Chapter 2: The Day I Was Sold (Part 2)

Cold detonated in my veins, a flood of winter snapping bones and dousing fire. The surge of power that had just erupted inside me shrieked, flared brighter for one desperate instant—

—then something uglier slammed down on it.

Not just poison, though there was that too, burning a black-ice path through me. This was heavier. Vile-thick. The feeling of hands reaching back into a door I’d finally forced open and slamming it shut, then welding iron bars across it from the inside.

The curse roared back to life.

Invisible chains clamped around my soul, tighter than they’d ever been. The silver-blue light on my skin sputtered and went out. My sharpened senses blurred, smearing into one dull mass.

The sound stretched.

The auctioneer’s shout warped, words drawn long and thin. Faces swam in my dimming vision.

On the balcony, someone screamed. Damon’s scent hit me like smoke in my lungs—acrid with shock, an undercurrent of possessive fury that made my fading wolf bare her teeth.

My gaze found him without trying.

For the first time since I’d stepped onto the stage, his mask had cracked. His eyes were wide, his mouth parted. Rage—mine? his?—flashed over his face.

His feet didn’t move.

Lila’s manicured hand clamped on his arm. He let her anchor him in place.

Of course he did.

Near the back of the hall, away from the expensive seats, my adoptive parents stood. Mother’s hand was plastered over her mouth, eyes huge. Father’s face had gone ashy under his beard.

Behind the first wave of horror, I could see it already: the calculation. How much debt would the office still demand if their asset died on the block? Could they sue the auction house? Could they even turn my death into a coin?

Closer, on the edge of the stage, the man who’d snapped my collar open—my brother, something in me insisted, my brother—was fighting through a wall of guards, eyes gone wild, teeth bared

“Lyris!” he roared again, like he could call me back to life by sheer will.

The other three poured from their balcony, shoving past nobles and servants alike, all of them arrowed straight at me as if the rest of the world had fallen away.

Pain should have been everything.

A silver dart in the chest. Curse magic grinding my power back into nothing. I should have been screaming.

Instead, everything slipped… distant.

My body became a weight at the end of a long rope. Heavy, unresponsive. I couldn’t feel the stage under my knees when they hit it. Couldn’t feel the collar anymore, only the cold lock slamming shut somewhere deep inside.

My heart beat once. Slow. Stubborn.

For one heartbeat, I was more than Lot Twenty-Seven… and they put the collar back on from the inside.

The thought was small and clear, the last leaf clinging to a winter branch.

Then the rope snapped. The world went black.

---

The smell of mold dragged me back first. Damp and familiar. Beneath it: cheap soap, old wood, the faint sour of too many bodies in too small a space.

I sucked in a breath.

It didn’t rip like torn cloth. It just… went in. Like my lungs worked. Like my ribs weren’t shattered by a silver dart.

My hand flew to my throat.

No iron. No collar. Just bare skin, tender and whole.

I sat up so fast that the room spun.

Low beams loomed overhead, water-stained, and warped. A crack zig-zagged across the ceiling, the same crooked lightning strike I’d stared at on nights when hunger had kept me awake. The mattress under me was thin, and it was bunched into uncomfortable lumps under my hip.

My bed.

The servants’ quarters in Bloodthorn’s lower wing. The place I’d left three years ago in the back of a transport van, wrists chained, drug chasing through my veins.

My fingers shook as I turned toward the shard of the mirror nailed to the wall.

A girl stared back.

Not the gaunt, hollow-eyed body that had stood on the auction stage. Younger. Cheeks less sharp. Bruises blooming fresh along her jaw from the dinner plate Mother had thrown last week. No collar bruises. No scar above her heart.

Her heart.

I pressed my palm to my chest. No wound. No bandage. The skin there was smooth, my pulse thudding fast against it.

Outside the tiny smeared window above the foot of my bed, the training yard stretched in hard-packed dirt and leaning wooden dummies. Late afternoon light painted everything gold.

In the center of the yard, a boy swung a practice sword, sweat darkening his shirt. Dark hair fell into his eyes; he shook it back impatiently. His footwork was a little showy, a hair unbalanced. His jaw hadn’t fully taken on the hard lines of the man on the balcony.

Damon Blackthorn.

No Alpha mark burned into his neck yet. No hardened weight in his shoulders. No memory in his eyes of rejecting an omega in front of the pack.

Because he hadn’t done it yet.

My throat went dry.

Slowly, I looked down at my hands. They were smaller. The faint scars I’d earned after the contract, after the drugging, after the auction—they were gone.

I flexed my fingers. My knuckles cracked.

“I died on that stage,” I whispered.

My voice sounded thin in the cramped room, swallowed by old wood and thin walls.

“So why am I back here—right before my nightmare begins?”

No one answered.

But somewhere deep inside, under ice and invisible iron, my wolf lifted her head.

Not free.

Not strong.

Awake.