Chapter 4

Lucian's POV

I felt the silver chain slide off my wrists and knew, immediately, that something had changed.

For a month, the Northern Pack had kept me bound in silver, a metal that burned against wolf skin and kept my wolf half sleeping and weak.

They had whipped me, poured aconite into my wounds, starved me for days at a time, all in an attempt to break my will and make me surrender. I had endured every bit of it without bending.

So why remove the chain now? Why move me from the filthy dungeon cell into this clean tent, with fresh furs and a proper bed?

I did not have to wait long for my answer. A strange woman came first, sent by their King himself to obviously sleep with me. Even in my weakest form, I could snap her into two.

She was all confidence and wandering hands, and I nearly crushed her throat for daring to touch me, before the errand girl arrived and dragged her out with nothing but a few sharp words.

I watched the whole exchange with a kind of numb disbelief, already guessing what was happening. This was another Northern scheme to chain me to this frozen land through blood instead of iron, by forcing me to breed with some woman and have a child with her.

The idea was almost laughable. I, Lucian Frost, Alpha Prince of the Southern Pack, reduced to a breeding tool for barbarians.

"Are you trying to die?" the girl snapped, kneeling beside me, checking my reopened wounds with more concern than her assignment required. "You are still injured. Fighting her like that could have killed you."

Why would she care whether I lived or died? I was nothing to her but a task given by her precious Alpha king.

We traded words, the same bitter accusations and insults I always threw at her, and she took every one of them without flinching, which irritated me more than if she had simply run.

Then, before I understood what she meant to do, she had the chain around my wrists and half a bottle of something bitter poured down my throat.

I should have fought harder. I told myself that the wounds had slowed me, that the aconite still lingered in my blood, weakening me.

The truth was simpler and far more humiliating. I had not expected her to move that fast.

She climbed onto my lap, and I felt whatever remained of my pride as an Alpha Prince crumble into pieces beneath her.

I meant to keep hating her through all of it. I meant to lie still and cold and let her finish whatever business her King had sent her to finish, and feel nothing but contempt while she did it.

That was not what happened.

She was clumsy at first, stiff and in obvious pain, and it took me only a moment to realize with disbelief that she has never been with a man before. She was forcing herself through it without knowing the first thing about what she was doing.

It made no sense to me.

Why would the King send an inexperienced girl?

I had always believed that Northern females were shameless, eager, and practiced in the act of pleasing a man in bed.

Instead she gritted her teeth and kept going anyway, determined to finish what she had been ordered to do, and something about that stubbornness needled at me more than any insult could have.

Even as I mocked her for it, she did not answer. She did not even look at me, at first. She only kept moving, finding her own rhythm little by little, and I hated that I noticed the exact moment the pain in her face began to ease into bliss.

I hated even more what was happening to my body.

She was warm against me, and slowly, to my horror, an unfamiliar heat stirred inside me. I blamed the drug still coursing through my blood, refusing to consider any other explanation.

I gripped the chain behind my back and fought to keep my breathing even, fought to keep my face still, and lost that fight when I heard her moan.

There was something strange in her. A Northern wolf's strength, yes, the same brutal kind I had felt when she bound my wrists without effort, but underneath it something softer.

Something almost southern.

I hated that combination most of all. I hated that some traitorous part of me found it more affecting than the polished, practiced women my father's court used to send to my chambers back home.

I will remember this, I vowed silently, my jaw clenched so tight it ached. The day I return south, I will burn this entire pack to the ground. I will kill every wolf who had a hand in this humiliation.

But even as I made the vow, pleasure crashed through me despite everything, and for one unguarded second I was nothing but a body responding to another body, no title, no war, no hatred, Only the warmth of her body, her weight against me, and the reluctant relief that followed.

Then it was over, and the shame arrived like cold water.

She lifted her head and looked at me, her breath still shaking, some question flickering behind her eyes that I did not want to answer.

I looked away first. I could not stand to see whatever softness remained on her face, could not stand the thought that she might see something similar on mine.

She climbed off without another word, straightened her skirt, loosened the chain from my wrists, and walked out without looking back.

Good. Let her go. Let her think this meant nothing, because it had to mean nothing.

I lay there afterward, staring at the tent's ceiling, disgusted with myself in a way the whip had never managed.

My father's voice echoed in my skull, the same lecture he had given me a hundred times growing up: the South wins with the mind, not the body, and a wolf who loses control of one loses control of both.

I had just handed a Northern woman more power over me in ten minutes than the Alpha King had managed in a month of torture.

It felt like betrayal.

Not of my body, not even of my pride, but of my own pack, of every Southern wolf who had died fighting these barbarians, of my father's throne and everything it stood for.

I had sworn to hate the North with everything in me, and instead my body had reached for one of their daughters like she was something worth wanting.

“It’s only the drug,” I told myself. “It has to be. Because how the hell am I supposed to face my father after leaving this barbarian land?”

I almost believed it.

A month since my capture, and every escape attempt had failed. My men, taken with me in that final battle, had vanished somewhere into this frozen wasteland, and I had heard nothing of their fate.

I could endure humiliation. I had endured worse in training, in war, in the long years spent proving myself worthy of my father's throne. But not knowing whether my warriors lived or died gnawed at me in ways the whip never could.

Slowly, an idea took shape.

The errand girl might be my only opening in this entire frozen prison. If their King wanted me bound through family, through her and whatever child might come of tonight, then perhaps I could turn that same weakness against them.

Cooperate, for now.

Let them believe their plan was working. Learn what happened to my men, gather what I could, until the day I finally broke free and led them home.

I closed my eyes, forcing my ragged breathing to calm down, and buried the rest of what I felt somewhere I refused to look at again.

For now, I would play their game.