Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9: WOLVES IN FINE CLOTHING

|| Ashvara’s POV ||

The next morning, I couldn't help but think about everything that had happened with Alpha Mason the day before.

Why could I feel the sincerity in his plea? That little tug in my chest that indicated the pull I so desperately wanted to ignore because it had ruined my life before?

I shook off the haunting thought, because I was summoned to the great hall for the formal introduction to the pack’s nobles. I stared at the dress on the bed, and exhaled.

When I finally left my room, I noticed something. All the servants were lined up, and they all bowed with their eyes.

Their bodies went through all the correct motions, back bent, hands folded, heads dipped to exactly the right angle for the Alpha King’s chosen mate.

It reminded me of the kind of pose we as servants were forced to take each one Isolde came to reign hell on us.

Their mouths murmured the polite words: Your Highness. A pleasure. We are honored.

But their eyes stayed flat, cold and measuring the entire time, moving over me like merchants appraising a horse that had been sold at too high a price.

I didn't like how it made me feel. This wasn't something I was used to.

I stood in the great hall of Ravencrest Palace, beside the most powerful man in the werewolf kingdom, in a gown that other people had chosen for me.

It was a deep green silk, beautiful and heavy, cut in a way that showed my shoulders. It showed….my scars.

The same people who had picked this dress, looked at my branding scar and my ankle and my thin wrists and decided that I was a problem to be dressed. I felt every scar on my body like it was freshly made…too exposed.

Not one of them had even bothered to ask what I wanted to wear.

The brand beneath my collarbone itched. The bruises along my arms seemed to glow through the fabric. Even the thin line of the hairpin cut felt like it was burning, as if each wound had a tiny voice and was shouting my history across the room. I was certain that every person here could see it. That they were silently cataloguing me. Branded omega. Rejected mate. Accused murderer.

I don't like that they're staring. Why can't I just rip off their eyes now,’ Seris whispered.

‘Calm down, Seris.’

‘I do not like it.’

‘Neither do I. Stand up straight.’

I lifted my chin.

Mason stood at my side, tall and dark and calm in black and silver, greeting each noble with the same measured courtesy. He placed his hand on my lower back and introduced me to every one of them.

Lord this, Lady that, A warrior named something I immediately forgot. A very old elder with a very long beard who looked me up and down and said nothing at all.

“My mate,” Mason said again and again, with a shameless expression. “Ashvara Darkwater.”

Not the omega or the girl from Silverfang. My mate.

Each time he said it, the room’s temperature dropped a little further. A woman with a jeweled fan murmured something behind it to her friend. Another lord’s mouth twitched in the corner like he’d swallowed a lemon. I caught one single, perfectly clear word floating through the crowd, whispered and sharp as a splinter.

Omega.

I kept my face blank, something I had learned years ago. When people wanted to hurt you, you gave them nothing to hold on to.

“You must be so overwhelmed, dear,” one lady purred, taking my hand in both of hers. Her fingers were cold and her smile was perfect, but it was obviously fake. “Coming from such… humble beginnings. I do hope the palace isn’t too much for you.”

“It’s very large,” I said politely, forcing the best impression of a smile I could manage. “I haven’t gotten lost yet.”

“How brave.” She said tightly, the way you might say how stupid.

I smiled back at her, and Seris growled very softly at her in my head, which was the closest she ever came to a rude gesture.

That was when the room changed.

I felt it before I saw it. A shift in the air, subtle at first, like a draft of air under a door. The conversations around us thinned, and heads turned, one by one, in the same direction. Bodies tilted, drawn the way a pack always tilts toward its strongest member, automatically and without thinking.

Vespera walked in.

She didn’t even need to announce herself. She simply entered through the tall double doors in a gown the color of fresh blood, her long dark hair loose and gleaming down her back, her shoulders straight, her stride smooth and powerful as a hunting cat’s. She was beautiful in a hard, cutting way, like a blade on a velvet cloth. Every step screamed that she was a warrior.

The entire hall rearranged itself around her, and I watched it happen. Lords stepped aside, Ladies bowed with real warmth, not the thin courtesy they had shown me. A few of the younger wolves even smiled, relieved, as if the sun had just come back out.

And my stomach dropped right through the floor.

She had been dragged out of my room yesterday with a hairpin missing from her hair. Now she was here, in the great hall, with no chains and no guards and not a single mark of punishment. The room didn’t treat her like a woman who had tried to stab the king’s mate. It treated her like a queen.

How did she command such power when she had no hierarchy?

‘She’s not even sorry, and her wolf stinks of mischief’ Seris breathed.

‘I can sense it,’ I whispered. ‘Something about her is off.’

Vespera’s eyes found mine across the room, abruptly stopping my thoughts.

I had braced myself for a sneer. A hiss, a glare, a curl of her lip. Something I could understand and defend against. But her face did not change at all, not one muscle.

She looked at me once, directly, with cool green eyes that were as calm as still water, and then she kept walking as if I were a piece of furniture she’d already decided to replace.

Somehow, that was so much worse. A sneer would have been an emotion.

I felt Mason’s hand move to the small of my back.

It was a light touch, warm through the silk, with all the intention of being protective. He didn’t say anything, nor look at me. He simply placed his palm there as if it had always belonged there, and I felt the whole room notice.

“Relax. She won't hurt you." He whispered into my hair.

I didn’t lean into his embrace, mostly because I couldn’t. Every part of me was trained to flinch from a man’s hand, and every part of me was screaming to run. But I didn’t move away either. I stood very still beneath that warmth, letting it exist, trying to understand why something that should have scared me felt so much like standing behind a wall.

It was a very small victory, but it wasn’t small enough to escape her.

Vespera’s gaze dropped to Mason’s hand on my back. I watched her eyes track it, slow and deliberate. Then they rose back to my face, and an emotion shifted behind them, very cold and absolute settling into place, like a bolt sliding across a door.

I knew the look of a tyrant when I saw one, because Isolde had taught me enough.

I understood in that single moment, with perfect, bone-deep clarity, that whatever she had started with the silver hairpin, she was nowhere near finished.

The music started again, and the noble ladies began to laugh. Mason murmured something polite to the lord beside him, and the room continued its bright, glittering dance.

And I stood in the middle of it, in a green silk gown and a borrowed life, surrounded by wolves in fine clothing, with a smile on my face and a single thought pounding in my head like a drum.

She is going to come for me.