Chapter 3: The contract

For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.

Eleven years ago I was seven years old, my mother had just died, and I did not know a single person outside of Ashen Creek. There was no reason for a man like him to have been looking for me, and yet he stood there in front of the whole hall saying it as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

"You must have me confused with someone else," I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted.

"I do not." He turned his head slightly, and the woman on the stage jumped as if he had spoken to her. "The girl is mine. Have the papers ready in five minutes, and tell the buyers that anyone who wants to complain may find me outside."

Nobody wanted to complain.

Two of his men came forward and removed the hands that had been holding my arms, and the room went so quiet that I could hear the candles hissing on the walls. Then he took off his black coat and put it around my shoulders without asking, and the warmth of it hit me so hard that I realized how cold I had been for three days.

"Walk with me," he said. "You do not have to if you do not want to, but I would like it if you did."

It was a strange thing to say after paying ten million for someone, and it made me trust him a little less and listen a little more. I walked.

My father was waiting at the bottom of the stage steps with the pen still in his hand. He looked like he had aged ten years in one night, and I should have felt sorry for him, but all I could feel was a tiredness so heavy that it was almost peaceful.

"Liana," he said, and his voice cracked in the middle of my name. "Please, let me explain."

"Explain what, Papa?" I asked. "That you drove me three hours to sell me to strangers, or that you let me think you were taking me to a healer?"

"It is not what it looks like."

"It looks like a man signing his daughter away for money."

He opened his mouth, and for a second I thought he was going to say something real, something that would make all of this make sense. His eyes jumped toward the Alpha King beside me, and then back to me, and I saw him swallow whatever it was.

"Just do what he says," my father whispered instead. "Stay alive. That is all I ask."

I laughed, a small, ugly sound that I did not recognize as my own. "You do not get to ask me for anything anymore."

I walked past him and did not look back, and the worst part was how much it hurt to leave him standing there.

Outside, the night air was sharp and clean, and a black car was already waiting with its engine running. The Alpha King opened the door for me himself. I climbed in with his coat still around me, and he slid in on the other side, leaving a careful space between us, as if he knew exactly how much room I needed.

The car pulled away from the lodge in silence. I counted the trees for a few minutes, mostly to avoid looking at him, but in the end my curiosity won.

"Who are you?" I asked. "And do not say the Alpha King, because I already heard that."

"Kaiden," he said. "Kaiden Blackwood."

"Why did you buy me, Kaiden Blackwood?"

He did not answer right away. He looked out of the window at the dark road, and I saw his jaw tighten, as if he was choosing which truths he could afford to give me.

"I am going to offer you a deal," he said at last. "You can accept it or refuse it, and if you refuse, I will drive you wherever you want to go tonight, and no one will touch you. But I would like you to hear it first."

"A deal."

"One year." He took a folded paper from inside his jacket and held it out. "For one year, you will live in my castle and be known as my Luna. It will only be on paper. You will have your own rooms, your own guards, and your own life. I will not touch you, I will not command you, and I will not ask you for anything you do not want to give."

I stared at him. "That is the strangest kidnapping I have ever heard of."

"It is not a kidnapping. Your father's debts are already cleared, so no one in your old pack can use them against you. And when the year ends, you may leave with whatever you want, and I will never come looking for you."

I took the paper but did not open it. "Why a year? Why a Luna? Why me?"

"The first two have simple answers," he said. "A year is how long it will take. A Luna is the only title in my kingdom that nobody dares to touch."

"And the third?"

For the first time, something moved in his face that was not cold. "When you are ready to hear it, I will tell you. I cannot tell you tonight."

I should have said no. Any sensible girl would have said no, because a stranger with gold eyes and a secret was exactly the kind of danger my mother had taught me to run from. But I thought about the storeroom with its flour sacks, about Rhett's face when he said I was not enough, about Selene's sad little smile. I thought about what waited for me if I asked this man to drive me back.

I had nowhere to go, and he knew it. But he had asked, and that was more than anyone else had done all week.

"I have conditions," I said.

He raised an eyebrow, and I think he was surprised. "Name them."

"First, nobody puts a hand on me unless I allow it. Second, I will not be called a stray, a servant, or a thing you bought, not in front of me and not behind my back." I took a breath. "And third, I want a kitchen."

"A kitchen," Kaiden repeated.

"I bake when I am upset. And I think I will be upset a lot this year."

He stared at me for a second. Then the corner of his mouth moved, just a little, in what could have been the smallest smile I had ever seen, and it vanished so quickly that I wondered if I had imagined it.

"Done," he said. "All three."

He handed me a pen. I unfolded the paper and read every line twice, because I had learned that night what happens when you sign things without reading them. It was a short contract, and it was fair, almost suspiciously fair, and at the bottom there was a space for my name next to his.

I signed.

"Thank you," Kaiden said quietly, and he sounded like a man who had been holding something heavy for a very long time and had just put it down. Then his eyes dropped to my neck, and his whole body went still.

"Where did you get that?"

My hand flew up. I had forgotten about the locket, my mother's silver locket, which had slipped out from under his coat and was resting against my collarbone.

"My father gave it to me tonight," I said. "It was my mother's."

He did not speak for so long that I started to feel afraid. His fingers, which had been so steady all night, were trembling slightly against his knee, and I realized that I had never seen anyone look at a piece of jewelry the way he was looking at it.

"One more rule," he said at last, and his voice was rough. "It is not on the contract, but it is the only one that matters."

"What is it?"

He leaned in until his gold eyes were level with mine, and for the first time, I saw something behind them that looked a lot like fear.

"No matter what happens in my castle, no matter who asks you, and no matter how nicely they ask, you do not take that locket off. Not for a bath, not for a ceremony, and not for me. Do you understand, Liana?"

The car went quiet. Far ahead of us, through the trees, the lights of an enormous stone castle began to rise out of the dark.

And I realized, with a slow chill, that the locket was the one thing both my father and the Alpha King had warned me about in the same night.