Worthless Mate Chosen

Chapter 6

Bound and Unbroken

Prince Lucian's Point of View

He sat with one leg resting over the other and watched Oliver Hayes work the room.

It was almost entertaining. The new Alpha moved from guest to guest with that particular energy of someone who needed something from everyone and was trying very hard not to let it show. His smiles came quickly and landed slightly too wide. His laughs arrived a beat too fast after other people's jokes.

Lucian had seen this kind before. Every pack had at least one.

He turned his attention briefly to the rest of the hall. The decorations were respectable. The food was adequate. The wolves gathered here were doing what wolves always did at these kinds of events, positioning themselves, measuring each other, deciding quietly who was worth knowing and who was not.

He felt the first pressure begin behind his left eye.

It was faint, just a warning knock at the door. But he recognized it immediately and his jaw tightened in response.

"Already?" Rowan's voice moved through him with something close to concern. "It is not even evening yet."

"It came early tonight."

"We should leave. Right now, before it builds."

"Not yet. If I walk out now, every wolf in this room will notice. That creates conversations I do not want to be the subject of."

He pressed two fingers lightly against his temple and breathed through his nose in a slow, measured way. The pressure eased back slightly. Not gone, but manageable. For now.

Every full moon without exception, the attacks came. They started as headaches, the kind that felt like something was trying to split his skull open from the inside, and they built from there into something much harder to contain. During those hours, the rational, controlled part of him grew thinner and thinner until the thing underneath it pushed against the surface with everything it had.

He had learned over many years how to handle it. He removed himself. He locked the door. He waited it out alone where no one could be affected by what he became during those hours.

He had agreed to attend today's ceremony in place of his father because the timing had seemed safe. He had not expected the early onset.

He endured the rest of the banquet through sheer discipline. By the time the formal portion of the evening was drawing to its close, the pressure had moved from a knock to something that felt like thousands of small, hard strikes landing repeatedly against the inside of his head. The thing beneath the surface was awake now and restless and pushing steadily outward.

He needed to be alone. He needed a room, a locked door, and silence.

Oliver appeared at his side again.

Lucian looked at him sideways.

"Prince Lucian, please allow me to walk you to your room personally. I want to make sure everything meets your expectations."

Lucian exhaled once through his nose.

"That will not be necessary. I prefer to move on my own."

Oliver's mouth pressed into a tight shape and his face colored slightly at the edges. He nodded in a fast, eager way that communicated far more than he probably intended it to.

"Of course. Right away, Prince Lucian. Whatever you prefer."

"You may go."

Oliver turned and left at a pace that was just short of an actual run. Lucian watched him go with a flat expression.

He turned and walked toward the corridor that led to the guest rooms. His steps were quick and even. The pain was climbing fast now. Every sound in the hallway felt sharper than it should. The light from the wall fixtures felt too direct, too insistent.

He had to get behind a closed door before this got any further.

Freya's Point of View

The cold was the first thing she felt when she came back to herself.

It moved across her skin in a way that made no sense for a moment because she could not immediately understand why the usual barrier of clothing was not there. She blinked, and the ceiling above her came into focus slowly. She tried to sit up.

She could not move.

Her wrists were pulled apart and secured to opposite sides of the bed frame with rope that had been tied with someone who knew exactly what they were doing. Her ankles were the same. Something had been pressed into her mouth and held there, muffling everything she tried to produce as sound into something soft and shapeless.

She was in a room she had never been in before. The furniture was heavy and expensive looking. The space was large and arranged with a kind of careful intention that made it clear this was not an ordinary room. There was no window she could see from where she lay. The air in the room was still and cold.

She pulled against the ropes instinctively. They held completely and the friction bit into the skin of her wrists immediately.

She stopped pulling and made herself breathe.

Think. Look. Understand what you are in before you decide what to do about it.

She turned her head as far as she could in each direction, cataloging what she could see. There was a door on the far wall. Light came through the small gap at the bottom of it. She could hear voices on the other side, low and carrying the particular tone of men who believed they were not being heard clearly enough to matter.

"Do you think the prince will be pleased with her?"

"He will find her satisfactory enough. She has the kind of face that tends to hold attention."

"It is a shame for her that it is Lucian's attention and not someone else's. I would not want to be in that room tonight."

She went completely still.

The pieces came together without any grace or gentleness. Oliver. This was Oliver's doing. He had rejected her, watched her walk away, and then arranged this as his answer to her refusal to fall apart in front of him.

She pulled against the ropes again. The rope did not give even slightly. The skin at her wrists burned from the effort.

"That sound she is making in there. Should we check on her?"

"Leave her. The more worn out she is before he arrives, the less trouble she will be."

She pressed her eyes shut and thought about her mother. She thought about the thing she had promised herself every single morning she had woken up in this pack. She was not going to die in this room. She had not survived everything she had survived up to this moment to end it here, tied to an expensive bed frame in a room she had never been in, because a boy who had never earned anything in his life was angry that she refused to cry for him.

She was not going to give any of them that.

She worked at the rope around her right wrist carefully, pressing her thumb against the knot from the inside and trying to find any give in it at all. There was a small amount. Not enough, but something. She worked at it steadily, ignoring the burning, keeping her breathing slow.

Then a voice came from outside the door that was different from the other two.

It was lower. It did not raise itself to fill the space the way the others had. It simply arrived and everything around it seemed to make room.

"You are both dismissed. I do not require anyone stationed outside this door."

"Yes, Prince Lucian."

Quick footsteps moved away from the door and disappeared down the corridor.

Silence settled on the other side of the door for exactly three seconds.

Then the handle moved.

Freya pulled one more time at the rope around her wrist with everything she had. The knot shifted a fraction and then held.

The door opened.

She turned her head toward it and looked directly at the man who stepped through.

He was tall in the way that fills a doorway without crowding it. The silver of his formal jacket caught the dim light in the room and threw it back in soft pieces. His face was arranged into an expression that carried no particular feeling on its surface, the kind of stillness that comes not from being calm but from having learned to keep things from showing.

He stepped fully inside and closed the door behind him.

His eyes moved across the room and found her immediately.

For a long moment, neither of them made a sound.

She held his gaze and did not look away from it. She had nothing left to perform for anyone tonight, no composure to carefully arrange, no careful expression to construct and maintain. She was angry and she was cold and she was completely unable to do anything about either of those things right now, and she looked at him with all of that sitting plainly on her face.

He looked back at her.

Something shifted very slightly in his expression. Not by much. Just enough that she noticed it before it was gone again.

She had no idea what kind of man was standing in this room with her.

She had heard the stories the same as everyone else, passed around in whispered pieces by wolves who crossed themselves after saying his name. She had chosen to come to this ceremony hoping to appeal to someone powerful enough to help her prove her mother's innocence, and instead she had ended up here, in this room, tied to this bed, at the mercy of the one person in this entire territory that every other person seemed to be afraid of.

The thing that surprised her most in this moment, now that he was actually standing in front of her, was that his eyes were not what she had expected them to be.

They were looking at her the way someone looks at something they were not prepared to find.

He had not moved from his position near the door. He had not spoken. He had not done anything at all except stand there and look at her with that unreadable expression and those unexpected eyes.

And the one question pressing itself against the inside of her chest, louder than the pain in her wrists and louder than her own heartbeat, was this.

What was a man like Prince Lucian going to do next, and was there anything left in her power to stop it?