BREEDER FOR THE MAD ALPHA

CHAPTER 002

SERA

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"Me," I said again, because surely I had misheard him. Surely.

He nodded like it was nothing.

"How could you do this?” My voice was barely above a whisper. “How…how could you actually sell me off to that monster? How could you sell me to…”

He met my eyes without flinching. “There’s no need for your million questions, Sera, because they won’t solve anything. The deal is already made."

“Actually,” my mother cut in. , “when you think about it properly, it makes a lot of sense. You would have a roof over your head. Food. You would be taken care of, Sera. That is more than you have here.”

I stared at her.

“It is honestly quite smart,” she added with a shrug. “Better than anything you would have managed on your own.”

Something cracked open in me then. Something that had been holding its shape for eleven years through every slap and every insult and every morning she had walked past me like I was part of the furniture — it cracked open and I felt it go.

“Smart.” The word came out of me slowly. “You think this is smart.”

“Sera—”

“You think selling your own daughter to a man that grown adults are afraid to say the name out loud—” My voice was rising and I did not pull it back. I was done pulling things back. “Do you understand what you just said to me? Do you hear yourself?” I took a step toward her and she actually leaned back in her chair. “I have cooked in this house. I have cleaned this house. I have ironed Callista’s clothes and polished his shoes and scrubbed those floors on my hands and knees and woken up before dawn every single day for eleven years, and I have never — not once — asked you for anything. I just kept my head down and endured you treating me like a slave and ... .and I waited because I thought, I actually believed, that one day you would look at me and remember that I came from you. That I am yours.” My throat burned. “But you sat there and you listened to him sell me off and your only thought was that it was smart.”

Tears were running down my face and I had not felt them start.

“I am not going,” I said. “I am not going anywhere. I am not going to be used to pay off debts that have nothing to do with me and I am not going to—”

The front door burst open.

Four men came through it so fast I barely had time to understand what was happening. They were large and dressed in dark clothing and they moved through the house like they had already mapped every corner of it in their minds and were simply walking through what they knew.

I ran.

I made it to the hallway before one of them caught my arm and I twisted hard, scratching at his hand, driving my heel back into his shin.

He grunted and his grip loosened just enough and I wrenched free and ran for the back door.

My fingers actually touched the handle before something sharp pierced the side of my neck.

I spun around.

One of them was holding a syringe.

I opened my mouth to scream and then the floor tilted sideways and the ceiling rushed toward it and everything went very, very black.

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I woke up moving.

Not moving myself — being moved.

The slow rock and sway of a vehicle in motion, the vibration of it humming through whatever surface my cheek was pressed against.

I tried to open my eyes and managed a thin sliver of blurred light before they fell shut again.

I tried to lift my arm and it lay there, completely useless, like it belonged to someone else.

They had drugged me.

My own family had stood there and watched men drag me out and drug me and put me in a car and not one of them had said a word.

I tried to scream and what came out was barely a sound.

The car stopped.

I felt myself being lifted and then came the cold night air against my face and the sound of gravel beneath the feet of the people carrying me.

I fought to keep my eyes open and caught pieces of things — a building made of dark stone, lit from beneath so it seemed to rise out of the ground. Trees everywhere, enormous and black against the sky. A door opening, light and warmth spilling out of it.

Voices reached me.

A woman said, “Oh. She is actually here.”

A man answered, “Good. Let us see if the mad bastard manages to shoot some heirs into the whore.”

Then a hand gripped my chin and tilted my face upward and I forced my eyes open wide enough to see an elderly woman standing over me, studying me with a cool expression.

“Let me be very clear with you,” she said. “A significant amount of money was exchanged for you. That means you will do what you were brought here to do without any trouble.” Her fingers released my chin. “Do not waste your time imagining that you are anything other than what you are. You are here to serve the throne. You are a breeder, nothing else, and nothing else is what you will ever be in this house. Nothing but a vessel. Do you understand.”

I said nothing. My mouth would not cooperate even if I had wanted it to.

They carried me into a room and laid me on a bed and I stared up at a ceiling I had never seen before and told myself to stay awake, to pay attention, to think.

Sleep swallowed me whole before I could do any of it.

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Morning light was filling the room when I opened my eyes.

I sat up slowly. My body felt like it had been wrung out and left to dry but it moved when I asked it to, which felt like a victory. I took in the room around me — stone walls, thick curtains, a fireplace with nothing but cold ash left in it, furniture that was heavy and dark and old.

I swung my feet to the floor and stood up.

And stopped breathing.

There was a man standing at the foot of the bed.

He was just standing there, still and quiet, watching me with an expression I could not immediately read.

He smiled slowly and took a step closer.

“Hello…I’m Alpha Kael.”

Alpha Kael.

The mad Alpha.

For one full second my brain went completely blank before I screamed on top of my voice and ran straight to the window.