Lead out

Valentina's POV

My breath caught the moment Ryker stepped into the room.

He didn’t speak at first. His shoes echoed softly across the polished floors. His presence was impossibly large. It bent the space around him, made everything else feel small, even the golden chandelier that shimmered above me or the lights burning low on ornate sconces.

I couldn’t look away and then he stopped right in front of me.

The space between us felt as if it had collapsed, I didn’t dare move. My pulse stuttered, and my fingers trembled, gripping the soft folds of the pale gown they'd forced me into earlier.

He squatted slowly. Not like a man offering himself to her, no. He moved like a predator lowering itself to inspect a captured thing.

Then he smiled coldly. That smile didn’t reach his eyes. His gaze held the temperature of glaciers, and yet it burned something inside me.

“You look,” he murmured, his voice like velvet drawn over steel, “like you’ve seen a ghost.”

My mouth opened before I meant it to. “I —”

He reached for my hands. I flinched. Just slightly. But he saw it. Of course he did.

He paused. Then he took them anyway, his palms wrapping around mine, steady and warm as he stood up slowly, bringing me with him. My knees didn’t want to hold me.

“You will behave,” he said, low and hard, “like the queen you’re about to become.”

It landed like a slap. A quiet, blistering one. My breath hitched again, my mind reeling. Queen? The word barely made sense in my mouth. I wasn’t royal anymore. I wasn’t strong. I wasn’t anything like the women I’d seen all my life before my parents were killed.

He was really marrying me?

“But... why me?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer, almost more afraid of the look in his eyes.

Ryker tilted his head, still holding my gaze with that terrible, inescapable calm.

“You don’t have the right,” he said coolly, “to ask me that.”

My stomach turned.

He didn’t say it to hurt me, not exactly. That would’ve meant feeling something, anything. His tone was clinical, exact, like someone closing a box and locking it tight.

I didn’t have the right.

He didn’t explain further. He never did. He simply turned, still holding one of my hands, and began to walk.

The hall was long, elegant, echoing with every footstep like a verdict. Its floor was black marble veined with gold. Its walls bore tapestries and sigils I didn’t recognize. And at the end of the corridor, doors loomed ahead.

When they opened, I forgot how to breathe.

The Grandhall was like something out of another world. Light poured from a thousand bulbs that floated as if by magic above our heads. Every surface gleamed. Every chair was a throne. Every table shimmered with silver, crystal, things I couldn't name. The air itself felt expensive.

It wasn’t loud. It was worse, quiet. But not from peace but from watchfulness. From judgement.

All eyes turned to me sharply.

My heart beat louder than the music that played softly in the background. I wanted to shrink, to disappear into the floors. But Ryker walked ahead without slowing, his grip on my hand firm and unrelenting.

A woman approached. I recognized her faintly, she was one of the ones who had dressed me earlier. The one with dark green eyes.

She reached out with both hands and placed them lightly on my shoulders. Ryker stopped. Looked at her once. Then slowly released me into her care.

“Come,” she said gently, guiding me toward a table at the far end of the hall.

I looked back, just once. Ryker was watching me still. His eyes cold and piercing.

My heels clicked against the tile like a countdown. The woman leaned in, her breath warm against my ear.

“I know you’re confused,” she said. “Of course you are. They didn’t tell you.”

I swallowed, throat dry. “Tell me what?”

“About the marriage.” Her voice was low, barely audible above the faint music. “It’s because his stepbrother has returned.”

I stopped walking.

She tugged me gently but firmly forward. “Keep walking.”

I wanted to scream. Or run. Or shake her until she said something that made sense. But instead, I let her guide me to the table. My feet moved as if through molasses, each step heavier than the last.

And then I saw them. The women.

They sat like statues, poised in their silence, their gowns as rich as the tapestries that framed the walls. Their hair was art. Their makeup, war paint. Every eye that turned toward me did not blink. Every gaze told a story and not one was kind.

I stiffened, the air sharp in my lungs.

The woman guiding me gave me the smallest of nods and then vanished back into the crowd, she had done its job.

I stood alone for a while, then I sat quietly.

The chair was too high, the cushion too soft, the air too cold.

I didn’t dare look behind because I could already feel his gaze on my back.

Silence hovered over the table for a moment and my fingers traced nervously at the ages of the table.

“How absurd,” a voice cut through the silence, “for Alpha Ryker Blackthorn, the last of his mother’s bloodline, to marry a pathetic thing—”