They shove her forward like she is a thing to be inspected.
Chains bite her wrists. The metal is cold. Her back stings where a boot shoved her against the wooden post. Torchlight makes everything sharp. Faces hover in the dark like vultures. The hall smells of sweat and old smoke and something sour that tastes like fear.
Lyria keeps her head up. Her brother's voice lives inside her skull. Never bow, he told her the week before the packs came down. Not even when you bleed.
She will not give them the sight of her breaking.
"Silver Crest's remainder," the auctioneer croaks, voice oily as he pats the ledger. "Illegitimate daughter of Alpha Rowan. No wolf bond on record. Offered as compensation for debts accrued during the raid."
Compensation. The room laughs. The wolves in the front row clap like they are at a market.
She had been home when the fire came. She had been grabbing for her brother in the smoke, hauling him toward the lower stair, the world full of screams and sparks. She had watched him fall with a blade in his ribs, had held his head loose on her lap, had tasted smoke and ash and iron and then nothing. After that, the pack was ashes and the house was gone and her father had sold her like a price on a ledger so he could survive the next council meeting.
Now she stands on the stage and feels hollow.
Then the scent hits her.
Not the burning wood of her memories. Not the iron tang of blood. Something sharper and colder. Rain after a long drought. Smoke from a different fire. Deep, old male. It threads under all the other smells and settles like a stone at the base of her throat.
Her body answers before her head does.
Heartbeat heavier. Breath quick. A tightening low in her belly she has no name for. She knows it is wrong to want anything right now. She knows the world pays you for being hard, not soft. But her fingers curl at the chain and she listens to that pulse.
Across the room, a man stops moving.
Alpha Kael of Nightfall does not often stop when things happen. He is a storm in full. Tonight he is stone. The torchlight sketches his face into hard lines. He stands like a cliff and the room fills with him, even from so far away.
His eyes lock on her and the world tilts. For the briefest beat his expression is empty, then it folds into something cold and old. Recognition hits him like a blow. Not soft. Not like that first look of seeing a mate should be. It is hard and edged and almost cruel.
Hatred comes after that, quick and bright.
Lyria feels it as if he had thrown a glass against her chest. It shatters her on the inside.
The auctioneer starts the bids and the noise washes over her. Numbers and crude jokes, people betting like it is a race. She stares at the crowd and sees nothing. Her throat works.
"Two thousand," someone calls.
"Ten," another replies.
Then Kael's voice cuts the room like a blade.
"Two hundred thousand," he says.
The hall snaps quiet. Even the torch flames seem to quiet with it.
No one argues. They know when an Alpha speaks. No one chances a fight. Kael's hand falls to the hilt at his hip. He leaves his seat and walks like he will bend the night to his feet.
He moves slow. He moves like he intends to enjoy making her small.
Her chain is unclipped by rough hands. They shove her toward the edge of the raised platform and when Kael is close he grabs the chain where it hangs and jerks. The motion is not gentle. It flings her forward so she lands half on her knees at his boots.
The scent of him smothers her. Her wolf, if it slept, wakes and snarls. Her lungs fill with something of iron and rain and the memory of a storm hitting hard against cliffs. Her skin goes warm.
He leans in. The crowd hushes. Even the rogues at the back hold their breath.
"You," he says, voice low and cold. "Of all the things offered tonight, you will do."
She opens her mouth to say something, any thing that might buy a breath—plea, lie, explanation—but the words thicken in her throat. To the world she must seem small and slippery and useful. But inside her, the shame and the heat and the salt of her brother's last look make her raw.
He drags her down the steps so everyone can see. He makes sure the torches blaze on them. He wants them to see what he intends to do with her. The crowd leans in like it is a performance.
"On your knees," he orders when they stop in the center of the floor.
Lyria's feet do not obey. She will not give him that. Her legs tremble but she stays upright and looks at him. Someone laughs, and it sounds like rats.
He moves, and suddenly he is behind her. His hand finds the back of her neck, rough in her hair, and forces her face to the side. Heat hits the skin where he presses—sharp, a star of pain.
