All Chapters of Sold to the Broken Throne: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Ondine POVThe line moved forward one body at a time, and Ondine moved with it, because the alternative was getting dragged.Seven wolves ahead of her. Then six, when a broad-shouldered man with a split lip got walked up to the block and sold in under a minute to a pack enforcer who didn’t even ask his name. Ondine watched the enforcer’s collar go around his throat and thought, efficient, and hated herself a little for thinking it like a compliment.“Lot Six,” the auctioneer called. Not her yet.She kept her eyes on the platform instead of the crowd. The crowd was worse — packs sent their seconds and enforcers to trade posts like this one, and every single one of them looked at the holding line the same way, like livestock they hadn’t decided the price of yet. Looking back at them never got her anything but a longer look in return.The post itself smelled like iron and wet stone, the kind of cold that came off underground rivers even on days the sun was out. Stalls ringed the square s

Corvain POV“Get inside,” Corvain said. “Now.”Ondine didn’t move.He should have expected that. Three weeks of knowing her wouldn’t have taught her to take an order without a reason, and he’d known her for three hours. “I mean it,” he said, already scanning the treeline, already counting exits she didn’t know existed yet. “That horn isn’t Fenwick’s, and it isn’t mine, which means it’s someone who found this place without an invitation.”“Then I’d rather see what’s coming than hide from it blind.”“That’s not—” He bit the rest of it off, because arguing was a luxury they didn’t have thirty seconds to spend. “Fine. Behind me. Not beside me.”She fell in behind him without another word, and some small, useless part of his chest noted that she’d listened the second the reason was real instead of just an order, and filed it away as one more thing about her he didn’t have time to feel anything about right now.Barrick was already at the treeline with a blade in each hand by the time they r

Ondine POV“That’s a war horn,” Barrick said. “That’s not one rider anymore.”Corvain moved before the echo died, and the clearing that had felt like a home a moment ago rearranged itself into something else entirely — Fenwick shouting positions, Barrick already stripping to shift, the fire kicked out under someone’s boot so it wouldn’t silhouette them against the dark. Ondine had exactly enough time to register that nobody was telling her to hide before the first riders broke the treeline, and by then there wasn’t time to be told anything at all.She counted six. Not an army — Fenwick had been right about that much, whatever this was, it wasn’t Vaunt’s full weight coming down on them tonight — but six armed men on a settlement with four defenders was still bad math by anyone’s count, and the banner one of them carried wasn’t Kessler colors at all.It was Greaves colors. Her old pack’s colors.The understanding hit her almost as hard as the bond had at the auction block — not Vaunt’s

Fenwick POV“Someone from inside our own pack, someone who survived that night, may have hidden you on purpose — and never told either of us you existed.”Fenwick heard himself say it and watched it land on both their faces at once — Corvain’s going carefully, deliberately blank in the way he only managed when a thing hurt too much to let show. Ondine’s going somewhere quieter and harder to name, somewhere between hope and dread, as she’d learned better than to let either one win before the facts arrived.“There were three of us who survived,” Corvain said. “Barrick, me, and you. If someone hid her on purpose, that’s not a long list of who it could have been.”“It’s not,” Fenwick agreed, and made himself say the rest of it before his own nerve failed. “Which is why I need to check something before either of you spend one more minute suspecting each other of a lie that isn’t yours to carry.”He crossed to where his pack sat against a fallen log, undisturbed since the fighting, and drew

Ondine POVNobody slept. Ondine wasn’t sure any of them had expected to, after a night like that, but by the time gray light started leaking through the treeline, she’d stopped pretending and started helping Fenwick sort through what could be carried and what had to be left behind.Hollow Creek had never been much — a handful of half-repaired buildings, a well, a garden Barrick clearly tended with more care than he’d admit to — but watching Corvain methodically strip the place of anything useful, folding three years of hiding into packs that would fit on four backs, she understood for the first time exactly how much this clearing had meant to all of them as something more than a hideout. It had been the first fixed point any of them had let themselves have since the massacre. Leaving it felt like proof that nowhere stayed safe long enough to matter.“We can’t stay,” Corvain had said at first light, and nobody had argued, because the alternative was waiting for whichever came first — V