Contracted To The Alpha King

MONSTER

Sera's POV

My hand would not stop shaking.

I told myself it was anger. It was easier to call it anger — cleaner, more useful — than to call it what it also was, which was fear so deep it had settled into my bones and become structural.

The knife was in my hand and Nicklaus was in front of me and his shirt was open because he had unbuttoned it himself, calmly, without being asked, and moved it aside to give me a clearer target. Like he was helping. Like this was a courtesy.

"Go ahead," he said. "Use all your strength."

I stared at him.

Is this a game? The thought arrived sharp and unbidden. Is this some sick, elaborate game — give the broken girl a knife and watch her fall apart?

I shook the thought away. I thought about Lyra instead. Lyra at nine years old with her red ribbon and her pigtails and the way she used to reach for my hand when she was scared because I was her older sister and I was the person who made things safe.

I thought about my mother's face in the trees.

My father at the tree line, still half-shifted, his body positioned the way it was because chose to protect his children.

This man took them. I pressed the thought against the inside of my chest like a coal. He took all of them.

I moved the knife forward.

The tip pressed against his chest — against bare skin — and I watched a thin line of red appear where the point made contact and Nicklaus did not flinch, did not move, did not even change his breathing. Just looked at me with those amber eyes that gave nothing away and waited.

The blood was real. The knife was real. He was right there and I hated him more than I had ever hated anything and I still could not go deeper.

I needed more. I needed to understand. I needed—

"Why." My voice cracked on the word. "Why did you do it. My parents. My friends." My eyes were burning. "My sister was nine years old. She was nine. Why did you—"

"Because I'm a monster," he said.

Simple. Flat. No defense, no elaboration, no flinching from the word.

"Do what you have to do," he added.

I looked at him. At the knife. At the thin line of blood on his chest.

And I couldn't.

I sat there with every reason in the world and I couldn't do it and I hated myself for it with a completeness that left no room for anything else.

I dropped the knife.

It hit the floor between us and I looked at him straight in the eyes and said, "I won't be a monster like you."

Nicklaus looked at the knife on the floor. Then at me. His expression moved through something I couldn't name and then settled back into its usual composure, like water finding its level.

He stood. Straightened his shirt without buttoning it.

Looking down at me. "That was your only chance," he said. Quiet. Final. "You won't get another."

He left...

I cried until I fell asleep.

Not the quiet, careful crying I had learned in my brother's house — the kind you do without sound, without visible evidence, the kind that leaves nothing behind for anyone to use against you. This was the other kind. The kind that comes when you have been holding something for seven years and it finds a crack and comes through all at once.

I cried because they were dead and he was alive and I had been right there with a knife in my hand and I had failed them. I cried because I was a coward. I cried because the only purpose I had carried for seven years had been in my hand and I had put it on the floor.

I fell asleep somewhere in the middle of it and didn't dream.

---

Three days passed.

I waited for the punishment. I knew punishment — had a detailed, comprehensive knowledge of its varieties and sequences and the specific moods that preceded each kind. I waited for the door to open the wrong way, for the quality of silence that meant something was coming.

Nothing came.

Food arrived. More than I could eat, which was saying something given how recently I had relearned what eating properly felt like. Isla came once to check the infection in my hand and the ointment progress on my back, cheerful and efficient and entirely unaware — or performing entirely unaware — of what had happened three nights ago. Nobody mentioned the knife. Nobody mentioned anything.

Nicklaus hadn't told anyone.

I sat with that for a long time.

He also hadn't come to the room. Three days and not once — no ointment reminder, no quiet questions about my wolf, no presence at the window adjusting curtains while I tried to undress with some remaining shred of dignity. The absence should have been a relief.

It wasn't.

Something kept telling me he was planning something. That the punishment was coming in a shape I hadn't catalogued yet, that the silence was the most dangerous part, that a man like Nicklaus did not simply absorb a knife to the chest and produce nothing in response.

I was sitting with this on the fourth morning when the knock came.

Not Isla's knock. Not Kate's. Heavier. Official.

I opened the door to two of Nicklaus's guards.

"Alpha Nicklaus requests your presence," the taller one said.

My stomach dropped. "For what?"

"We weren't informed. You're expected immediately."

I looked at them. At their faces, which were professionally blank and offered nothing. I thought about asking again and decided it would produce the same result.

"Alright," I said, and my voice only shook slightly.

I had not left my room in three days.

I realised this as the guards walked me through corridors I hadn't seen yet, through parts of the territory I had no map for. Three days of eating and sleeping and staring at the ceiling and conducting elaborate internal arguments about what kind of coward drops a knife, and I had not once walked out of that room into the larger world beyond it.

A pig, I thought, with the particular dark humour that had become one of my few survival tools. Fed and rested and fattened for whatever comes next.

The guards stopped outside a door. One of them knocked. No answer came, but he pushed it open anyway and gestured for me to enter.

"Wait inside," he said. "He won't be long."

The door closed behind me.

I stood in Nicklaus's quarters and tried to gather information the way I always gathered information — exits, layout, what the space said about the person who occupied it. It was larger than my room. Less decorated than I expected. A desk with papers arranged in the specific order of someone who actually used them. A window overlooking the territory. A—

The bathroom door opened.

Nicklaus stepped out with a towel around his waist and nothing else, and I turned my face away so fast I nearly lost my balance.

Heat climbed up my neck. My heart was doing something I refused to analyse.

I had not been prepared for that. I had been prepared for many versions of whatever this meeting was going to be — punishment, intimidation, some new category of control I hadn't encountered yet — and I had not been prepared for that.

My mind, unhelpfully, supplied Rhea's voice. Most don't make it past the cat's paw.

The other women. The ones he had used and discarded. The ones he had—

"Why am I here?" I asked the wall. My voice was not steady. I had stopped pretending it was going to be.

I heard him move across the room. Unhurried, as always.

"You're here," Nicklaus said, "to take care of my needs."