Chapter 6

The sound that tore from the King’s throat silenced the entire hall.

It wasn’t a growl exactly, though it carried that same primal weight, something deeper, older, a sound that seemed to come from somewhere beneath the centuries of composure he’d built around himself.

His grip on Katina’s wrist tightened, not painfully, but with the unthinking urgency of a man who had just found something he’d been searching for without knowing it was lost.

“Your Majesty…” Lady Ashbourne’s voice cracked through the silence, alarm bleeding into her careful hostess’s tone. “Is something wrong? If the servant has offended…”

“Silence.” The word cut through the hall like a blade, and Lady Ashbourne’s mouth snapped shut, her face draining of color.

The King hadn’t looked away from Katina once, his  crimson eyes moved over her face with an intensity that made her want to shrink back and step closer all at once. Some instinct she didn’t understand pulled her toward him even as fear screamed at her to run.

“Say something,” he said, his voice low and almost unsteady in a way that seemed foreign to a man born to command.

“K-Katina,” she managed, swallowing hard. “Katina Ashbourne.”

Something flickered across his face at the surname, displeasure, or recognition, she couldn’t tell which. His grip on her wrist didn’t loosen. If anything, his thumb pressed lightly against the fading silver mark still faintly visible on her skin, the last ghost of the bond that had shattered her life less than a day ago.

His eyes darkened further as his thumb brushed the fading mark. “This mark,” he said quietly. “Explain it.”

Katina’s throat closed. Three hundred nobles were watching, breath held, and somewhere behind her she could feel her mother’s panic radiating like heat from a flame. “It’s nothing, Your Majesty. A rejected bond. It means nothing now.”

“It’s nothing, Your Majesty. A rejected bond. It means nothing now.”

Lady Ashbourne stepped forward again, recovering some of her composure, though her smile had gone brittle at the edges.

“Your Majesty, I apologize for the disturbance. This girl is a servant of this house, a troubled girl, unfortunately, recently disciplined for a serious offense against the family.

“She’s of no consequence to the matters we’re here to discuss. Please, allow me to have her removed so we may proceed with the treaty negotiations in comfort.”

The King turned his head slowly toward her, and Katina watched Lady Ashbourne visibly resist the urge to step back from whatever she saw in his expression.

“Removed,” he said, his gaze hardening. “You’d have her removed?”

“For your comfort, Your Majesty, of course…”

“I did not ask for comfort.”

He released Katina’s wrist at last, though his eyes didn’t leave her, and turned fully to face Lady Ashbourne with the terrible stillness of a predator deciding whether something was worth the effort of a kill.

“I came to Ravenmoor to discuss a treaty..land, trade routes, and a military alliance against the eastern territories. That was the arrangement my envoys proposed, and that was the contract drafted for my signature.”

He gestured almost lazily toward the rolled parchment resting on the table beside his goblet, the treaty Katina now understood had been the entire purpose of this elaborate welcome.

“That arrangement no longer interests me.”

A ripple of confusion and alarm moved through the assembled nobles.

Lady Ashbourne’s composure finally cracked, the carefully maintained smile slipping from her face as she struggled to understand what had suddenly changed.

“Your Majesty, surely…”

“I have one condition remaining for my continued presence in this hall, or in this alliance at all.” He reached down without looking, picked up the treaty parchment, and, before anyone could react, tore it cleanly in half. The sound of ripping parchment seemed to echo through the stunned silence of the hall.

“Give me the girl,” the King said, “and I will consider a new arrangement. Refuse, and my delegation leaves Ravenmoor within the hour, along with any hope this pack has of Northern protection against the wars gathering on your eastern border.”

Katina stood frozen between them, the wine pitcher still trembling in her hands, feeling every eye in the hall shift to weigh her like currency.

“Your Majesty,” Lady Ashbourne said carefully, scrambling to understand the sudden, inexplicable value of a servant she’d been trying to bury in the cellars less than a day ago, “if I may ask… why her? She’s nothing. A stripped bloodline, a convicted…”

“That,” the King said coldly, “is not your concern.”

Silence stretched, taut and dangerous, while Lady Ashbourne visibly calculated, her fingers tightening until they went white around the stem of her wine glass.

Katina could see the exact moment her mother’s fear of losing a valuable alliance outweighed whatever petty satisfaction she’d taken in keeping her disgraced daughter as a permanent, humiliated fixture of the household.

Political survival, as always, mattered more than any daughter ever had. “Of course, Your Majesty.” Lady Ashbourne’s smile returned, thin and calculating.

“If the girl is what secures the North’s friendship, then she is yours. A gift, freely given, in the spirit of alliance.”

A gift. Katina’s stomach turned at the word as she realized she felt like a bolt of silk or a case of aged wine, something valuable being handed across a table to smooth a business arrangement.

Twenty two years as a daughter, and in the space of a single sentence, she had become currency.

The King’s eyes finally left Lady Ashbourne and returned to Katina, something in his expression softening almost imperceptibly.

Not warmth, not yet, but a kind of careful attention that no one in that hall had ever directed at her before.

“Gather your belongings,” he said, his voice quiet enough that, absurdly, it felt meant only for her despite the crowd. “You leave with my delegation within the hour.”

“I have no belongings,” Katina said before she could stop herself. The truth of it…the stripped bare truth of everything that had been taken from her in less than a day…rose  painfully in her throat.

“Everything I had was taken when they sealed my wolf. I have nothing left, Your Majesty….not even a name that means anything now.”

The hall held its breath at her boldness. Several nobles visibly braced for the King’s fury at being addressed so plainly.

Something shifted behind his eyes, as though a decision had just been made. “Then you’ll have something new.” He extended his hand toward her, not as a command this time, but as something closer to an offering.

“Come with me…”

Katina stared at his outstretched hand, then lifted her eyes to the crimson gaze that had somehow gone from terrifying to something unreadable and strange. For the first time in longer than she could remember, she felt something other than dread rising in her chest.

Behind her, she heard her mother’s sharp intake of breath. It wasn’t a sound of relief. It was fear.

Because Lady Ashbourne finally understood exactly what it meant for the Alpha King of the North to recognize a scent no one had smelled in sixty years.

And with a single desperate bargain…

She had just handed him the very secret her family had spent twenty-two years and one forbidden Sealing trying to bury.