The Alpha King's Cursed Breeder

RULES OF THE BARGAIN

Lyra POV

The bloodied cloth was still hidden under my mattress when the sun came up. I hadn't slept. I'd spent the whole night staring at where I'd hidden it, turning Ronan's words over until they lost their shape. *I very much want to be the one who finds out first.* Not a threat, not exactly. Worse than a threat, somehow, because a threat would have told me what he wanted.

At dawn, a servant came to fetch me, eyes flicking to my sleeve before she caught herself. "The king wants you in the west study."

The study smelled like old parchment and woodsmoke. Kael stood at a window, back to me, hands clasped behind him like a man used to being obeyed without turning around. Morning light hadn't reached this side of the keep yet, and the room felt colder for it, like the night hadn't fully released its grip on either of us.

"Sit," he said.

"I'll stand."

That got his attention. He turned, and whatever exhaustion had softened his face last night was gone, scraped clean.

"Fine." He crossed to the desk between us. "Then we'll do this fast."

"Do what, exactly?"

"The terms." He said it like a man reading out a contract, not a bargain he'd offered in the dark with his hand around mine. "You stay within these walls until the heir is confirmed. You don't leave the territory without an escort. You don't speak to anyone outside this pack about what you are, what happened last night, or what happened at the gate."

My fingers curled against my palm. The bloodied cloth was still hidden beneath my mattress upstairs, and I wondered, listening to him lay out rules about honesty, what he'd say if he knew I was already breaking the spirit of them before he'd finished speaking.

"That's a short list for something you're calling a bargain."

"There's more." He didn't blink. "You answer to me. Not my Beta, not my guards, not anyone else who thinks they've earned the right to question you. If something happens to you, I want to hear it from your mouth first."

"And if I do?"

"Then the protection ends." Flat. No cruelty in it, which somehow made it worse. "This isn't a courtship, Lyra. There's no love owed here. No trust, either, until one of us earns it, and I'm not in the habit of handing mine out for free."

"You think I want your trust?"

"I think you want to survive. Which means you'll take whatever terms keep you breathing, same as I will." He studied me across the desk, unreadable, the way he'd studied me across the fire the night before. "We understand each other."

"We understand nothing." My voice came out sharper than I meant it. "You dragged me through your gate like I'm livestock and now you're standing there acting like I should be grateful for the leash."

Something flickered in his jaw. "Careful."

"Or what? You'll reject me too?" The words left before I could stop them, and I hated how much they cost to say out loud, hated that some part of me had been waiting my whole life to say them to someone. Hated more that some smaller, quieter part of me actually wanted to know the answer.

He went very still.

"I'm not him," Kael said, low. "Whatever you're picturing when you look at me like that, I'm not him."

"You're worse. At least he never pretended I mattered."

For a second, something raw crossed his face, there and gone before I could name it. Then the wall came back up, brick by brick, faster than I'd seen anyone rebuild it.

"You're right," he said. "I never will pretend to. It would be a lie, and I don't lie to the people I make bargains with."

I'd been expecting anger. A lie would have been easier. The truth hurt far more. There was something almost unbearable about being told plainly that no one would pretend to love me here either. Not because I wasn't worth pretending for, but because pretending wasn't a language this man spoke.

"When?" I asked, because someone had to say it, and I refused to let him make me wait for it like a sentence handed down.

"Tonight." No hesitation. "The sooner this is done, the sooner you'll be safe behind these walls. I don't intend to drag it out for either of our comfort." He said it the way he said everything — plainly, without cruelty and without softness, as though comfort were a currency he'd stopped trading in a long time ago.

My stomach dropped, a cold, weightless plunge, but I made myself hold his gaze.

The word sat heavy in my chest. *Tonight.* Not some distant future I could pretend wouldn't come. A handful of hours. After tonight, nothing about my life would belong to me the way it had before. I thought of every version of myself I'd been up until this moment — the cursed daughter, the rejected mate, the fugitive — and wondered which one of them, if any, would still exist by morning.

"Fine." My voice didn't shake this time. "Tonight."

He nodded once, like we'd just closed a trade deal instead of the rest of my life, and turned back to the window, dismissing me the same way he'd greeted me — with his back turned, as though the sight of me had already served its purpose for the morning.

"One more thing." He didn't look at me. "Ronan will be handling your security detail personally, starting today."

Every muscle in my body went cold. I thought of the cloth again, of old dried blood that belonged to someone whose name I didn't know, of the way Ronan had said *I very much want to be the one who finds out first* like a promise instead of a threat.

"No."

That brought his head around fast. "Excuse me?"

"I don't want him near me." I kept my voice level, though my hands had curled into fists at my sides without my permission. "Not for security. Not for anything."

"He's my most trusted—"

"I don't care what he is to you." I kept my voice even, though my pulse hammered. "I want someone else."

Kael crossed the room in three strides, close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his gaze. "Give me a reason. A real one. Not a feeling."

I didn't have proof. I had a bloodied cloth hidden under a mattress and an instinct that had never once lied to me, and neither of those would survive being said out loud to a man who trusted Ronan with his own life.

"I don't have one," I admitted. "Not yet."

Something shifted behind his eyes, calculating now instead of angry. "Then you'll have him assigned until you do. And Lyra." His voice dropped, quiet enough that it landed harder than shouting would have. "If you're right about him, you'd better find that reason fast. Because if you're wrong, and you've just insulted the one man who's stood beside me for a decade, you'll have made an enemy of the only person in this territory who might actually help you survive what's coming."

He walked out before I could answer, leaving me alone with the fire and the terrible, sinking certainty that I'd just started a war I had no proof to win.

I stood there a long time after the door shut, listening to his footsteps fade down the corridor, and wondered how many more rooms in this keep I'd end up standing in alone. Somewhere above me, hidden beneath a mattress in a room that wasn't mine, a scrap of bloodied cloth waited for me to figure out what it actually meant — before Ronan decided I'd already figured out too much.