005

The Devil's Bargain

MEIRA

"How dare you, Meira."

I didn't need to turn around. That voice had been the soundtrack to every bad thing that had ever happened to me. I'd heard it through walls, through closed doors, through the thin partition of my childhood bedroom while it told my father things about me that weren't true — or worse, things that were.

Alpha Cain. My father.

Darius's hand shifted at my back. Just slightly. Just enough. I don't think he even meant for me to notice, but I did, and it was the only reason I didn't visibly flinch.

I turned around slowly.

My father was standing at the edge of the dance floor with two of his enforcers behind him like furniture. He was dressed the way he always dressed when there were people watching — sharply, deliberately, every button done up, every crease in the right place. The face he showed the world was composed and commanding.

The eyes he turned on me were neither of those things.

"You." He didn't even glance at Darius. Just looked at me like I was something that had wandered out of its enclosure. "You have no business being out here tonight."

I opened my mouth.

Darius spoke instead.

"Out here." He repeated the words back slowly, like he was tasting them and finding them strange. "She's at a ceremony. In a hall full of pack members. Where exactly should she be?"

My father's gaze finally moved to him. I watched it happen — the slow drag of recognition, the almost imperceptible stiffening of his spine, the recalibration behind his eyes as he understood exactly who he was speaking to.

"My King." He bowed his head just enough to be respectful without being servile. "Forgive me. I didn't realize Meira had caught your attention this evening."

"She wasn't trying to catch anything," Darius said. "I asked her to dance."

My father smiled. It was the smile I'd grown up dreading — wide enough to look genuine, hollow enough to mean nothing. "Of course. I only came over out of concern. It's been a hard night for her."

He said it like he cared. Like the hard night hadn't started in his living room with his voice and his indifference and the cold, flat way he'd told me I had until morning to find a mate or he'd find one for me.

"She seems fine," Darius said, and turned away.

Just like that. Mid-sentence. Like my father was a conversation he'd already finished having.

I had watched people talk to Cain Nicholas my entire life. I had watched them laugh too loudly at his jokes, agree with opinions they didn't hold, shrink and smile and make themselves smaller so he'd think well of them. I had never once watched someone simply stop paying attention to him and walk away.

The look on my father's face in that moment — I knew I'd be paying for it later. But I tucked it somewhere private and let myself have it, just for a second.

Darius steered me toward the far end of the hall, away from the noise and the bodies and my father's stare burning a hole between my shoulder blades. We stopped near one of the tall windows. Outside, the grounds were dark and still. Inside, the chandeliers threw gold light across everything and made it all look softer than it was.

"You're shaking," he said.

"No I'm not."

He looked at my hands. I pressed them flat against my thighs.

He didn't push it.

"How do you know my name?" I asked. I'd been holding the question since the club, since I'd turned on that barstool and found his eyes already on me, since he'd said *Luna Meira* like he'd been waiting to say it. "I had a mask on. I made sure no one would recognize me."

He was quiet for a moment. Not the kind of quiet that meant he was stalling — more like he was deciding how much to give me.

"I knew you before tonight," he said. "Twelve years ago. You wouldn't remember, you were young."

"How young?"

"Eight, maybe nine."

I watched his face, looking for something to tell me whether to believe him.

"I was seventeen," he continued. "Wolfless. I'd been run out of two territories already and ended up near Silver Fang borders. Your father's enforcers found me." He said it plainly, no drama in it, the way people talk about things that hurt them so long ago the pain has gone flat. "They were thorough."

Something tugged at the back of my mind. A half-formed memory, the kind that lives more in the body than the brain. The smell of the creek behind the pack house. Wet grass. Summer. A boy sitting on the bank with his knees pulled up, dark hair falling across his forehead, trying to make himself look smaller than he was.

A little girl with no shoes on and bread she'd taken from the kitchen, sitting down beside him without asking if he wanted company.

"You sat with me for an hour," he said. "You didn't say much. Neither did I. But you left the bread."

My chest did something strange and quiet.

"I remember a boy," I said slowly. "I didn't know what had happened to him."

