THE BIKER ALPHA'S CURSED BRIDE

Ottilie broke the news to me the same way she broke everything else in this house — like it was a favor she was doing me by not making it worse. "You should be grateful." She didn't look up from the mirror, adjusting an earring like my entire future was a minor inconvenience to her morning. "Do you have any idea how much Duskrail's Alpha could have asked for, taking a Broken bride off your father's hands?" The word landed the way it always did — flat, final, a label I'd worn so long it barely stung anymore, except today it came wrapped around something new. "Taking me where." "Redstone territory. Duskrail proper." She met my eyes in the mirror, and for one unguarded second I saw something almost like pity there before it hardened back into her usual brisk contempt. "Your father's debts are settled. You're the payment. Try not to embarrass this family more than you already have by existing." I'd known about the debt. Everyone in Vellhorn knew about the debt — the way you know about weather, something looming and inevitable that you stop discussing because discussing it changes nothing. I hadn't known it would be paid in me. "When," I said, because that was the only question that mattered now. "Three days." Ottilie turned from the mirror at last, taking in my flannel and my work boots with the specific disdain she reserved for anything about me she hadn't personally chosen. "You'll want something better to wear than that when Alpha Wilder comes to collect you. Assuming you own anything better." I didn't. We both knew I didn't. She said it anyway, because reminding me of what I lacked was the closest thing to conversation she and I had ever managed. --- I found my father in the garage, elbow-deep in an engine he had no real reason to be fixing at that hour, the particular kind of busywork a man does when he can't stand to sit still with what he's done. "Dad." He didn't look up. "Bri." "Ottilie told me." His hands went still on the engine block. When he finally turned around, I saw something I hadn't seen on his face in years — not the tired, distracted love he usually offered me around the edges of his own exhaustion, but something rawer, closer to shame. "I didn't have another way," he said. "The debt's real, Bri. Duskrail could take the territory, take the pack, take a lot worse than a marriage if I let it go another season unpaid. This was the only offer that left anyone standing." "You could have offered Dahlia. Or Iris." "They didn't ask for Dahlia or Iris." The words sat there between us, plain and ugly, and I understood without either of us saying it out loud exactly why Duskrail had asked for me specifically — the Broken daughter, the one who'd never shifted, the one whose worth to this family had always been calculated as slightly less than zero. A political marriage cost something when you gave away a daughter who mattered. I'd never mattered enough to cost anyone anything. "Torin Wilder," I said. "What do you actually know about him?" My father's jaw tightened. "Runs Duskrail hard. Took over young, after his father died — some kind of accident nobody talks about clearly. Cold. Effective. Not cruel, from what I've heard, but not gentle either." He hesitated. "He agreed to the marriage without ever meeting you. Just the paperwork, the territory transfer, the debt cleared. That's all this is to him. A business arrangement." "Good," I said, and meant it, mostly. A business arrangement I could survive. A business arrangement didn't require me to be anything other than what I already was. --- I didn't sleep that night. I lay in the dark running my hand over the old, faded burn scar on my palm — my mother's, the one physical thing of hers anyone had ever let me keep, a shape like a crescent moon that no one had ever explained to my satisfaction — and tried to imagine what it would feel like to walk into a stronger pack's territory as their weakest possible acquisition. Around three in the morning, headlights swept across my bedroom ceiling, engines idling low in the yard below — more than one bike, more than a casual visit. I heard my father's voice through the floor, tense, formal, the particular careful tone he used for people who scared him. And under it, low and even, a voice I didn't recognize, one that carried the specific stillness of a man who didn't need to raise it to be obeyed. Three days early. He'd come three days early. I sat up in the dark, heart hammering, and understood with total certainty that whatever business arrangement I'd told myself I could survive was about to start a great deal sooner than I'd braced for.