THE BIKER ALPHA'S CURSED BRIDE

# Chapter 3 — Extinct ### Torin

Nobody in that circle answered me, which told me more than any answer could have.

I carried Bri Locke down from the ridge myself, her weight slight and unconscious against my chest, gold-flecked eyes closed now, breathing shallow but steady, and felt every wolf we passed go quiet in that specific way packs go quiet around something they don't have words for. I'd expected a political marriage. I'd expected a debt cleared and a territory absorbed and a bride who'd spend the next year adjusting to a life she hadn't chosen.

I had not expected to feel her pulse jump under my hand at the altar like something recognizing me, or to watch her eyes turn a color I'd only ever seen described in Duskrail's oldest, least-trusted records — records my own father had dismissed as superstition before he died and left me a club with more secrets than he'd ever bothered explaining.

*Moonblood.* A bloodline the elders spoke of, when they spoke of it at all, in the past tense. Extinguished generations ago. Except apparently not, if the woman currently unconscious in my arms was any indication.

"Put her in the west room," Callan said, falling into step beside me, voice low enough that only I'd catch it. "Not the standard quarters. West room's warded — old wolf magic, from before my time even. If something in her is waking up, I want walls around her that have held worse than a scared bride before."

"You know something about this."

"I know enough to be careful before I know enough to explain." Callan's jaw was tight, his eyes doing the same rapid calculation I recognized from every crisis we'd survived together since we were pups. "Torin. If she's what her eyes just said she might be, this isn't a debt marriage anymore. This is a problem half the old guard in this club would kill to control."

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She woke near dawn, disoriented, her eyes back to their normal brown, no trace of gold left except in my memory of it. I'd stayed. I told myself it was strategic — a new asset requiring assessment, a threat requiring containment — and knew, even as I thought it, that it wasn't the whole truth.

"Where—" She sat up too fast, wincing, one hand going to her temple.

"West wing. You're safe." I watched her carefully, cataloguing every flicker of expression the way I'd catalogued men across a table my whole adult life. "Your eyes turned gold at our binding. Do you know why?"

Something shuttered behind her face, fast, practiced — the look of a woman who'd spent a lifetime learning to hide things, and I felt a flicker of grudging recognition, because I'd built the same defense myself, for the same reasons.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said. "I've never shifted in my life. That's why they call me Broken."

"I watched it happen. So did four witnesses and your own stepmother, who looked less surprised than anyone else standing on that ridge." I kept my voice even, though something in me — something that had gone quiet the second her hand closed over mine at the altar and hadn't fully settled since — wanted very badly for her next answer to be honest. "Whatever you are, Briallen Locke, you're not what your family sold me as. I'd like to know what I actually married before it happens again somewhere I can't control the room."

She stared at me a long moment, calculating, and I watched her decide, in real time, how much of whatever she was carrying she was willing to hand a stranger she'd been forced to marry the night before.

"I don't know either," she said finally, and something in her voice cracked just enough that I believed her. "I've spent my whole life being told I was defective. Nobody ever offered me an explanation better than that. If something woke up back there, I don't know what it is any more than you do."

I believed that too. It didn't make the problem smaller.

"Then we find out together," I said, surprising myself with how easily the word *together* came out, how little it felt like the political calculation it should have been.

A knock at the door cut off whatever she might have said in response — Callan, jaw tight, not bothering to wait for permission before he stepped inside.

"You need to see this," he said, holding out an old, leather-bound ledger, its pages brittle with age. "Before word of last night reaches the wrong ears. I found it in the archive an hour ago, and Torin—" His eyes flicked to Bri, wary, weighing how much to say in front of her. "Her mother's name is in here. So is a bloodline my father spent thirty years insisting was extinct."

Bri went very still beside me.

"What bloodline," she said, and her voice had gone thin and careful in a way that told me she already suspected the answer might change everything she thought she knew about her own life.