Claimed by the Seven Alphas

Winter in the Wolf Territory could kill.

The laundry room was a box of corrugated steel. When the wind shoved through the seams, it whistled—a low, guttural sound, like the noise a male wolf makes deep in his throat just before he mounts. I had been crouched beside the washbasin for so long that my kneecaps had gone numb, my fingers buried in water that was barely above freezing. My knuckles were swollen, purple as dead beans, and packed under the nails was a crust of dried blood.

Not my blood.

It belonged to Cain's war coat.

The Wolf King had ripped a traitor apart with his bare hands the night before. They said he tore the man's scent gland clean out of his throat, trachea and all, and the blood had sprayed across the floor in a three-foot arc. This coat was the proof. Clotted shreds of tissue were still snarled deep in the fur. I had washed it five times, and the water I wrung out was still pink.

The smell drove straight into my sinuses. It wasn't just the ordinary reek of blood. It was the pheromone residue of an Alpha in full killing fury—gunpowder smoke, hot iron, and underneath it all, a raw, primal male musk.

That scent wasn't a mist. It was a living thing. A scorching, invasive presence that crawled down my nostrils and throat, coiled in my chest, and then sank lower, pooling heavy in my belly. I had been breathing it for hours, and the muscles along my inner thighs had begun to clench without my permission.

The gland on my nape no longer belonged to me.

It was throbbing. Not an itch. A hollow ache, as if someone had scooped out a chunk of flesh and left a void that something vital was meant to fill. Cain's pheromones were too potent. They didn't smell like dead residue clinging to fabric. They smelled like a live wolf hibernating inside the fibers, a beast that stretched out a rough, textured tongue every few minutes and dragged it from my nape all the way down to the dip of my lower back.

My belly cramped.

My hand jerked. Filthy water sloshed over the rim of the basin and splashed onto the chilblains on my shins.

The frostbite sores on my hands had split open. When the cracks met the ice water, numbness came first, then a searing burn, and then a steady, grinding ache—like someone dragging a metal file across the bone, stroke after stroke. Yellowish fluid mixed with beads of blood seeped from the wounds, dripping into the basin and swirling with Cain's blood into a sick, muddy pink.

The iron door scraped open. The hinges dragged deliberately, letting out a long, shrill scream.

Vivian stepped in on stiletto boots that added a full hand's width to her height. Her tailored cashmere coat cinched her waist into two distinct sections. A sapphire brooch was pinned to her lapel. Her hair had been freshly curled, every wave calculated to the millimeter. She picked her way across the concrete floor, and when sludge from a pothole splashed onto the tips of her boots, her brow creased.

Two creatures trailed behind her. I never bothered with their names. One had a chin too long. The other had a forehead too narrow. Long Chin clutched a patent leather handbag. Narrow Forehead was cradling a thermos, and the cloying sweetness of hot cocoa drifted over, colliding with Cain's pheromones still thick in the air and turning into something stale and nauseating.

Vivian stopped beside my hand. The tip of her boot rested half an inch from my pinky.

"Cain's coat." She peered down into my washbasin, her voice dripping honey. "Is it done yet? The victory banquet is tomorrow. He specifically requested this one."

Bullshit.

A war coat drenched in a traitor's blood was meant to be burned the same day. But I couldn't be bothered to argue. My nape was still pounding, my lips were purple from the cold, and explaining pack law to her was like playing a lute for a cow.

"I asked you a question."

The boot tip pushed forward. The anti-slip treads ground down onto the nail of my right pinky with a wet, crunching sound. When a frostbitten finger gets crushed like that, the pain doesn't start in the finger. It explodes from the spine, spreads along the edges of the scent gland at my nape, and transforms into a searing current that shot straight down to my tailbone. My temples pounded twice in rapid succession. Bile rose in my stomach.

I didn't pull my hand back.

"Not done," I said. My voice scraped out like a shovel dragged across wet cement.

Vivian bent at the waist. The angle was precise, calculated to let her collar gape just enough to expose the skin beneath her collarbone dusted with shimmer powder. Two fingers pinched the edge of the war coat, her cashmere sleeve brushing against the wolf fur. She lifted it to eye level, looked it over, then let her fingers go slack.

The coat dropped into the filthy water. The splash hit my face, my neck, the open cracks on my hands. When ice water meets raw flesh inside a wound, the burn rockets into a searing sting. My jawbone locked. My teeth clenched until my cheeks ached.

"Pick it up," Vivian said.

I stood. My kneecaps cracked, joints rusted from squatting too long. I bent to retrieve it. Her boot heel pinned the coat sleeve to the ground. I tugged. It wouldn't budge.

"With your mouth," she said.

The words hung in the air. Long Chin stepped forward, her hand already reaching for the back of my skull, fingers flexing. She was going to shove my face into the basin. I saw the intent in the curl of her knuckles, the way she braced her weight onto her back foot for leverage. The filthy water in the basin still swirled with threads of Cain's blood, and my own reflection stared back at me from its surface—lips purple, eyes hollow, the face of a girl who had survived three years in this frozen hell by being invisible.

