Owned by the Exiled Alpha.

Against my Will.

MANDY'S POV

I had imagined my wedding day approximately one thousand times.

I had imagined a dress that I chose for myself. Flowers, I worked with flowers, I knew exactly which ones I would have wanted.

I had imagined a man at the end of that aisle who looked at me like I was the answer to something he'd been asking for years.

What I got instead was a grey Tuesday morning, a veil I couldn't see properly through, and twelve people in a wood-paneled room who were there to witness a transaction.

The custom was that the bride did not lift her veil until the ceremony was complete. Old pack tradition, something about the joining being sealed before the faces were fully known to each other, some ancient idea about commitment preceding choice. I had always thought it was romantic when I read about it as a girl.

Standing here now I understood it differently.

It meant I didn't have to look at him.

I kept my eyes downcast behind the thin white fabric and I thought about the woods.

I don't know why my mind went there. Maybe because it was the last time I had felt like myself, not an omega, not a debt, not an arrangement but just a woman in the dark making a choice that was entirely her own.

“You're going to be fine. I need you to know that.”

I wondered where he was right now. If he had even thought about me at all.

Probably not. Probably I was already a forgotten thing, a strange, sad girl in a red dress who had cried in the dark and then disappeared.

The elder's voice washed over me in waves I wasn't fully absorbing. Words about pack bonds and family honor and the sacred nature of the joining. Beside me I was aware of him, my husband.

I did not look at him.

My life was over and what was beginning was this; A Cleansilver house. A Cleansilver name pressed over mine like a hand over a mouth.

"The joining is complete," the elder announced.

Twelve people in a wood paneled room made the appropriate sounds.

My mom made a sound too but it wasn't quite the same as the others.

I didn't lift my veil to see his face, nobody asked me to.

They put me in a car that wasn't his.

That was the first thing I noticed, his absence from the vehicle that was apparently meant to take me to my new life.

We drove for twenty minutes.

The house, when it appeared, was not what I expected.

I don't know what I expected exactly. Something cold, I suppose. But what I got instead was a house that was simply large and quietly beautiful, set back from the road behind iron gates and old trees.

Thomas opened my door and carried my single bag to the entrance without being asked.

Before he could knock, the door opened from the inside.

"Oh, you're here, you're here!"

The woman in the doorway was small and round and somewhere comfortably past sixty, with silver hair pinned up in a bun that was losing the battle against several escaping strands and an apron that suggested she had come directly from the kitchen and hadn't thought twice about it. Her face broke into a wide smile when she saw me.

"Come in, come in, dear, don't stand there in the cold." She was already reaching for my hands. "I'm Issy. I keep this house and I've been keeping it for longer than you've been alive so you can come to me for anything you need, anything at all, do you hear me?"

I blinked at her.

"I… yes. Thank you. I'm Mandy."

"I know who you are." She said it warmly, patting my hands before releasing them. "Come, let me show you around. You must be exhausted, poor thing. Have you eaten? I made soup. You look like someone who needs soup."

I followed her through the entrance hall in a mild daze.

The house was warm inside. High ceilings and dark wood floors and good furniture. Books on actual shelves in actual disarray. A fireplace in the sitting room with wood already burning low.

I walked slowly, taking it in.

And then I noticed.

No photographs.

I moved through the sitting room and the hallway beyond it and the dining room where Issy was already talking about soup and meal times and which rooms were which and there was not a single photograph anywhere. Not on the walls, not on the mantle above the fireplace, not on the side tables arranged neatly beside the sofas. In a house this size, belonging to a man of this family… nothing. No image of him anywhere. No face.

I had married a ghost.

"Issy," I said carefully, interrupting her mid-sentence about the linen cupboard.

She looked at me with bright, attentive eyes.

"What kind of man is he?" I asked. "My…my husband."

Something moved briefly across her expression.

"He's a good man," she said simply. And smiled and returned immediately to the subject of the linen cupboard.

I hate him.

I hated him. I hated him and I hated his name and I hated his family's silver insignia above the fireplace and I hated the soup that Issy put in front of me that was, infuriatingly, the best thing I had tasted in weeks.

I hoped he drove off a bridge on the way home.

I hoped his car got a flat tire somewhere unpleasant.

I hoped he stayed away forever and I could live in this warm house with Issy and her soup and never have to meet the man whose name was now legally attached to mine.

Issy showed me to the bedroom at half past seven.

Our bedroom. I didn't say that out loud. I walked in and looked at the large bed with its dark linen and its four posts and I thought about what was expected to happen in it and I felt my skin crawl from the inside out.

I changed out of my wedding dress alone, which I was grateful for. I folded it and put it at the bottom of the wardrobe because I couldn't look at it. I put on something comfortable and sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the house settle around me.

I closed my eyes.

I thought about the woods one more time, the stranger.

I thought…

I wish I had asked his name.

And then I was almost asleep, tipping toward the soft dark edge of it, my breathing slow and the house silent around me and the fire burned down to embers somewhere below…

Then around midnight, maybe later, I heard it.

The soft click of the front door opening downstairs.

Heavy footsteps on the stairs.

My heart slammed against my ribs.

He was home.

The bedroom door creaked open.

I squeezed my eyes shut, pretending to sleep, breath shallow.

Then that voice, deep, familiar, edged with dark amusement rolled through the darkness like thunder I’d already felt between my thighs.

“Still awake, little omega?”

My eyes flew open.

Standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the hallway light, was the man from the woods.

The same broad shoulders. The same hungry eyes. The same scent that still clung to my skin no matter how hard I’d scrubbed.

My husband.

Damien Cleansilver.

And he was smiling.