Chapter 2

Freya

I pulled the sheet against my chest, my head still heavy with sleep, and stared at him. Last night this man had held me all night, and now he was looking at me the way strangers looked at me. "What? I don't..."

"Whatever scheme you played to get into my bed, it failed." His voice was flat and cold. "I have a woman, I chose her myself, and no bond forced on me by fate will ever make me want someone as weak as you."

Every word landed on me and my chest caved in around them. A scheme. He thought I planned this. He thought someone like me had looked at someone like him and dared to want him.

"A scheme?" My eyes burned. "Garrett drugged me, he chased me, I never planned any of..."

"Enough." He didn't even raise his voice, because he didn't need to. "Get dressed, get out, and if you ever speak of this night to anyone, I will make sure you regret it."

He walked out, and the door clicked shut behind him, quietly, and somehow that quiet click hurt worse than shouting would have. I wasn't even worth anger. I was something to be removed from a room.

I sat in a stranger's bed with tears running down my face and the mate bond still humming under my skin, warm and steady and completely unaware of what he had just done to us. That was the cruelest part. My own soul was still reaching for him.

Sable was crying, and I could feel her curled up small inside me.

He's our mate, she whispered. He's supposed to want us.

I know, I told her, wiping my face with the back of my hand. But nobody ever does.

I found my uniform on the floor and got dressed with shaking hands, and I walked out of the royal wing with my head down, the same way I had walked everywhere my entire life. Last night someone had held me like I was precious. I told myself to forget it. Girls like me didn't get to keep moments like that.

I thought the worst thing that could happen to me already had.

I was wrong.

The ride back to Blackmoor territory took most of the day, and I spent it pressed into the last seat of the transport with my forehead against the window, my chest aching. Every mile away from the palace felt like a hand pulling stitches out of me one by one. The bond. It didn't care that he hated me. It just wanted to go back.

The staff transport rode at the back of the convoy, far behind the vehicles carrying the delegation's ranked members, and nobody in it spoke to me. But when we stopped at the border crossing and I stepped down to stretch my legs, Garrett was leaning against his father's car with his bandaged hand in his pocket, and he was watching me, and he smiled.

That smile should have terrified me more than it did.

We were unloading crates from the vehicle when a warrior found me unloading crates. "Freya. The Alpha summons you. Now."

My stomach dropped, and my hands went cold around the crate I was holding. The Alpha had never once spoken to me in twenty years. Whatever waited for me in that pack house, it was nothing good.

The main hall smelled of pine and smoke, and the Alpha sat in his high chair with Garrett's father who was his brother standing at his shoulder, and Garrett himself stood in the middle of the room wearing the face of a wounded, honest man. Seeing that face, I understood, and fear crawled up my throat. He had gotten here first. Of course he had.

"There she is," Garrett said. "I told you she'd come back acting innocent."

"Kneel," the Alpha said, and the command crushed me to the floor before I could take a breath. My knees cracked against the wood.

"Alpha, whatever he told you..."

"Silence." He leaned forward. "Garrett has testified that you abandoned your duties at the royal tournament and spent the night in a Lycan noble's bed like a common whore. You, an omega carrying the honor of this pack."

"That's a lie." My voice cracked. "Alpha, please, Garrett drugged me. He forced something into my mouth and tried to force himself on me, and when I fought him off he chased me. Whatever happened after that happened because of what he gave me."

The room went quiet for a moment, and I hated myself for it. Twenty years of being invisible and I still hoped that just once, someone would believe me.

Then Garrett's father laughed. "The word of a fat orphan omega against my son. Alpha, must we listen to this?"

"I have proof." Garrett held up his bandaged hand. "She bit me when I tried to stop her from sneaking into the noble's wing. I was trying to protect our pack's name."

"Liar!" The word tore out of me before I could stop it. "You told me you liked curvy girls, you told me I should be grateful, you..."

"Enough!" The Alpha's roar shook the windows, and his power rolled over me and pressed my face toward the floor. "You shame this pack with every word. Freya Callahan, for disgracing Blackmoor before the crown, I sentence you to breeder status, effective immediately."

The words didn't make sense at first, and then they did, and everything inside me went still.

Breeder. No name, no rights, no choice. A body passed between males until it stopped producing pups. I had seen the breeder females once, gray-faced and empty-eyed behind their barred windows, and I had looked away fast, the way you look away from your own worst nightmare.

"No." I was shaking so hard my teeth chattered. "No, Alpha, please, please..."

"Take her."

Two warriors hauled me up by my arms and dragged me toward the doors, and I fought them with everything I had, screaming, my heels scraping the floor, and the worst part was the pack gathered outside to watch. People I had cooked for. People I had cleaned for my whole life. They watched me being dragged past them and not one of them moved, and my heart broke all over again.

Harper's voice cut through the noise, shouting my name, shouting that they were all cowards, and then I heard the crack of a hand striking her face and her voice stopped, and that hurt worse than my own sentence. Even loving me was punished here.

The breeder quarters stood at the far edge of the grounds, low and gray with bars on the windows, and an old female waited at the door with iron cuffs hanging from her hands. Her eyes met mine, and there was nothing in them. No pity. Nothing. That emptiness was where I was going.

The warriors forced my wrists forward. The first cuff closed cold around my skin, and I stopped fighting, because there was no one in the world coming for me. There never had been.

Then howls rose at the border.

Long, layered, echoing howls, dozens of throats at once, and every wolf in the clearing froze, because those were not Blackmoor voices. The gates swung open and black vehicles rolled through, flanked by warriors with the royal crest on their shoulders, and the entire pack dropped to its knees around me.

The warriors forced me down with them, my knees hitting dirt, the loose cuff swinging from my wrist, and my heart was slamming without knowing why yet.

Doors opened, boots crossed the ground. The Alpha scrambled down from the porch, bowing so low his forehead nearly touched his knees.

"Your Majesty. Blackmoor is honored beyond..."

"Why is that female in chains?"

My whole body stopped. I knew that voice. I would know that voice for the rest of my life, and I raised my head slowly, praying I was wrong and knowing I wasn't, and I found myself staring up at the man from the palace. The man whose sheets I had woken in, the man who had told me to get out.

Silver eyes. The royal guard fanned out behind him.

The stranger from the tournament was the Lycan King, and I had no air left in my body.

Mate, Sable whispered, and her voice was breaking with a hope I couldn't afford. Mate came for us.

He didn't come for us, I told her, but my traitor heart was pounding anyway.

The Alpha straightened halfway, wringing his hands. "Your Majesty, this omega disgraced our pack at your tournament. She has been sentenced to breeder status, as our laws demand. I assure you her punishment will be thorough."

The King's eyes moved from the cuff on my wrist to the gray building behind me, and then to my face, and his expression hardened.

"Remove her chains."

"Your... Majesty?" The Alpha blinked. "The sentence..."

"Remove them." Nobody moved fast enough, so a royal warrior stepped forward and broke the cuff off my wrist with one twist. "She is coming with me."

The whole clearing seemed to stop breathing, and I couldn't look away from him, and I didn't understand anything anymore. He hated me. He had thrown me out. So why was my chest filling with something that felt dangerously close to hope?

"Forgive me, Your Majesty, but... she is a disgraced omega. Why would the crown want her?"

The King looked down at me, kneeling in the dirt with my wrist bleeding where the iron had scraped it, and when he answered, his voice was loud enough for all to hear.

"Because she is my mate."