All Chapters of Married to the Alpha Who Killed My Father: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The snow in Voss territory never used to be red.Aria was fifteen years old the night that changed, standing between her mother's shaking hands in a crowd that smelled of fear and pine smoke, watching her father kneel in the center of the pack square with his wrists bound in a silver chain."Say something," she whispered, though she knew he couldn't hear her. Knew, even then, that some moments in life are not built for mercy.Elias Voss did not beg. That was the detail Aria would carry for the next decade, the one she polished like a blade every night before sleep, her father knelt in the snow with his chin lifted, and he did not beg."Elias Voss," the enforcer's voice rang out, cold and formal, reading from a decree that bore a seal Aria was too young and too broken to memorize properly. "By order of Alpha Kade Thorne, you are found guilty of treason against the Thorne pack, of conspiring to poison the alliance talks, and of the murder of three Thorne sentries at the border crossing.

The council hall smelled of cedar smoke and old parchment, the same as it had for as long as Aria could remember, and yet she'd never felt more like a stranger inside it.Every seat at the long table was filled. Voss elders on one side in their dark formal robes, murmuring to each other with the particular tension of people watching history bend beneath them. Damion sat at the head, composed, unreadable, exactly as he'd been the night her father died. Aria took her place at his right hand, spine straight, hands folded, every inch the picture of a dutiful niece.Inside, she was doing math. Ten years. Ten years and now this.The doors opened at the appointed hour, and the Thorne delegation entered.She'd expected soldiers. Instead, she got diplomats, three older wolves in traveling cloaks, sharp-eyed and cautious, flanking a figure who hung back near the doorway as though deliberately avoiding center stage. Aria's gaze slid past him without recognition, cataloguing threats the way she'd

The formal betrothal dinner was held on Thorne territory, a detail Aria's uncle had objected to on principle and lost a small concession, the Council had argued, to a pack that had agreed to nearly everything else.She arrived at dusk in a convoy of Voss escorts, dressed in deep burgundy that Damion had chosen for her, the color of loyalty, he'd said, though Aria privately thought it looked rather more like the color of old blood. The Thorne compound rose out of the tree line ahead of them, all dark timber and torchlight, larger and less fortress-like than she'd expected. She'd spent a decade imagining this place as something out of a nightmare.Instead, it looked, absurdly, like somewhere people actually lived.She kept her spine straight as she stepped down from the carriage. She kept her face arranged into the calm, gracious mask she'd practiced in her mirror for three days. She did not let herself think about her father.Kade Thorne was waiting at the top of the entrance stairs.U

The last stretch before the wedding moved in a blur of fittings, feasts, and diplomatic small talk, and Aria threw herself into all of it with the practiced grace of a woman who had spent a decade learning to perform whatever role a room required of her.She smiled through breakfasts with Thorne elders who studied her like a horse they were considering buying. She sat through hours of seating arrangements and border-market negotiations disguised as wedding logistics, absorbing every scrap of information the Council let slip in front of her, which sentries would be posted where, which advisors held real influence over Kade and which merely postured at it, which old grudges still simmered beneath the surface of this fragile peace. She catalogued it all with the same patient precision she'd once reserved for herb ratios and poison doses, because information, she'd learned long ago, was its own kind of weapon.It was during one such gathering, a formal dinner meant to introduce her to the

Their chambers had been prepared with the same careful ceremony as everything else that day, candles lit low and warm, a bottle of dark wine already breathing on the table by the window, the bed dressed in linens embroidered with the joined sigils of both packs. Aria noted all of it with a strange, distant clarity, the way she might have noted the details of a room she was about to walk out of and never see again.Kade closed the door behind them, and the sound of it settling into its frame seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet."You don't have to look so terrified," he said, and there was gentleness in it rather t