"You will pay for what you did to her," he whispers in her ear.
She freezes. Her name in his mouth tastes like accusation. She does not know this woman. Her mind scrambles through the night her pack fell. She remembers faces and fire and a silhouette in the trees. But she does not remember seeing a woman in the way he speaks of. She did not know anyone from Nightfall had been there. She had been thinking only of getting out, of grabbing her brother, of breathing.
The first bite is sudden and deep and it rips a cry from her she cannot stop. Pain explodes, hot and animal. Then another thing moves under that pain, something sharp and raw and strange. Blood and heat and a pull that tightens in her bones like a noose.
A mate bond slams closed between them with the force of a slammed door.
The hall moves around her. Her vision dims and then brightens. Something invisible links her and Kael now, a thread that tugs and hums and refuses to let go.
People gasp. Someone cries out. The air tastes of copper and new wind.
She did not ask for this. She did not want any of this.
Kael pulls back like he has been stung. The instant the thread ties them he straightens and his face goes cruel and controlled again. He does not smile. He will not take the tender, easy way that a true bond brings. He will twist it into power. He will make it a weapon.
"To all of you," he says loudly, for the crowd and the cameras and the gossip and the record to hear, "know that I mark her as mine. She will remain in Nightfall territory as restitution. She is not my true mate."
The room swells with noise. A mate claimed should be crowned. But he takes that sacred thing and slaps a bruise across it. He calls it property. He calls it shame.
Lyria's throat closes. The word mine is heavy and wrong on his mouth. Her lungs burn. The mark on her neck throbs, and where he bit, she can feel something fierce and fragile bleeding together.
"You were seen near Selene when she fell," Kael says, sudden and bright. "You ran while she died."
The name is a knife.
Selene. He had been in love with her. The thought of another woman with his name and his grief eats at him.
"I was running," Lyria tells him. Her voice is small in the big hall. "I was trying to get out. There was fire and—"
"You were there," he snaps. "Do not pretend you are innocent."
Hands grip his arm. An advisor leans in to murmur. Kael listens, face like stone, then turns his head and drags Lyria roughly toward the back where the horses wait.
Mounted wolves whisper behind them. The world is night and its trees blur. Kael hauls her onto a horse before he mounts and then he sets her down in front of him like a shield or a puzzle piece. His arms wrap around her and she feels the press of his chest hot and steady. The bond pulls again and the noise of the crowd shrinks, small as a mouse.
"You will learn what it is to lose," he says, close enough that his breath tickles her hair. His words are meant to scare. To push. To own.
She does not answer. She looks forward through black trees and thinks of her brother and the ache that will not leave her. She also thinks of the way he glanced at her when he first saw her there, the way his eyes had the look of a man who had been cut and who was sure he had a single person to blame.
For a second, as the horse lopes, doubt crosses his face like a shadow.
He does not know the truth about that night. If someone had planned those fires and those deaths, then the string that tied Selene to her fate could be pulled by more than grief and revenge.
Lyria's fingers tighten on the chain at her wrists. She wants to ask him questions. She wants to tell him everything. But she knows that words will twist into weapons against her. She knows now that the world will prefer easy answers.
Kael steers the horse through the dark. The high gates of Nightfall's estate open slow and wide, like jaws welcoming blood. Torches gust and flare.
As they pass under the arch, the crowd's murmur swells behind them and then fades. Inside the courtyard, armored wolves turn to look at the woman their Alpha has brought home in chains. They see the mark on her neck. They see the way she sits rigid in front of him. They smell the smoke on her skin and the iron in her blood.
Kael leans close and his mouth brushes the side of her neck, where his bite had been. His voice drops.
"If you try to run," he says, "I will hunt you myself."
She lifts her chin even though every muscle screams. "Maybe you should be hunting someone else," she answers. The words surprise her by how steady they feel.
He goes quiet. For a heartbeat something like doubt slips across his features. Then he masks it again. He pulls the reins and the horse moves.