Chapter 1: The Alpha’s Knot

Evelina Sinclair:

“Next!!!”

The matron’s voice cracks through the corridor like a whip, and my heart slams against my ribs so hard I taste copper. I’m staring at the eighth body being rushed past me on a stretcher—another Gamma’s daughter, another Beta’s bloodline, gone. Her neck is bent at an angle that makes my stomach lurch, and there’s blood drying between her thighs, dark and obscene against her pale skin.

It has always been like this. Always. But tonight is different. Tonight, the screams lasted longer. The crashes were louder. The Alpha Supreme is going mad again, and the bodies are piling up faster than the servants can drag them out.

I look down at my own trembling hands—rough from scrubbing floors, thin from hunger—and I wonder, with a hysteria that bubbles up in my throat, if I, an Omega Rogue wolf with no pack and no pedigree, will be able to take His Majesty’s cock. It’s a sick, stupid question, made worse by the fact that I’m going to find out in approximately thirty seconds.

I swallow hard, my throat clicking dryly. My legs feel like they’re filled with wet sand as I follow the matron down the hall. She’s muttering under her breath, already writing me off as a loss in her flesh market.

“Three hours,” she grunts, not bothering to look at me. “You won’t even last three hours. Barely worth the coin your step-bitch got for you.”

Three hours. The Gamma before me had been a warrior trained for combat, and she’d barely made it to dawn.

They’d had me washed for days—scrubbed raw, oiled, perfumed until my skin felt like it might split open. All so I could survive long enough to serve my purpose before dying like the rest. Everyone knows the truth: Veyron Mordane has no control during the blood-moon frenzy. Everyone knows he’s the only werewolf in existence without a true mate, cursed to break every female body he touches in his search for the one who can withstand him.

I’m not her. I know I’m not her. But here I am anyway.

The bedroom door looms—massive, black oak carved with wolves in mid-hunt. The guard at the entrance doesn’t speak. He just looks at me with dead eyes and jerks his chin.

“Strip,” he says.

My fingers fumble with the thin linen shift they’d given me. It pools at my feet, leaving me bare and shivering in the hallway’s torchlight. The guard opens the door and shoves me inside.

The heat hits me first—unnatural, stifling, thick with the scent of sex and violence and alpha musk that makes my wolf whine and tuck tail inside my mind. I keep my eyes slammed shut. It’s the deepest taboo for an Omega to look directly upon the Supreme Alpha. To do so is to invite death worse than the one waiting for me on that bed.

I hear him before I feel him—breathing, rough and ragged, somewhere in the dark.

“Kneel,” he growls.

I drop so fast my knees crack against the stone floor. “Please,” I gasp, pressing my forehead to the ground, my dark hair spilling around me like a funeral veil. “Please, my Alpha, I beg you... spare me. I’m nothing. I’m worthless. I’m—”

“On the bed. Spread your legs. Now.”

The command lashes through me, an Alpha compulsion so strong my body moves without my consent. I scramble backward, finding the massive four-poster by touch, climbing onto furs sticky with things I don’t want to identify. I lay back, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my sternum, and I spread my thighs.

I keep my eyes squeezed shut. Even as I feel the mattress dip under impossible weight. Even as the heat of him radiates against my bare skin like a furnace.

And in the darkness behind my eyelids, I think about how I got here.

Three days ago, I’d been scrubbing pots in my stepmother’s kitchen—a bastard daughter, unwanted, unloved, but at least alive. She’d come in with the trader while I was elbow-deep in greasy water. She’d smiled that sharp, hungry smile and said, “Evelina, I’ve found a buyer who’ll actually pay for your scrawny hide.”

Sold. Like cattle. Like meat.

Because that’s all I am now. Meat for the wolf.

The first touch comes like a brand against my stomach—huge, calloused, burning hot. I flinch, a whimper escaping my throat. Then his mouth follows, teeth grazing my navel, tongue tracing a wet, possessive path upward. He’s massive—every part of him dwarfing me—and the sheer size of his presence makes me feel like prey pinned beneath a predator’s paw.

“Please,” I whisper again, tears already leaking from the corners of my eyes. “Please, I’ve never—I’m a—”

He doesn’t care. He doesn’t stop.

He mounts me.

The first thrust is a violation that tears a scream from my throat—raw, guttural, animal. He’s enormous, thick and ridged and impossibly hard, and he forces himself into my virgin body with a single, brutal stroke that splits me open. I’m not ready. I’m dry. I’m tight. And he’s splitting me apart like he’s trying to break me in half from the inside out.

“Too big,” I sob, thrashing my head side to side, nails scrabbling uselessly against his shoulders—shoulders broad as mountains, corded with muscle that feels like stone under my desperate fingers. “Please, Alpha, please, it hurts, it hurts, it *hurts*—”

He pulls back and slams in deeper.

The pain is white-hot, blinding, a tearing agony that radiates from my core through my entire body. I’m crying openly now, ugly tears streaming down my temples into my hair, my body trying to reject the invasion even as he forces me to accept every inch. He’s not fully seated—he can’t be, there’s too much of him—but what’s inside me already feels like it’s reaching my throat, rearranging my organs, breaking my pelvis with every savage thrust.

“Please,” I beg, voice breaking, dignity shattered. “Please stop, please, I’ll die, you’re killing me, please—”

He growls—a sound that vibrates through my chest cavity—and bites down on my neck, canines piercing skin, claiming me as his teeth draw blood. His hips piston against mine with a violence that shakes the bedframe, that makes my teeth rattle, that turns my vision spotted with stars. I can feel myself tearing, the wet slickness that isn’t arousal but blood, the way my body is being used like a sheath for a sword too large for its scabbard.

Every thrust drives the air from my lungs in punched-out sobs. I’m begging continuously now, a litany of “please” and “mercy” and “it hurts” that dissolves into wordless screaming. He’s destroying me—methodically, relentlessly, grinding against that spot inside me that burns with agony with every brutal stroke.

My legs are forced wider, bent back toward my shoulders, opening me completely to his rutting. I can feel the slap of his heavy sac against my torn flesh, the way he’s hitting my cervix with every downward plunge, the sheer animal power that’s reducing me from a person to a hole, a vessel, a thing to be emptied into.

“Alpha,” I choke out, my voice barely a thread. “Please... I can’t... I’m going to—”

Black spots dance at the edges of my vision. The pain has become a living thing, a monster consuming me from the waist down. I’m hyperventilating, gasping for air that won’t come, my body convulsing around his relentless invasion in spasms that only make him growl louder, fuck harder.

He shifts angle, driving deeper still, and I feel something inside me give way—a tearing, a rupture, a final surrender of flesh that was never meant to accommodate such size. The scream that tears from my throat is inhuman, a wolf’s death-howl, as I feel him swell even larger, the knot beginning to form at his base that will lock him inside me for hours.

“No,” I whimper, delirious, consciousness fragmenting. “No, no, please, I’ll die, I’ll die—”

He thrusts once more—hard, final, devastating—and I feel the hot flood of his release, pulse after pulse of burning seed filling my ruined womb, claiming what’s left of me.

The black spots expand, swallowing the red behind my eyelids, swallowing the pain, swallowing the world.

The last thing I feel is his teeth in my shoulder, his weight crushing the breath from my lungs, and the distant, fading thought that my stepmother got her money’s worth.

Then—nothing.

Darkness takes me, and I welcome it.