Semua Bab I Sold Myself to the Lycan King : Bab 1 - Bab 10

"Lot Twenty-Three, you're up."The handler shoved Belcalis through the curtain and just like that she was on the stage, lights blazing, two hundred men staring up at her like she was something placed in a shop window with a price tag already attached.She did not flinch.She had made herself a list on the drive over. She would not cry. She would not plead. She would not search the room for a friendly face because there were no friendly faces here. These men had come to buy. She had come to be bought. Those were the terms.The auctioneer cleared his throat. "Lot Twenty-Three. Twenty-three years of age. Unmated. Certified omega bloodline, third generation." He paused. The murmuring that moved through the room told her exactly how much that last part mattered to them."We open at fifty thousand."A paddle went up. Then three more.Belcalis fixed her eyes on the back wall and breathed through her nose and thought about Iyana. Iyana in the hospital bed. Iyana who had grabbed her hand and s

The estate appeared in the headlights like something from a story that did not end well for the girl who wandered in.Stone towers. Grey walls that had been standing long enough to grow their own silver. Ivy that wasn't decoration — it was structural, it had become part of the building. The forest at the far boundary pressed in close, dark and enormous, the kind of old that had layers and remembered things.The car had barely stopped when Charles stepped out without looking back at her, because apparently waiting for people was not something the Lycan King did.Belcalis got out.And the territory hit her.It hit her wolf like a wave — and her wolf did not recoil. That was wrong. That was not how it was supposed to feel. Standing in another Alpha's claimed land was supposed to feel like trespass, like pressure, like a door you were not allowed to open. This felt like the opposite. Like recognition. Like her feet knew the ground even though her mind had never been here.She said nothing

Her phone rang at seven forty-three Thursday morning and she answered it before the first ring finished."She's out of surgery. Everything went well. She's asking for you."Belcalis was sitting on the floor of the corridor before she knew she had moved. Back against the wall. Knees up. Phone still in her hand. She was not crying, she was breathing in a way that was technically not crying but was extremely close to it."Can I speak to her?""She's still groggy from the anaesthetic. But she told me to tell you—" The nurse paused, and Belcalis could hear the smile. "She said, tell Bel she owes me a new playlist because she stressed me out so bad I couldn't even enjoy my own surgery."Belcalis pressed her free hand over her eyes."Tell her I'll make her the worst playlist she's ever heard," she managed. "Tell her I love her."The call ended.She sat on the floor and counted to sixty. She gave herself exactly one minute to feel the full weight of eight months of terror lift off her chest,

He talked for two hours.He talked for two hours. Not everything, she could feel the shape of what he left out, but enough. Mira had come through a different kind of arrangement, less auction, more alliance. Sharp, stubborn, someone who made him laugh. He had let her close enough to matter.Varro had found out.The rest he would tell her later. Not tonight. She accepted it.What she could not accept was the feeling after she left the library: that she was standing in a story that had already happened once, with different players, and she did not know yet how much of the ending was fixed.She did not go to dinner.She told Dara she had a headache, which was not exactly untrue, and spent the evening in her room with her back against the headboard and her legs drawn up, thinking.Her grandmother had never mentioned a sister.Not once. Not a photograph, not a name, not the specific kind of silence people kept around things that hurt. Just absence, the way you don't mention a room that doe

The second journal was smaller than the first.Dara had kept it in the lining of Mira's coat, folded in a cedar chest. Forty years. She had opened that chest every year to air it, felt the journal each time, and closed it again.Belcalis held it now in both hands, sitting in the chair in Mira's room.Charles was on the floor, back against the wall, first journal in his lap. She'd knocked and he'd said come in, and the look on his face when he saw what she was holding told her Dara had been right to wait.He was ready now."Dara kept it," he said. Not a question."She was waiting until you could hear it."He held out his hand. She hesitated, not because she didn't trust him with it, but because she wanted him to know this was different from the first. He seemed to understand. He kept his hand extended and waited.She gave it to him.He opened it.She watched his face while he read. This was not the same as last night, the shut-down, the closed door, the window-staring. This was a man r