The Alpha's Silent Vow

Chapter 3

"What did you say to him?" Torin's hand slams into my stomach before I can even answer, knocking every bit of air clean out of my lungs.

"N... nothing," I gasp, doubling over. "He asked why I smelled strange. That is all I told him, I swear it."

"Did you tell him why you smell strange?" Damon is close enough now that I can feel his breath hot against my face.

"I did not say it was you," I whisper, though it comes out so small and broken I doubt either of them believe it counts as an apology.

Torin's fingers twist into my hair, yanking my head back hard enough that my whole scalp screams in protest. "If you have ruined this deal for us, you will not see daylight again, do you understand me?"

He drags me down the long hallway by my hair, toward the basement door at the far end, and I stop trying to walk properly and just let my feet stumble along behind him. Begging has never worked before in all these years. I try it anyway, because some small stubborn part of me refuses to stop hoping.

"Please. He is an Alpha, I had to answer him, I did not have a choice."

Torin throws the basement door open with enough force that it cracks against the wall behind it.

Alpha Silas is standing on the other side, arms crossed over his chest, leaning against the wall like he has been waiting there patiently for exactly this moment to happen.

"Alpha Silas," Torin says, his voice cracking with false calm he cannot quite hold together. "I thought you had already left the property."

"I said I would show myself out. I thought I had found the front door somewhere around here." Silas's grey eyes move slowly from Torin's fist still tangled in my hair, down to the open basement behind us, thick with the smell of mildew and old, stale fear that has soaked into the concrete over years. "Instead I found this room. Riddled with your sister's scent, layered in over and over. Is this how your pack treats its own family?"

"She is responsible for our parents' deaths," Torin says, like that single sentence explains everything away completely, like it always has for sixteen years.

"Keep your nose out of our business," Damon adds, stepping up beside his Alpha with his chest puffed out.

Silas laughs, short and completely humorless. "If I sign this treaty with you, your business becomes my business from this day forward. So tell me honestly, what does her punishment usually look like around here? No food for days? Locked away in this basement? A whipping, perhaps?"

"We do not..."

"Really." Silas's eyes flick over to me, taking in every inch of me, the same slow, careful study he gave me back in the office earlier. "She is underfed. There are bags under her eyes that should not exist on someone her age. For the sister of an Alpha, she is certainly not treated like family here. Regardless of whatever she supposedly did as a small child."

"She did it," Torin snaps, his voice rising again.

"That is for me to decide, not you." Silas glances past him, down the long hallway. "Where is your mate? I would very much like to hear how she feels about all of this."

My stomach drops straight through the floor. Selene is worse than Damon and Torin combined on her very best day, and I do not want her anywhere near this particular conversation.

"On second thought," Silas says, before Torin can even think to call for her, "I imagine she is just as pleasant as the rest of this household." He turns his full attention back to my brother. "I have a new condition to add to this deal of ours."

"We already agreed on terms weeks ago."

"I am adding one more. Refuse it, and you do not get my pack's protection at all. You get my pack as an enemy instead, standing right across from you. And you already know, deep down, that you do not want that outcome."

Torin's jaw tightens until I can see the muscle jump beneath his skin, over and over. "This is about her, is not it."

"It is." Silas does not blink once. "Sign her over to me, and you have your deal after all."

Me? I do not understand any of this. Why would a man like him possibly want someone like me?

Torin and Damon murmur to each other, low and fast, heads bent close together, while Silas watches only me instead of them, like he is trying hard to memorize every single detail of my face before he loses the chance.

"Deal," Torin finally says, sticking his hand out toward Silas.

Silas does not take it. "Paperwork will be ready by tomorrow morning." His hand cups my face instead, his thumb dragging slow across my bottom lip, and something about the gesture is gentler than anything anyone has done to me in years and years. "Pack whatever you have."

He walks away without looking back even once, straight toward the front door, like he has walked this exact hallway a hundred times before tonight. At the door, he finally pauses.

"If any one of you touches her again," he says, not even bothering to turn around, "the contract will be the very last thing on your mind, I promise you that."

The door slams shut behind him with a force that rattles the windows.

"Get out of my sight," Torin snarls at me, and I do not need telling twice in one night.

I hurry up the narrow back staircase to my room, my whole body still shaking from the fear of what almost happened in that basement. My cheek still stings from Damon's hand earlier in the day, and my scalp aches where Torin pulled my hair, but none of that hurts nearly as much as the confusion sitting heavy in my chest. Why would a stranger, an Alpha with no reason to care about me at all, put himself between me and my own family. Men like him do not usually notice servants unless they need something moved or cleaned. They certainly do not stop fists in midair for us, and they do not speak our names like they matter.

I do not sleep at all that night. I own three shirts, two pairs of pants, and a pair of sandals with the soles worn nearly through. Packing takes less than a full minute. I fold each item carefully anyway, smoothing out the wrinkles with my palms, just to have something to do with my hands besides shake. The house is quiet around me, the kind of quiet that only ever comes after everyone has gone to bed exhausted from their own cruelty for the day.

I sit on the edge of my thin mattress and look around the small room that has been mine for sixteen years. There is nothing here worth missing. No pictures on the walls, no trinkets on a shelf, nothing that says a person actually lives inside these four walls. I have never been allowed to keep much of anything, and somewhere along the way I stopped wanting to. Wanting things only ever led to disappointment in this house, so I learned to want as little as possible.

The rest of the long night, I lie awake on my thin mattress wondering what a man like that could possibly want with someone like me. I turn his words over and over in my mind, the way he said pack whatever you have as though it were already decided, as though there was never any question of me staying behind. I do not know if I am walking toward something better or simply trading one set of chains for another, only wrapped in nicer paper. By the time the sky outside my small window turns pale grey with morning, I still have not found an answer that makes any real sense.