Chapter 1

The Price of a Debt.

I’d learned a long time ago, the safest place in this pack was nowhere. Not the middle of a room. Not even the edge of a conversation, honestly. Nowhere at all. If I could scrub a floor and nobody noticed my hands doing it, if I could carry a tray clear across a packed hall without catching one single eye, then that was a good day, that counted as a win. That was basically the whole trick to surviving as an Omega under Alpha Roran: you made yourself small enough, people just kind of forgot you were even there to begin with.

That morning, before any of it started, I’d reached for the good ladle in the east kitchen, the one that didn’t leak everywhere, and one of the cooks just plucked it right out of my hand without even really looking at me. “That’s not for Omega hands,” she said, already turning back to her pot, like it wasn’t even worth the breath to explain herself further. I didn’t argue. You learn not to, real quick. Just picked up the cracked one instead and went back to my basin, told myself it didn’t matter, same as I always did.

I was still at that basin when it happened, arms up to my elbows in cold greasy water, scrubbing at some roasting pan somebody had left too long on the fire and that’s when Nora came in, mouth already going before the door had even shut behind her.

“Emergency meeting,” she said. “Alpha wants everyone in the hall. All of us. Now, Elira.”

I straightened up, water dripping off my elbows onto the stone. “All of us? Kitchen staff too?”

“Everyone.” She was already yanking her apron off over her head, and her voice had this tightness to it I really didn’t love. “Something’s going on. He looked like death walking in there. I’m not even exaggerating this time, I swear.”

I dried my hands off on my skirt, badly, and just followed her out. My stomach was already doing that slow sick turn it does whenever the whole pack gets called together at once like that. Full gatherings never meant anything good, not once. Last time it was three warriors dead on the northern border. So whatever this was, I already had a bad feeling about it, deep down, before I even got there.

The hall was packed solid by the time we made it. Wall to wall, shoulder to shoulder, air thick with sweat and old smoke and way too many people all breathing at once in one room. I found my usual spot near the back wall, like always.

Alpha Roran was up on the stone dais at the front, and Nora hadn’t been exaggerating one single bit; he looked gray, actually gray, under the torchlight, jaw so tight I could see it working even from clear across the room. Next to him stood two men I’d never once seen before in my life. Their clothes were finer than anything this pack had owned in years, dark fabric, silver stitched along the collars, and they had this stillness about them, the kind that belongs to men used to being obeyed without question, ever. It didn’t take long to figure out who they probably were. Envoys, sent down from Alpha Kaelan Thorne’s territory, there to witness whatever Roran was about to hand over, and carry word of it back home to their Alpha.

The whispering around me died down slowly, like a fire losing its air bit by bit, till it got quiet enough I could actually hear my own pulse going in my ears.

“I won’t waste your time pretending this is good news,” Roran said, and his voice cracked, just barely, right on the word good. “Three months ago, I entered into a dispute with the Alpha of Ashcliff Territory. Over grazing rights, along our western border. I believed our claim was strong. I was wrong.”

Something rippled through the crowd right then. I felt it more than actually heard it.

“The dispute’s been settled,” he went on, “and not in our favor. We’ve lost the grazing lands. Lost standing with three allied packs who backed Ashcliff over us. And now we owe a debt so big, if it doesn’t get paid, this pack loses its territory. All of it. Gone, just like that.”

Somebody near the front made this small broken sound and swallowed it back down fast.

I just stood there against the wall, trying to picture what kind of debt could swallow up a whole territory like that. We didn’t have that kind of gold. Nobody in that hall had that kind of gold, everybody knew it.

“There is a way to clear it,” Roran said, and something in his voice shifted, went careful, and went kind of rehearsed. “Alpha Kaelan Thorne, of the ruling territory, has agreed to forgive the debt. In full. Grazing lands, reparations, all of it. In exchange for a different kind of payment.”

I remember thinking, distant and kind of stupid with it, what could possibly even be worth that much.

“He has requested a bride,” Roran said. “An Omega. To serve his household however he sees fit. As his mate. Or as something lesser. That choice belongs to him, once she’s delivered.”

