Traded to the Heartless Alpha King

"Say it again." My father looked up from his desk. "I want to hear you say it one more time," I said. He set his pen down. He folded his hands the way he always did when he wanted to look like he was being patient. "You are going with the convoy tonight. With the other omegas." I stood there. The fire crackled. Outside, the Stone Ridge wind was doing what it always did, cutting through the walls and caring about nothing. "To the King's Keep," I said. "Yes." "As tribute." "As is customary." I looked at my stepmother Mira. She was by the window with her arms crossed, looking out at the yard below. She didn't turn around. She never turned around for me. Then I looked at Dane. He was leaning in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and an expression I couldn't read. I'd spent years trying to read him. He was my half-brother and I still couldn't tell when he was on my side or just standing near it. "The convoy leaves at nightfall," my father said, and picked up his pen. He was done. In his mind we were finished. "Is it the debt?" My voice came out quieter than I wanted it to. I cleared my throat. "Is this about the debt you owe him?" The pen stopped. Mira turned from the window. Dane straightened in the doorway. My father looked up. Something moved behind his eyes and then locked back behind everything else. "You don't know what you're talking about," he said. "Then explain it." He stood. He was not a small man. Twenty years of Alpha authority sat on him like armor. He crossed the room and stopped in front of me and I kept my eyes on his because I was done with the floor. Done with making myself smaller so he could feel larger. "You have no wolf," he said. "You have no rank beyond what I gave you. You have contributed nothing and you have embarrassed this family at every turn. The King requires tribute. You will go." "And if I refuse?" He smiled. "You won't." I thought about the storage room they called my bedroom. The cold meals. The pack members who looked through me like I was air. I thought about twelve years of packing that down so deep it stopped feeling like anything. "I want you to remember this conversation," I said. "Sera." "Every word of it." I held his gaze for three full seconds. "Because I will." I walked out. Dane followed. I heard him coming up the corridor behind me and I didn't stop. "Sera." I pushed into my room and turned to face him in the doorway. The storage room. It smelled like cedar and old dust and something beneath that, something that had always been there, the smell of being kept somewhere small on purpose. "Don't," I said. "I need you to listen to me." "You knew." I pulled the cloth bag from under my cot and started moving. Three changes of clothes. The pouch of dried herbs from Rena at the market, the ones that helped with my joints in cold months. My book with the cracked spine. "You knew before I did. So don't stand in my doorway like you're on my side now." He stepped into the room and lowered his voice. "He won't touch you. I don't mean that the way it sounds, I mean the rumors about the curse are real but people have the wrong idea about what it actually does." I stopped. "What does it actually do?" He paused too long. I looked at him and waited for him to fill the silence and watched him decide against it. "You knew," I said again, quieter this time. He didn't deny it. That was the thing about Dane. He wouldn't lie to you but he'd go very still and let you figure it out yourself, which amounted to the same thing. I turned back to the bag. "Tell them I'm ready," I said. "Tell them I'll be at the gate at nightfall." He stood there. I kept packing. After a moment I heard him leave. I sat on the edge of the cot with my bag in my lap and looked at the cracked plaster wall I'd been staring at for most of my life. I have always known that I was hated. I have always known I was unwanted. But this. This was my father deciding, out loud, with his pen in his hand, that I was the least valuable thing he had and could therefore be spent. I pressed my thumbnail into my palm until I felt the sting of it. Breathed. I was not going to die in that Keep. I didn't have a plan. I had no wolf, no rank, nothing behind me. But I was still alive after twenty-two years of people deciding I wasn't worth much. That had to count for something. It had to.