Contracted To The Alpha King

Sera's POV The first thing I felt was the belt. It cracked across my back before consciousness arrived, dragging me out of sleep with a gasp that scraped my throat raw. My body curled instinctively, hands flying up, and the second strike caught my forearm instead of my face. "Why the f**k are you sleeping?" Cole. I blinked the blur from my eyes and found him standing over me, belt in hand, jaw tight with the specific irritation of a man who had been looking for a reason. Beside him stood Gloria — arms folded, lips curved into something that wasn't quite a smile but lived in the same neighbourhood as satisfaction. The cleaning bucket had tipped beside me, water spreading across the stone in a slow dark pool. I had fallen asleep. Been working since before dawn and my body had simply stopped. That distinction meant nothing to the two people standing over me, but I held it anyway. "I'm sorry." Too small. Stuttering. "I didn't know when I fell asleep, I'm almost—" "Excuses." Cole's lip curled. "That's literally all you're good for." The belt came down again. I got my arm up and the strike wrapped around my forearm and my eyes flooded — not crying, I told myself, not over this — and I pressed my teeth together and held it. "Pick yourself up," he said, dropping to that low flat register that was somehow worse than shouting. "Get back to work before I beat your sorry ass to death." I got up. My back screamed, my arm swelled, my legs were stiff from cold stone — but I got up and reached for the mop. Gloria watched with her arms still folded. "She fell asleep on the job, Cole. We should report her to my mate, Alpha Dorian." The name hit me like a hand around my throat. The fear that moved through me at those two words was a different species entirely from what I felt about Cole's belt. Cole hurt me. Dorian dismantled me. There was a difference between pain and obliteration and my brother had always understood precisely where that line was and how far past it he could walk. And then there was the deepest cut of all — that Cole had been my fated mate. On the night I turned eighteen and the bond snapped into place, he rejected me in front of the entire pack without hesitation, humiliating me publicly. The rejection broke what little remained of my wolf, leaving her silent inside me ever since. "We should," Cole agreed, turning the belt over in his hands. "He'd love a reason tonight of all nights." "Please." The word came out before I could stop it. Small and humiliating. "Please don't. I'll work faster. I'll finish everything, I promise—" "Look at her begging." Gloria tilted her head, studying me the way you study something mildly entertaining. "Pathetic." She wasn't always like this. That was the thing I could never fully bury — the memory of a different Gloria, one who used to sit beside me on the pack house steps and talk for hours, who used to laugh so freely it made everyone around her laugh too. My best friend for 13 years. Then my parents died and she became this. "Cole. Gloria." The voice came from the corridor doorway. Elder Maddox stepped in, moving with the careful deliberateness of a man whose knees had started to object to stairs. He was sixty-something, silver-haired, with a face that had been kind for so long the lines of it had set that way. Cole's father. Gloria's father. The only person in this pack who still looked at me like I was a person. "That's enough," he said quietly. Not commanding — Maddox never commanded anymore, his authority had been quietly eroded over the years until he occupied a ceremonial kind of eldership that everyone respected in theory and ignored in practice. But his voice still carried something. "She has work to do and so do you. Today is not the day for this." Cole's jaw tightened. Something moved between him and Gloria — a glance, quick and dismissive — the particular communication of two people who have silently agreed that someone's opinion no longer counts. "She fell asleep on the job," Gloria said, her voice taking on that patient, slightly condescending tone she used exclusively with her father. "We were handling it." "You were indulging yourselves," Maddox said. "There's a difference." He looked at them both steadily. "Alpha Nicklaus arrives today. Dorian needs this pack running perfectly. That means everyone does their job." A pause. "Including her." Cole stared at his father for a moment. Then he looked at me with the expression he reserved for things he planned to return to later, and turned away. "Finish the floors," he said, without looking back. "All of them." They left. Maddox lingered. He looked at me — at my arm, at the way I was holding myself sideways to protect my back — and something moved through his expression that looked like pain. He crossed to where I stood and touched my shoulder lightly. "Are you alright, little one?" Little one. He had called me that since I was small. Since the days when he would sit with me in the pack house garden and tell me stories — the old legends, the history of our bloodline, tales of the eastern territories and the wolves who roamed there. I had loved those stories. I had loved him. He was the only one who had never blamed me for what happened. The only one who still, after seven years, looked at me with something other than contempt. "I'm fine," I said softly. "Thank you, Elder Maddox." He squeezed my shoulder once. "Don't give