"Now you do."

I looked at him properly then — the jaw, the set of his shoulders, the particular stillness he carried like a second skin — and somewhere underneath all of it I could still find the shape of that boy. Like looking at a river and knowing what it used to be.

"You built all of this from nothing," I said.

"I had good reasons to."

The way he said it closed the door on that part of the conversation. I didn't push it open.

The music from the center of the hall drifted over to us, and with it, the sound of my father's voice somewhere in the crowd. My stomach tightened automatically, the way it always did when I heard him at a distance, that low-grade dread I'd carried since childhood.

"He's going to pair me with someone tonight," I said. I wasn't sure why I was telling him. Maybe because he already seemed to know, and it was exhausting pretending things weren't what they were. "If I don't find a chosen mate on my own, he'll do it for me. He told me this afternoon."

"I know," Darius said.

I looked at him. "How?"

"I make it my business to know things about this pack." A pause. "Especially about your father."

Something in that landed differently than I expected. Not threatening exactly, but weighted. Deliberate.

"What do you want with my father?"

He looked at me for a long moment. Then — "Marry me."

I actually laughed. It came out short and surprised and a little broken around the edges. "I'm sorry?"

"A contract. In name. Long enough for me to get what I came for, and long enough for you to get clear of him." He wasn't performing anything when he said it. No charm, no softness. Just the bare shape of it. "You get a name that protects you. Resources. Time. Whatever you need. In return, I get proximity to your father. His trust. A seat close enough to watch him."

The laughter had already gone cold inside me.

"You want to use me to get to him."

"Yes."

I appreciated that he didn't dress it up. I'd had enough of men who dressed things up.

"What did he do to you?" I asked.

Something moved through his expression and then was gone. "More than I'm going to tell you tonight."

I thought about pushing. I didn't.

Instead I stood there turning it over in my mind — the offer, the shape of it, the parts he wasn't saying. I'd spent four years loving a man who looked at me like I was enough right up until the moment he decided I wasn't. I'd spent a lifetime with a father who'd treated me like a liability he couldn't figure out how to write off. I was standing in a hall full of people who'd watched Kaelan humiliate me and then gone back to their conversations.

And I was pregnant. Alone. With two lives that hadn't asked to be brought into any of this.

"When it's over," I said carefully, "what happens to me?"

"You walk away. Clean. Enough money to go wherever you want. I don't make claims on people after the fact."

"And the—" I stopped.

His eyes moved, just briefly, to where my hands had drifted without me realizing, resting low against my stomach. The gesture I kept making without meaning to.

"That's your business," he said quietly. "Not mine. Not part of the arrangement unless you decide otherwise."

Across the hall, my father had found me with his eyes again. He was talking to someone else, smiling that wide hollow smile, but his gaze kept sliding back to me the way it always did when he was calculating something.

I knew what came after tonight if I walked away from this window alone. I'd seen it happen to other women. I knew the kind of chosen mate my father would pick for me — someone who owed him something, someone he could control through me. Someone who would make the last few years feel like a warm memory by comparison.

Darius held out his hand. Same as he had on the dance floor. No urgency in it. Patient, like he already knew what I was going to do and he was just waiting for me to catch up.

"I'm carrying Kaelan's children," I said. I don't know why I told him. Maybe I needed to watch his face when he heard it. Maybe I needed to give him the full weight of what he was asking for and see if he'd still reach for it.

His expression didn't change.

"I know that too," he said.

I stared at him. "And you still—"

"I told you. It's your business."

The music swelled somewhere behind us. My father took a step in our direction.

I put my hand in Darius's.

His fingers closed around mine and his grip was steadier than anything I'd held onto in years.

"If you betray me," I said, "I will find a way to make you regret it. I don't have much left, but I still have that."

Something shifted in his face then. Not quite a smile. More like recognition.

"I'd expect nothing less," he said.

And that was how I shook hands with the devil.

The worst part — the part I'd turn over in my head for weeks afterward — was that when he held my hand, I didn't want to let go.