Title: Bound to the Cold Alpha

CHAPTER ONE "Sign it, Nora. Don't make this harder than it needs to be." My mother's voice was calm. That was the part that broke me — not the words, but how unbothered she sounded while handing me a document that changed my entire life. I looked at the paper on the table. The candles around it were still lit from what I had believed, two hours ago, was my birthday celebration. The cake was still on the counter. Half-eaten. Nobody had offered me a slice. "What is this?" I asked. "A contract." She smoothed her dress and sat down, crossing her legs like we were discussing grocery lists. "You'll be transferring to Silverstone Pack. Effective tomorrow morning." My hands went cold. "Transferring." "As a contract mate." She met my eyes for exactly one second, then looked away. "To Alpha Kade Blackthorn." The room tilted. I had heard the name Kade Blackthorn the way you hear thunder from far away — you know it is real, you know it is large, but you never actually expect it to land on your house. "You sold me," I said. "I secured your future." She gestured to the paper. "You have no prospects here, Nora. You know that. This family needs this arrangement, and honestly, so do you." I stared at her. At the woman who had carried me, named me, and apparently planned to hand me to a stranger before the night was over. "I'm not signing this," I said. Her expression didn't change. That was when I knew it didn't matter whether I signed or not. The door behind me opened. Two men I had never seen before stepped into the room. Big, quiet, and wearing the dark grey of Silverstone Pack. They had already come to collect me. I didn't sleep that night. I sat in the back of a vehicle with a small bag of my things on my lap and watched the roads turn from the familiar cracked streets of my home territory into something wider, colder, and more remote. Nobody spoke to me. The two Silverstone men in the front talked quietly to each other and ignored me completely, which I suppose was fair. I was cargo to them. I had been cargo to my mother too, and she at least pretended otherwise, sometimes. I pressed my forehead against the cold window glass and breathed. I thought about running. I thought about it very seriously for about twenty minutes, turning it over in my mind — where I would go, what I would say, how long before they found me. Then I thought about what I was actually running back to. A mother who planned a goodbye party and forgot to say goodbye. A home where I cleaned floors and was invisible. A pack that hadn't looked at me as a real person in years. Running back meant choosing that. So I sat still, and I watched the highlands open up outside the window, grey and enormous and nothing like anything I had ever known. Silverstone rose out of the morning mist like it had always been there and would always be. Stone walls. Dense trees along the edges of the territory. And up on a hill, looking over everything like a ruler who knew he didn't need to shout — The estate. It was the largest building I had ever seen. Not in a showy way. In a way that said this was built to last and nothing here is pretending. My stomach dropped. I had grown up being told I was not enough for anything. Now I was being walked through the gates of the most powerful pack in the region in yesterday's clothes with a bag that weighed less than my pride. Great. The inside of the estate was quieter than I expected. A woman met us at the entrance — small, dark-eyed, with quick hands and an expression that gave nothing away. She took my bag from me without asking, introduced herself as Sera, and told me she would show me to my room. I followed her down a long stone corridor. "He won't see you today," she said without looking back. "He has meetings." "The Alpha?" "Yes." A short pause. "Don't take it personally. He doesn't see anyone the first day." "Does he see anyone any day?" She glanced back at me then, and something small moved in her expression. Not quite a smile. More like recognition. "You'll want to be careful," she said quietly. "About what you say. And to who." She pushed open a door at the end of the hall. The room was simple. Bed, window, a wooden chair by a small fireplace. Nothing personal. Nothing warm. It looked like a room built for someone who was expected to stay but not to matter. I set my bag down on the chair and stood there in the silence, and for one moment — just one — I let myself feel it. All of it. The humiliation. The grief. The sheer, bone-deep exhaustion of being unwanted by the one person who was supposed to want you unconditionally. Then I breathed out. Get up, Nora. You are still here. That is something. I walked to the window. The pack village spread below the hill. People moved through it, going about their morning. Ordinary life, carrying on without knowing or caring that I had just been handed over like something owed. I watched them for a long time. I didn't know this place. I didn't know these people. I didn't know the man who now held a legal contract with my name on it. But I was still standing. That was where I was starting from. The first time I saw him, I wasn't supposed to. Sera had shown me the parts of the estate I was permitted to walk freely. The east corridor was not one of them. I got lost. Genuinely, honestly lost, in a building that seemed to have twice as many hallways as made any architectural sense. I turned a corner looking for the kitchen and stepped into a space that felt entirely different from the rest — quieter, heavier, like the air itself had been told to behave. He was standing with his back to me at a large table covered in maps and papers. He was taller than I expected. Broader. He wore a dark shirt with the sleeves pushed to the elbows, and even from behind, standing completely still, he took up space in a way that made the room feel smaller. He turned before I could step back. Grey eyes. Flat and sharp at the same time. A jaw built for silence. And a scar — running from the left side of his jaw down past his collar — that made something move in my chest before I could stop it. He looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said anything for three full seconds. Then he said, "You're in the wrong wing." His voice was low. No anger in it. No warmth either. Just a fact being stated. "I'm lost," I said. Because honesty seemed smarter than an excuse. He looked at me for another moment. Not the way men usually look at women — not sizing me up or dismissing me. More like he was filing information. Reading a situation. "Sera will find you a map," he said. Then he turned back to his table. That was it. That was the entire conversation. I stood there for one more second — I don't know why — and then I turned and walked back the way I came, my heart beating slightly faster than usual and my jaw tight. He didn't even ask my name, I thought. I was in a contract with this man. A legal, binding arrangement. And he hadn't asked my name. I turned the correct corner and found the kitchen. Sera was already there, making tea. "You went east," she said without looking up. "I got lost." "You saw him." It wasn't a question. "Briefly," I said. She set a cup down in front of me. "And?" I wrapped my hands around the warmth of it and looked out the kitchen window at the grey Silverstone sky. "He needs to work on his hospitality," I said. Sera's mouth twitched. Just slightly. "You're going to be interesting," she said. Then she went back to her tea. I drank mine and thought about grey eyes and the map I now apparently needed and the one hundred and four days stretching ahead of me in this cold, stone place. Survive first, I told myself. Everything else comes after. Three corridors away, I did not know that a man who had not looked twice at anyone in three years had just looked up from his maps and stared at the empty doorway for a full thirty seconds after I left.