Chapter 4

Kade’s POV

I knew Something was wrong the moment they took the silver chain off me.

For a month, the North had thrown everything at me…whips paired in aconite, starvation, every method meant to break a man before they killed him or bent him to their will but now suddenly I was moved to a clean tent with proper furs on the bed and the chain gone from my wrists.

The North doesn't do kindness, not without a reason.

Just then, the answer walked in almost immediately.

A woman I didn’t recognize slipped through the tent flap, already reaching for me before I’d fully understood what was happening.

She climbed onto me without asking, disgust rose in my throat before anything else. I knew wolves like her…she’s the kind who warmed every warrior’s bed in the North and still called it honor.

It was almost insulting how obvious it was.

I’d heard the guards talking and laughing about how many men she’d taken and how eager the Northern Pack was to use her for exactly this kind of thing but I would rather die than let the Alpha King bind me through a female like her.

When she pressed herself against me, my body reacted the only way it knew how. I fought her, my hands went straight to her throat.

My wounds tore open again and blood ran hot down my sides but I did not care, I would kill her before I let her take anything from me.

I was still fighting when the door opened again and Elowen stepped in.

Relief flickered for half a second before understanding followed. Of course the King had simply sent a different she-wolf, one with a softer face and a quieter mouth but the plan was the same, give the Southern prisoner a Northern woman, I put a child in her belly and that binds me to this frozen hell through family just the way you’d chain a dog with something it couldn’t bite through.

Northern women were nothing more than tools for men to use, passed from hand to hand without a say in any of it. I had watched their males use them like that for weeks and I had no interest in being tied to one and even less interest in pretending otherwise.

Elowen drove the other female out with threats about her brother. Thorne’s name still carried weight here.

When we were alone she scolded me for fighting while injured.

I laughed in her face.

She was right and that only made it worse.

I was still calculating my next move when she moved faster than I expected and tied my hands.

I hadn’t expected that, hadn’t expected her to be strong enough to bind me before I could stop her, my wrists still raw and weak from the whip.

She climbed onto my lap.

My pride, what little of it remained after a month in chains felt like it was being ground into the dirt beneath her knees.

When she began to move, I realized with something between disbelief and disgust that she had likely never done this before.

She’s a virgin forcing herself through pain and dryness onto a man who hated her, for reasons I refused to examine too closely.

Why would this foolish woman force herself through sex when it clearly hurt her? She was shaking, her thighs trembled and tears gathered in her eyes and still she pushed down until she took all of me.

I could not stop the mockery.

“You don’t even know what you’re doing,” I said, my voice sharp with contempt. “Is this what passes for seduction in the North? Or are you simply that desperate to obey your King?”

She said nothing..she didn’t even look at me instead she kept moving, slow and unsteady at first like she was teaching herself as she went.

Being taken like this, forced by a woman from the enemy pack that had tortured me for a month should have been the worst humiliation of my life, worse than losing the battle that got me captured in the first place.

And yet heat built low in my body, unwanted and impossible to ignore. She was tight and warm and the drug she’d forced down my throat was clearly doing exactly what it was made to do, that had to be the reason…there was no other explanation for why my body was beginning to enjoy the very thing I hated.., no matter how much my mind rejected it.

I hated every second of it… I told myself that over and over, even as my breathing turned uneven beneath her.

I kept insulting her but she kept moving.

Her breath grew shorter and her body slowly adjusted. The dry drag turned slick and she found a rhythm that made her soft sounds change.

I felt myself throb inside her against my will.

Few minutes later her movements grew less careful…she chased something for herself and when her body clenched around me and she came, the tight pull dragged my own release out of me.

I hated how good it felt.

She stayed on me only until the shaking stopped, then she climbed off, cum still dripping down her thighs and simply untied the knot around my wrists.

She didn’t clean me up, didn’t even look at the blood still seeping from my wounds. She simply reached over, untied the knot at my wrists and walked out of the tent like none of it had happened at all.

I stared after her, something ugly twisting in my chest that I refused to call hurt.

How could she just leave like that? But I locked the memory in place.

I promised myself I would remember this, every second of this humiliation carved into memory. The day I returned south… I would burn this pack to the ground and make sure not one Northern wolf was left standing to remember my name.

A strange, resentful feeling flickered in my chest, almost aggrieved but I crushed it immediately.

Alone again, the weight of the last month settled back over me.

I had tried every escape method I knew and all of them had failed. My most loyal warriors had been captured with me and I had heard nothing of them since the day we were dragged north. I could endure humiliation, I could endure pain but not knowing the fate of my warriors was a different kind of torture.

Elowen might be the only way I had left.

She came every day and she was trusted enough to bring food and medicine…she was Thorne’s sister and that gave her access others did not have.

I made the decision while the taste of her was still on my skin.

For now I would cooperate , I would pretend to soften, pretend the Northern female was beginning to matter and pretend submission was possible.

If that was the only path that led me back to my men and back to the South, then I would walk it… and when the time came, I would burn this entire frozen wasteland to the ground.