1. The Tribute

"Addie…" Teagan whispered as her fingers dug into my arm. "I’m scared. I'm really scared. What is he going to do to us?"

I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out.

The words were there; You’ll be fine. We’ll get through this. Lies I’d heard a hundred times before. Lies people told when they didn’t have anything real to offer.

I tightened my grip on her freezing hand but I didn't say a word. How do you lie to someone when you can already hear the end coming? I wanted to protect her, but I was standing in the path of the same storm.

She was going to find out what the Lycan King was capable of sooner or later. When that happened, a lie would be the last thing she’d thank me for.

"Say something, Adeline! Please…" Her grip on my arm tightened painfully. "Tell me we’re going home. Tell me this is some kind of mistake...please, just say something!"

I glanced at my best friend, Samantha. She was sitting on the floor beside me with her arms wrapped tightly around herself like she was trying to hold herself together.

I was silently begging her to step in and say something. Sam always knew what to say to make even the worst situations feel survivable with just a few quiet words.

"Sam?" I called out softly.

She didn’t even look at me.

My gaze followed hers to the peeling wallpaper across the room. She was staring straight through it, like she wasn’t really here.

When I saw the first glint of tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, my stomach twisted into a painful knot.

Because Sam never cried.

She hadn’t cried when the pack warriors cracked her ribs during training. She hadn’t cried when her mate rejected her in front of the entire assembly. She hadn't cried when her own brother turned his back on her and sided with the elders who wanted her punished.

​She didn't do tears. Ever.

So watching her break like this felt like watching the sky collapse. If the strongest person I knew was this terrified, then the rest of us weren't just in trouble.

We were already dead.

"I heard that he releases his prisoners into the woods and has the alphas hunt them," Mirabel said suddenly.

Her voice felt… wrong.

I turned to look at her to make sure it was actually her speaking. Back home, Mirabel didn’t talk to us. Not unless she absolutely had to. Most times, she acted like we didn’t exist.

"If you’re caught," she continued, staring straight ahead, "then the alpha is at liberty to do whatever he wants to you. However he wants. For as long as he wants."

Teagan made a small, choked sound.

"Mirabel… why are you telling us this?" She sobbed.

"Because you asked what he was going to do to us," Mirabel said simply, shrugging one shoulder. "I’m just answering."

Teagan’s grip on my arm tightened.

"Don't scare her," I frowned. "Those are just stories people tell to make everyone afraid of the Lycan King. They're just rumors. Nothing more."

But I didn’t believe my own words. Not for a second.

If I had to bet my life on those rumors being true, I would have shoved every chip I owned onto the table without hesitation. I’d heard the same stories whispered back home, passed like poison between scared omegas in the dead of night.

It was rumored that the Lycan King raided packs and after a defeat, the fallen alpha had to offer tribute. The tribute wasn't gold or land.

It was people.

The defeated Alphas were forced to hand over their own people; usually the ones with no rank, no families and no voices to protest. To refuse was to invite a death sentence for every soul in the territory.

So our alpha, the coward he is, had taken the three women he deemed the weakest and the most useless, and sent us to straight to our deaths.

He tossed us straight into the King’s mouth just to keep his miserable throne from burning. He called it a sacrifice for the greater good, but we knew the truth. We were just the trash he was throwing out because we had no use to him.

What made it truly unsettling was the fact that the Lycan King only ever took women as tribute. His entire pack was rumored to be made of males, and if there was no place for us in their ranks, then we weren't being taken to serve. We were being taken for something far darker.

And no one knew for sure what happened to the women who disappeared into his territory. Not a single one had ever crawled back from his clutches to tell the tale.

Some folks swore he locked the women in underground cells and forced them to bear pups for his endless army. Others claimed they spent their short lives scrubbing floors and breaking their backs under the whip until they dropped dead from exhaustion. But the story that truly made my blood run cold was the one Mirabel had just repeated.

The Hunt.

They said he released the prisoners into the ancient woods surrounding his fortress and let his alphas chase them for sport. Once you were caught… you belonged to whoever dragged you down.

"I’m not trying to scare her," Mirabel snapped in irritation. "I’m just saying the little girl should know what’s coming so she doesn’t freeze up and get us all killed when it happens. Do you think they made us all shower and stuff us into these stupid nightgowns because they’re throwing us a welcoming party? Grow up."

I stared at her, stunned. Mirabel had never wasted a single breath on any of us before. She always walked past the three of us in the pack house like we were stains on the floor. She was the Gamma’s daughter. Ranked. Powerful. She had everything we didn’t.

So why the hell was she here with us?

She had status. She had a wolf. She wasn’t expendable like the rest of us wolfless rejects. She should have been safe in the pack house, sipping tea while the rest of us were loaded into trucks like cattle. Yet here she was, sitting on the same filthy floor in the same ridiculous white nightgown.

It didn’t make sense.

I looked around the vast hall for the first time and felt my stomach drop. Hundreds of young women were packed shoulder to shoulder on the cold floor, every single one of us dressed in the same thin, nearly see-through nightgown. We looked like offerings. Prizes. Livestock on display.

Were we being prepared for the Lycan King himself, or just fresh meat for the monsters who worshipped him? Either way, we were being showcased, left to tremble and wait for a master who clearly saw us as nothing more than property.

"What is going to happen to us, then?" Teagan whispered.

"Only the Moon Goddess knows that," Mirabel muttered, rolling her eyes. "I hope she keeps all of us safe."

I almost laughed.

The Moon Goddess.

She hadn’t done anything for me before, so why would she start now?

She was the one who cursed me in the first place. She cursed me with the chronic sickness that made my body too weak to ever shift, rendering me wolfless. Being wolfless meant I was weak and being weak meant I was a liability to our pack. I didn’t even blame our alpha for offering me as tribute. At least he’d been honest about how little I was worth.

So, screw the Moon Goddess and her so called protection.

The soldiers lining the walls suddenly snapped to attention. One of them, a massive man with a jagged scar slicing through his lip, walked toward our section.

"Everyone on your knees!" he roared. "Heads down and eyes on the floor. If I see a single one of you look up, I’ll make sure I rip your guts out and feed them to the dogs!"

Wow. What a welcome.

The sound of bodies hitting the floor filled the room, then disappeared just as fast.

I kept my eyes glued to the dirty floor between my knees and took a shaky breath. This was it. The moment we’d all been dreading since the trucks rolled through the gates.

The Lycan King was coming.

Or one of his alphas.

Or maybe the whole damn hunting party.