, heavy enough to vibrate the whole

Calla's POVThe word hit the corridor like a second scorch mark, and every guard who'd been frozen a second ago suddenly remembered how to move, except none of them moved toward me.They moved away."Don't," the nearest one said, hand up, palm out, like I was something that might detonate if he made the wrong sound. "Don't come any closer. Someone get the Alpha, someone get him now, tell him--" His voice cracked, and he swallowed hard and tried again. "Tell him it's true. Tell him what she is.""What am I?" My own voice sounded strange to me, thin and far away, like it belonged to someone standing outside my body watching this happen to a stranger. "I don't even know what that word means."Nobody answered me. That was somehow worse than an answer would have been.I looked down at my hands, still faintly silver, still humming with whatever had just torn itself loose from inside me and gone looking for a hall full of people I used to call family, and for one long, suspended second, n

Calla's POVI hid my hands.And I did not do it gracefully. I shoved beneath under my thighs like a child caught with something stolen, heart slamming so hard against my ribs I was certain whatever was coming through those trees could hear it before it ever saw me.And then the thing crouched beside me went so still it stopped seeming like it was breathing at all. The humming in the ground climbed up through my spine. "What is it?" I whispered, barely moving my lips. The way you learn to talk without talking when you've spent three years married into a family that punished you for speaking at the wrong volume in the wrong room. "Something that remembers what your mark used to smell like before your kind buried the memory of it." Its silver eyes hadn't left the dark. "Which means it's about to be very, very interested in you, and I would prefer it stayed merely interested rather than certain." "That's not comforting.""I wasn't attempting comfort. I was attempting accuracy."The