them reasons," he said quietly. "Keep your head down today. It's an important day for the pack." Then he left too. I stood alone in the corridor with my mop and my swollen arm and I exhaled the way you exhale when something worse has been narrowly avoided. That was mercy. I meant it without irony. --- I deserved it anyway. All of it. Five people were dead because of me. My father. My mother. My little sister Lyra. My friends Calla and Demi. Five people who would be alive — laughing, breathing, existing — if I had just listened. I had been thirteen and certain, the way thirteen year olds are certain — that the eastern border was forbidden for cautious wolves, frightened wolves, not for me. I had just gotten my wolf. I had felt the electricity of that first transformation singing in my bones and I had been so sure of myself. I had convinced Calla and Demi easily. Persuasive and certain, the way you are when you've never yet been badly wrong. And my younger sister Lyra had simply followed because she was nine and she always followed me. The rogues came fast and without warning. I tried to fight them off, to protect my friends and Lyra, but they were too many, too strong. I was afraid—so afraid. I don’t know how many of our parents had found us. I didn’t care. I was confident that we were safe now, but then I took a blow to the head and the world went black. When I woke, there was nothing but silence and the dead and the face of the man standing in the middle of it all. I pressed my palm against the mop handle. Counted the grain lines in the baseboard. One. Two. Three. Four. Keep moving. That was all there was. --- The morning omegas swept past in a cluster and I moved to the wall immediately, made myself small. They were too distracted to bother with me today. "—heard he arrived in Callahan territory once and the whole pack just surrendered, didn't even fight—" "He's supposed to be terrifying. But also—" giggling "—incredibly—" "Stop it, Pria—" They swept past without a glance. Alpha Nicklaus. I turned the name over as I wrung out the mop. For three weeks the pack house had been coiled around his arrival and I had noticed — quietly, from corners and corridors — how differently the name landed depending on who said it. The women spoke it like something from a fantasy. The men spoke it lower. Careful. Like the name had edges. And my brother — twelve days ago, outside his office, Dorian's voice through the wall in a way that made me go completely still. The man is a devil, Cole. A genuine devil. And we are inviting him into our house. I had never heard fear in Dorian's voice. Not once in all his rages and cruelties. Why invite the devil then? Something was wrong with the pack. I knew it through walls and fragments — resources shrinking, tempers shortening, conversations that stopped when certain people entered rooms. Whatever Dorian had broken had brought him to this. I didn't know the details. I knew enough. --- By evening I was done. In the basement I arranged what I had gathered throughout the day. The heel of a bread loaf. Cold vegetables. A bruised apple. I reached for the bread. The door opened. I stood immediately. Cole stood at the top of the stairs, his eyes moving from me to the food on the floor. "Guests have arrived. You're serving drinks." "Can I eat first." The words came out quiet and already retreating. "Please. I haven't eaten today—" The slap landed fast. My head snapped sideways, copper flooded my mouth. His foot swept through the food. Bread skidding. Apple rolling. Vegetables scattering across stone. I looked at where they had been. His hand closed in my hair and pulled — I moved with it — and he marched me up the stairs, releasing me at the top with a shove into the wall. "Not a word in there," he said quietly. "You carry the tray, you set it down, you disappear." His eyes held mine. "This deal means everything to this pack. If you embarrass us tonight, what I do to you will look like kindness compared to what your brother does. Are we clear?" "Yes, Beta Cole." He turned. I followed. --- The tray was heavy. Good glasses. Wine that cost more than anything I had eaten in the past month. I carried it with both hands, eyes down, following the voices to my brother's office. I stopped outside the closed door. You are furniture. You walk in, you set it down, you leave. I opened the door. The room came in pieces — Dorian behind his desk, Cole at his right, two pack wolves along the wall, strangers positioned around the space, the atmosphere pressurised and still— Then my eyes found the man by the window. The tray hit the floor. Glass. Wine. The crash swallowing the room. The dark red spreading across stone and none of it — none of it — reached me because I was looking at his face and his face had lived behind my eyelids for seven years without a single night's rest. Amber eyes. Black hair. That stillness — the absolute, unnerving stillness of a man who has never needed to move quickly because the world rearranges itself around him. I had woken up in the mud at thirteen years old. Head split open. Ears ringing. I had opened my eyes and this face had been the first thing the world offered me. Standing in the wreckage of everyone I had loved. My mother. My father. Lyra with her red ribbon in the mud. Calla. Demi. All of them gone. And him standing in the centre of it. The man of my nightmares. Here. Breathing. Real. Ten feet away from me.