What Debt Looks Like In White

REINA

My father has a tell.

Most people who know him wouldn't catch it. But I've been watching him my whole life and I know the tell. It's in his hands. When things are bad, really bad, he sets them flat on the table in front of him like he's trying to hold something down.

Both hands. Flat on the table.

That's how I know, before he says a single word, that whatever is in the letter he's been staring at since I came downstairs for breakfast is not something either of us is going to recover from quickly.

I pour my coffee, sit down across from him and wait.

My father is not a weak man. I want to be clear about that because what happens next could make him look like one and he isn't.

He is a man who made one terrible decision twenty years ago when he was desperate and young and didn't fully understand what he was agreeing to. He has been paying for it in installments ever since, in sleepless nights and careful conversations and the specific way he flinches every time someone mentions the Cole pack name, like the words have edges.

He's been paying for twenty years.

Apparently the account is still not settled.

"Reina," he says.

Just my name. That's all. But the way he says it tells me everything before the words do.

"Tell me," I say.

He slides the letter across the table.

I read it once, fast and breathe through it.

Then I read it again. Slowly this time. Because the first read I was looking for the part where it wasn't what I thought it was, and there isn't one, so the second read I make myself absorb every line.

The Castillo debt, principal and accrued interest has been called in full. In lieu of financial settlement, the Cole pack will accept one alternative arrangement. Reina Castillo, eldest daughter, will be formally bonded to Alpha Zaden Cole in a legal marriage ceremony no later than thirty days from the date of this letter. Upon completion of the arrangement the debt will be considered paid in full. Failure to comply will result in immediate and total collection by whatever means the pack deems necessary.

Whatever means the pack deems necessary.

I set the letter down very carefully because my hands want to do something else with it and I am not going to give them the satisfaction.

"How long have you known this was coming?" I ask.

My father closes his eyes. "I didn't know it would be this. I knew the debt was being called. I thought… I was trying to find another way"

"How long, Dad?!"

"Three weeks."

Three weeks. He has known for three weeks that his daughter was going to be handed over like a line item in a ledger and he has sat across from me at this table every morning and said nothing.

"Who is he?" I ask, even though I already know. The Cole pack name has been a shadow over this family my entire life. But knowing a name and knowing a person are different things, and I want to hear my father say it out loud. I want him to have to say it.

He looks at me for the first time since I sat down. His eyes are the eyes of a man who knows exactly what he did and has no defense for it.

"The most powerful Alpha in the city," he says quietly. "Maybe in the country. He's…he runs the pack like a corporation. Nobody crosses him twice."

"And I'm supposed to marry him."

"Reina-"

"I'm supposed to walk into a wedding dress and marry a man I have never met who runs the pack that has been bleeding this family for twenty years." I hear my own rise. "I'm supposed to be the payment?"

My father doesn't answer. Because there is no answer. Because that is exactly what is happening and we both know it and the only thing left to decide is whether I am going to fall apart at this kitchen table or whether I am going to be the person I have spent twenty-one years becoming.

I stand up, take my coffee and look at my father, at the hands flat on the table, at the weight in his face, at the man who loved me the only way he knew how and it still led here and I make a decision so quietly that it barely feels like a decision at all.

I am not going to fall apart.

Not here. Not in front of him. Not anywhere anyone can see.

"I need some air," I say. "I'll be back."

He nods, doesn't try to stop me and doesn't try to fix it.

We both know there is nothing to fix.

I walk out the back door into the small garden that my mother planted years ago and never got to finish and I look at the sky and I let myself feel it, the full crushing weight of being twenty-one years old and having your entire future decided in three lines of someone else's handwriting.

Then I breathe out and go back inside.

The dress arrived four days later.

I don't know who sent it. It appeared on my bed while I was at work, a garment bag, white, with a small card attached that has nothing on it except a date and an address. The date is twenty-six days from now. The address is somewhere on the north side of the city that I don't recognize.

I unzip the bag.

The dress is beautiful. Of course it is. It fits perfectly, which means someone took my measurements without my knowledge at some point, and I add that to the list of things about this situation that I am not going to think about too hard or I will stop functioning entirely.

I put it back in the bag and hang it on the back of my door.

I look at it for a long time and make myself another promise. The same kind I made in the garden

I am going in there with my head up.

Whatever he is, cold, powerful, a man who collects human girls as debt settlements without losing a night's sleep over it, I am not going to give him the satisfaction of watching me break.

I am Reina Castillo. I have been surviving things my whole life.

This is just one more thing.