Ryan
“You’re sure there’s no way out of this?” Jacob asks Andrew two hours later. We’re sitting around a campfire roughly a half mile outside of the village.
Andrew nods, glancing at me before hugging his knees. “These tribes are steeped in tradition, guys. I don’t know what else to say. If Alpha Ryan refused the girl, he would have been offered another, and another, and if he’d refused to marry outright, she would have been given as a… concubine, perhaps.”
I close my eyes for a moment and sigh around the rim of my water jug. The sweet, heavy wine and mead I’d been served over and over again, my cup never empty, has my head pounding already.
But the second I close my eyes, I see her. Aviva. What a name. It dances over my tongue like a song, and it seems fitting for her.
She’s a ver