The hall didn’t gasp, not really. Just went quiet, quiet with actual weight to it. Nobody protested. Nobody even moved a muscle.

I didn’t get it yet, that the quiet was because everybody else in that room already knew who it was gonna be.
Everybody but me.

“The Omega chosen,” Roran said, and his eyes finally moved, finally landed, “is Elira Vance.”

The floor kind of tilted under me right then. My ears started ringing, this high thin sound that swallowed up the rest of the hall whole, and my knees went soft and useless like somebody had pulled the bone clean out of them, and for one long stretched-out second I couldn’t even get a breath in, like my chest had just forgotten how the whole motion worked. Something in me, low down and animal, reared up all at once, some instinct older than the fear even, screaming one word over and over. Run. My wolf clawed against my ribs like she wanted straight out, wanted to bolt for those doors before my legs could even decide to move on their own.

For one dumb second I actually thought maybe I’d heard him wrong. Just the wall at my back, and a hundred pairs of eyes swinging toward me all at once.

“No,” I said, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted it, swallowed up almost instant by how big that hall was. “There’s gotta be a mistake. I’m not important enough to”

“It is decided.” Roran’s voice left no room in it for me to keep arguing. “Ashcliff’s envoys ride out tonight, and you’re riding with them. There’s no week to spare, Elira. Every hour this debt sits unpaid is an hour closer to losing everything I’ve built for this pack.”

I shoved forward through the crowd anyway, ignoring how people kept stepping back from me, and got as close to that dais as the guards were gonna let me.

“You can’t do this,” I said, voice shaking now, cracking wide open into something a lot closer to panic. “You’re talking about my life. You’re trading me off like a sack of grain, to cover a debt I had nothing to do with”

“Watch your tone,” Roran said, quiet and somehow that quiet was worse than if he’d just shouted it at me. “Your family owes this pack everything, Elira. Your father’s debts. Your mother’s medicine. The roof over your siblings’ heads. All of it, paid for by this pack’s generosity, for years now. You refuse me, and I won’t just let the Ashcliff debt sit where it’s at. I’ll collect what your family owes to me instead. In full. Immediately.” Something flickered behind his eyes right then, quick and cold, gone before I could even name it properly the look of a man doing math with somebody else’s whole life, weighing one Omega girl against his title, his territory, his seat at the head of this hall, and finding the scales tip easy in his own favor every time. “I did not build this pack up just to watch it crumble over one girl’s comfort.”

“You don’t even know what he’ll do with me,” I said, quieter now, the fight already draining out of my legs even if it hadn’t drained out of my voice just yet. “Mate or slave, you said it yourself, you don’t even know which.”

Roran’s face didn’t move, not one inch. “That,” he said, “is not my concern.”

I just stood there, in front of two strangers in black and silver who hadn’t said one single word this whole time, and understood, plain as anything, that nothing I said was gonna change a thing.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. Sat on the edge of my narrow bed, knees pulled up to my chest, and prayed actually prayed, the first time in years that the Moon Goddess would hear me for once. Not for rescue. Just the smaller mercy. Let him pick slaves over mates. Let it be humiliation instead of some bond I never even agreed to.

Didn’t know yet that she wasn’t listening.

I was still awake when I heard it. Horses, outside, more than a few of them, moving with a kind of discipline that told me right off these weren’t traders. Went to the narrow window and looked down into the torch-lit courtyard, and my breath just caught somewhere behind my ribs and stayed stuck there, wouldn’t move.

The doors of the great hall were already swinging open down below, wide and slow, spilling firelight out into the dark. And walking through them, flanked by warriors who moved like shadows given shape, was a man whose name I’d only ever heard whispered, the kind of reputation that made grown warriors go quiet and small.

He paused at the base of the steps, and slowly, like he already knew exactly where to look, lifted his gaze up toward my window. For one long stretched-out second, across all that distance and firelight, his eyes found mine and just held there.

He’d come to collect what he was owed.