But I wasn't invisible anymore.

I straightened my spine. My hand dropped from the coat. Long Chin's fingers were an inch from my hair when I turned my head and met her eyes. She froze. Not because of me. Because of what she saw in my face—the absolute, unblinking certainty of someone who had already decided she had nothing left to lose.

"Touch me," I said, very quietly, "and you'll find out which one of us Cain kills first."

Long Chin's hand halted mid-air. Her eyes darted to Vivian.

Vivian's lashes twitched. The moment stretched, brittle as ice over a black river. I could feel the weight of every gaze in the laundry room pressing against my spine. The old Omega washerwoman had stopped breathing. The guard at the door had his hand on his spear, knuckles bloodless. The faucet in the corner dripped, each drop a small detonation in the silence.

Then Narrow Forehead's voice ripped through the tension from the back of the laundry room.

"Found it!"

The spell shattered. Long Chin's hand dropped. I exhaled.

A blue moonstone necklace lay in Narrow Forehead's palm, gleaming with cheap, cold light. She had yanked it from under my pillow—my plank bed, my thin blanket, my iron trunk with no lock because there was nothing worth stealing.

Vivian plucked the necklace from her hand and dangled it in front of my face. The moonstone swung from her index finger, chattering against the chain with a faint sound like splintering ice.

"Caught red-handed." She wagged the necklace right at my nose, the corner of her mouth curling to a precise, practiced angle. "By pack law, stealing from nobility is twenty lashes and permanent exile."

She pushed the necklace closer to my face.

"But." She tilted her head, her neck stretching into an elegant diagonal. "If you drop to your knees right now and crawl between my legs, I might reduce it to ten lashes."

The doorway was packed. The washerwomen had stopped working. The guards had removed their helmets. The old man who fed the furnace was leaning on his coal shovel like a walking stick. Every pair of eyes clung to my back like leeches. Nobody spoke. They were waiting. Waiting for the sound of an Omega's kneecaps slamming into concrete.

I pulled my hand out of my pocket.

First, I took the blue necklace from her. My movements were slow, like extracting a needle from an infant's grip.

"This." I raised it into the light so everyone could see the cut lines along the edge of the moonstone. "Purchased off the black market last autumn. The cut angle is off. Two fractures from a botched job. Defective goods."

Then I reached into the hidden pocket.

The moment the red moonstone necklace slid out, the light seemed to drain into it. Pigeon-blood red. The size of a fist. The edges were set with black obsidian shards that, under the laundry room's sickly yellow bulbs, cast a thick, bloody glow across the room. That crimson light fell onto my purple, frostbitten fingers, and for a moment, it looked like my hand had caught fire.

Vivian's eyeballs trembled. They jittered side to side before freezing. Her pupils shrank to pinpricks, and the reflection of that red light burned inside her irises.

The old Omega washerwoman behind me made a noise first. Not a shout. A strangled whimper forced from the deepest part of her throat, like someone had stomped on her stomach. She recognized this thing. Everyone in the laundry room recognized it. The last person to wear it had been Cain's mother, and when she died, this necklace had been ripped bloody from the old Wolf King's throat. That night, every Omega in the city had screamed.

Long Chin's mouth fell open and wouldn't close. Her chin was already long, but with her jaw unhinged like that, her entire face stretched from an oval straight into a horse's muzzle. Narrow Forehead's thermos hit the floor, hot cocoa splashing everywhere, scalding her shins. She didn't move. Didn't even glance down.

The head guard at the door stumbled backward, his hip slamming into the doorframe. The metal frame groaned on impact. The shaft of his spear clattered against the concrete floor.

Silence. Thick, absolute silence.

"Impossible." Vivian's voice shattered on the word. Three syllables, all of them shaking, the last one splitting in two. "Where did you steal that from?"

"Cain came to see me last night." I held the necklace up to her eye level and kept my gaze steady, letting her see the necklace and my eyes at the same time. "He fastened this around my neck with his own hands. That coat of his isn't being worn to any victory banquet tomorrow. It's meant for the incinerator. A battle coat soaked in a traitor's blood can't be kept. You didn't know that?"

She didn't know. Her intelligence came from a deputy on the guard squad her father had bribed. That deputy had clearly never witnessed Cain tear a man apart in person. He had no idea the coat was scheduled to be thrown into the furnace today.

Vivian's lips trembled. The bottom lip started first, then the top one joined in. Her lip gloss was a dusty rose shade, and when they quivered like that, the color looked grotesque—two strips of spoiled raw meat convulsing. Then they stopped. She bit down on her bottom lip, teeth sinking into the flesh, cracking the gloss and exposing a stark white tooth mark underneath.

"You're lying." She forced the words through clenched teeth. "A laundry room Omega. How could he possibly look at you—"