THE BIKER ALPHA'S CURSED BRIDE

Chapter 2 — The Binding### Bri

Torin Wilder filled our garage doorway like the building had been built too small around him, and the first thing I understood about him, before he'd said a single word to me, was that every version of "cold" my father had warned me about was going to turn out to be an understatement.

"Briallen Locke." He said my full name like he was testing its weight, dark eyes moving over me once, quick and assessing, in a way that made me feel catalogued rather than looked at. "I expected three more days."

"So did I," my father said, too fast, too eager. "Alpha Wilder, if this is about the terms—"

"The terms are fine. I moved the date up because I don't like leaving loose debts on a ledger longer than necessary." Torin's gaze hadn't left me. "You're smaller than I expected."

"I get that a lot," I said, before I could stop myself, and watched something flicker across his face — not quite surprise, something closer to a man recalculating an assumption he hadn't realized he'd made.

"She's Broken," Ottilie put in from the doorway, unhelpfully, unable to resist the chance to say it out loud to someone new. "Never shifted. I assumed the paperwork mentioned—"

"It mentioned." Torin's voice didn't change, but something in the air did, a warning so subtle I almost missed it, aimed at Ottilie in a way that made her fall silent fast. "The binding happens tonight. Pack up what you need."

"Tonight." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I thought I had three days to—"

"You had three days to prepare for a wedding your family already agreed to." He turned toward the door, done with the conversation, already moving on to logistics I wasn't part of. "The debt doesn't get smaller the longer it sits unpaid, Miss Locke. Neither does my patience."

---

The binding ceremony took place at moonrise, on a ridge overlooking Duskrail territory, a handful of witnesses from both packs standing in a loose circle around a stone altar worn smooth by generations of exactly this ritual. My father wouldn't meet my eyes. Ottilie looked faintly triumphant, like a woman who'd finally offloaded an inconvenient piece of furniture.

A Duskrail elder recited words I only half absorbed, my whole body strung tight with a fear I refused to let show on my face, and then Torin's hand closed around mine over the altar, and the elder drew a blade across both our palms in one smooth motion, blood mingling in the shallow stone bowl between us.

I'd braced for pain. I got something else entirely.

Heat shot up my arm the instant our blood touched, sharp and electric, nothing like the clean sting of the cut itself — a heat that spread through my chest, my throat, behind my eyes, so sudden and total that my knees nearly buckled. Somewhere very far away I heard the elder still speaking, finishing the ritual words, utterly unaware that something in my body had just woken up screaming after twenty-two years of total silence.

Torin's hand tightened around mine. Not gently. His eyes had gone sharp, fixed on my face with an intensity that hadn't been there a moment ago.

"Something's wrong," he said, low, only for me.

"I'm fine." The lie came automatically, the same reflex I'd built a lifetime around, except my voice shook on the second word, and the heat behind my eyes kept building instead of fading, pressure like something enormous trying to push through a door built to keep it shut forever.

"You're not fine. Your eyes—"

I didn't get to hear the rest. The heat crested all at once, blinding, and I heard someone in the circle gasp, and Ottilie's voice rose sharp with something that wasn't triumph anymore.

"Her eyes," she said. "Edmund, look at her eyes—"

Everything went gold at the edges of my vision, and the last thing I registered before the world tilted sideways was Torin's grip shifting from my hand to my waist, catching me before I hit the stone, his voice suddenly urgent in a way the cold, contained Alpha from my garage doorway hadn't sounded capable of an hour ago.

"Someone explain to me right now," he said, to the whole silent, staring circle, "why my new wife's eyes just turned the color of a bloodline that's supposed to be extinct."