Sold to the beast Alpha’s dying son

The offer came on a Tuesday. Nina Carlos remembered that detail clearly, because Tuesdays were the days she wore her mother's old cardigan to work, the faded yellow one with the loose button at the collar, and she had been standing behind the counter of Mercer's Diner wearing it when the man in the black suit walked in. He did not sit down. He simply looked at her and said, "Are you Nina Carlos ? The girl with the sick brother?" She set down the coffee pot slowly. "Who's asking?" "Someone who can save him." The diner was nearly empty. Old Mr. Calloway was asleep in the corner booth as usual, his newspaper sliding off the table. The cook, Dayo, was humming something in the back kitchen. No one was paying attention. "My brother has a rare blood condition," Nina said carefully. "It would take close to four hundred thousand dollars to cover the surgeries and the treatment program. So unless you're handing me a check right now, I suggest you order something or leave." The man reached into his jacket and placed an envelope on the counter. Nina did not touch it. "What is that?" "An invitation," he said. "From Alpha Victor Draven." The name landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water. Even Dayo went quiet in the kitchen. Nina knew the name. Everyone in Cresthaven knew the name. Victor Draven was the kind of man people whispered about at church and then prayed they never encountered in real life. Billionaire. Alpha of the most powerful wolf pack on the eastern seaboard. A man who had buried three wives and never explained how. "I don't have business with Victor Draven," Nina said. "He has business with you." The man nudged the envelope closer. "Open it." She opened it. Inside was a single card, cream-colored and thick, with raised lettering that smelled faintly of cedar and something else, something dark and old that she could not name. It read: Your brother's life, in exchange for yours. Come to Draven Manor by Friday. Come alone. Nina read it twice. Then she looked up. "This is a joke." "Mr. Draven does not joke." "He wants me to do what, exactly?" "Marry his son." A laugh came out of her before she could stop it, short and incredulous. "His son. The one in the coma." "Yes." "The one they say killed his last three brides." The man's expression did not change. "Those are rumors." "Rumors," Nina repeated. "Right. So the answer is no. Absolutely not. Tell Victor Draven to find another girl." The man picked up the envelope and slid it back toward her. "Before you give your final answer, Miss Carlos , I was asked to show you something." He placed his phone on the counter. On the screen was a live feed. A hospital room. And in the bed, connected to more machines than Nina could count, was her brother Danny. Fourteen years old, small for his age, with her same dark curly hair fanned across a white pillow. She pressed her knuckles hard against her mouth. "He has perhaps six weeks," the man said quietly. "Without the treatment." "You had no right to go near him." "We didn't touch him. We only looked. But we can also heal him, Miss Carlos . Completely. The pack has doctors, resources, things your human hospitals don't have access to." He paused. "All Mr. Draven asks is that you come." Nina stared at her brother's face on that screen for a long time. When she finally spoke, her voice was very steady. "If I do this, and Danny doesn't get better, I walk away. Those are my terms." "Mr. Draven anticipated you would say something like that. He agrees." "And the son... he doesn't know anything. He's unconscious." "Correct." "So it's a ceremony. A legal arrangement. Nothing more." "That is the understanding, yes." Nina folded the card and tucked it into the pocket of her mother's cardigan, right next to the loose button. "Tell Mr. Draven I'll be there Friday." Draven Manor sat at the end of a private road that wound through three miles of old forest, and when Nina's taxi crested the final hill and she saw it for the first time, her stomach dropped straight to the floor. It was not a house. It was something older than a house. Stone and iron and dark glass, towers at either end, ivy grown so thick on the east wall it looked like the building was being slowly swallowed. Every window was lit from within, amber and orange, and the light did not look warm. It looked hungry. "You sure about this, miss?" the driver asked. "No," Nina said honestly. "Keep the meter running." She got out anyway. A woman was waiting at the front door. Tall, silver-haired, with eyes the color of ice over deep water. She looked Nina up and down with an expression that was not unkind but was absolutely clinical, the way a jeweler examines a stone to determine its value. "You're smaller than I expected," the woman said. "You're ruder than I expected," Nina said. "And I expected pretty rude." Something shifted in the woman's face. Not quite a smile, but the shadow of one. "I'm Marta. I run the household. Come inside before the wolves on the eastern perimeter catch your scent and decide you're interesting." "Are they going to hurt me?" "Not tonight. Tonight you're a guest." Marta turned and walked inside. "After the ceremony, you'll be something else." Nina followed her through a doorway tall enough to drive a truck through, into a hallway that smelled of stone and cold air and, underneath both, something warm and animal that made the hair on the back of her neck rise. "Where is Mr. Draven?" she asked. "Waiting." "And his son?" Marta paused at the end of the hallway without turning around. "Eli is in the east wing." Eli. It was the first time anyone had given her the name. She had been thinking of him simply as the comatose son, which was a terrible way to think of a person, even a person she was being sold to. "Has he always been... like this?" Nina asked. Marta turned then, and the look on her face was strange. Complicated. The kind of look people wore when they had spent a very long time deciding what to say about something. "Eli Draven," she said slowly, "has been many things. What he is now is the least of them." Before Nina could ask what that meant, a door to her left opened, and Victor Draven stepped out. He was nothing like she had imagined, which is to say, he was exactly what she had feared. Tall. Broad. Silver at the temples, but the kind of silver that made a man look more dangerous, not less. He wore no tie and his sleeves were rolled up, and there was a scar along his jaw that looked like it had been made by something with claws. His eyes found her immediately, and she had the distinct, disorienting sensation that he had been waiting for her specifically. Not just any girl. Her. "Nina Carlos ," he said. "Mr. Draven." He studied her the same way Marta had, but with something additional beneath the assessment. Something she could not name. Relief, almost. Or recognition. "You look like someone I used to know," he said. "I get that a lot," Nina said, which was a complete lie. No one had ever said that to her before. He almost smiled. "Come. There are papers to sign, and the ceremony is at midnight." "Midnight," she repeated. “Of course it is” She followed him down the hallway, her cardigan's loose button swinging softly against her chest, and tried very hard not to think about the fact that somewhere in the east wing of this enormous, breathing house, a man named Eli was lying in a bed, unconscious, about to become her husband. She tried not to think about it. But something in the house was already thinking about her. She could feel it. Like something old and awake and patient, pressing its attention against the inside of her ribs like a second heartbeat. Waiting. To be continued in Chapter Two: The Ceremony