Wren POV
The lights were too bright.
That was the first thing I noticed when they shoved me onto the stage. Hot white light, blazing down from above, turning everything below into shadows and shapes. I couldn't see faces. Just bodies. Rows and rows of them, seated in the dark like they were waiting for a show.
I was the show.
My wrists were tied in front of me with silver-laced rope. It didn't burn the way it would burn a full wolf I had no wolf for the silver to fight but the rope was rough, and my skin was already raw from pulling at it in the van. I had been pulling at it for three hours. It hadn't helped. Nothing had helped.
Don't cry. I pressed the thought down hard. Do not cry.
Cole's voice came to me, clear as if he were standing right beside me.
Chin up, little wolf.
Cole. My brother. The only person in my father's house who had ever looked at me like I mattered. He used to ruffle my hair when I was small and call me little wolf even though everyone knew I didn't have one. Even though our father made sure I understood, over and over, that a wolfless daughter was barely worth the food she ate.
Cole never cared about any of that.
Cole was dead now. Gone in the battle that my father lost. And my father, Alpha Gregor Ashvale, the man who was supposed to protect me, had looked me in the eye three days ago and said: You are the price of peace. It was always going to be you.
Not my half-sister Lyra. Not any of the warriors. Me. The spare. The embarrassment. The wolfless one.
I lifted my chin.
The auctioneer was a thin man in a gray suit. He had small eyes and a voice that carried easily across the crowded hall. He walked a slow circle around me as he spoke, like I was something on a shelf.
"Wolfless she-wolf," he said. "Nineteen years old. Daughter of the Ashvale line, though that line is now surrendered territory." He chuckled a little. The crowd chuckled with him. "No bloodline power. No wolf. No particular value except youth and good health."
Someone in the crowd laughed. Not a kind laugh.
My face went hot. My hands curled into fists inside the rope.
I thought about the last time I saw Cole alive. We were crouched behind the storage room door while the sounds of the Duskmore soldiers came through the walls boots on stone, shouting, the crack of power that meant wolves were shifting. Cole had his hand on my shoulder. His eyes were steady even when mine weren't.
If something happens to me, he'd said, you keep going. You hear me? You keep going.
I hadn't wanted to hear him say that. I'd put my hands over my ears like a child, and he'd pulled them away gently and made me look at him.
Promise me, Wren.
I promise.
He'd gone out to fight and he hadn't come back.
So I kept my chin up on the auction stage, in front of strangers who were bidding on me like I was a piece of furniture, because I had promised my dead brother I would keep going. That was all I had. That was enough.
The bidding started low.
I watched the shapes in the dark raise their hands. Numbers climbed still low, still insulting. The auctioneer kept his voice smooth and bored, like this was routine. For him, it probably was.
I scanned the room the best I could through the blinding light. I could feel them not the way a real wolf could feel a room, with scent and instinct and power but the way years of being invisible had trained me. I had learned to read people from the edges of rooms, from back hallways, from silence. These wolves were wealthy. Powerful. Most of them were here for information or influence, not for me specifically. I was just the last lot on tonight's list.
Then my chest cracked open.
It was so sudden I almost made a sound. A wave of warmth hit me from somewhere in the room deep and strange and overwhelming, like walking out of a cold building into summer sun. My breath caught. My knees went strange. Something in the center of my ribs pulled, like a string tied to my sternum was being tugged from across the hall.
I had read about it. In the old pack texts Cole used to smuggle me from our father's library. The mate bond. The recognition. The thing wolves described as coming home and being struck by lightning at the same time.
I had always assumed it would never happen to me. Wolfless she-wolves weren't supposed to have mates. Or if they did, no one talked about it.
I searched the dark.
The pulling came from the back of the room. I could not see him clearly just a figure, tall, very still, seated apart from the others like he didn't need anyone near him to feel safe.
The bidding had slowed. Two bidders left.
Then a hand rose from the back of the room.
The auctioneer stopped mid-sentence.
The new number was triple the current bid. Not a small jump not a show of mild interest. Triple. Clean and flat, like the amount meant nothing to him.
Silence fell over the hall.
The other bidders didn't move. No one countered. Not at that number. Not with that kind of certainty behind it.
"Sold," the auctioneer said.
Guards came for me. I let them take my arm and steer me toward the stairs at the edge of the stage, down into the dark of the hall. My heart was hammering. The warmth in my chest was getting stronger, not weaker, which meant whoever bought me was close.
Close and getting closer.
The guards stopped. Stepped back.
He was standing in front of me.
Tall. Dark hair with the first threads of silver at the temples. A jaw like something carved from stone. Gray eyes not the warm gray of rain clouds but the cold gray of steel, of a blade laid flat. He had scars on his hands. He held himself the way only one kind of man holds himself: like violence was a language he had spoken so long he'd forgotten there were others.
I knew his name before he said a word.
Every wolf in the eastern territories knew Kane Duskmore.
His pack had crossed into Ashvale lands. His soldiers had broken down our walls. His war had taken my brother.
And every part of me that was animal and instinct and unnamed bloodline was screaming that he was mine.
He looked down at me. Something moved in his expression fast, controlled, locked away before I could name it.
Then he leaned down, close enough that I could feel the cold coming off him, and he said it quietly, just for me:
"You killed Lyra. I bought you so you can spend the rest of your life wishing you hadn't."
The warmth in my chest didn't disappear.
It just learned what it was standing next to.