Sold to the beast Alpha’s dying son

Chapter2

The papers took forty minutes to sign.

Victor Draven sat across from Nina at a table that probably cost more than her entire apartment building, and he watched her read every single page without rushing her. She had expected impatience. Instead she got something that felt almost like respect, which unsettled her more than impatience would have.

"This clause," she said, pressing her finger to the third page. "It says I cannot leave the manor grounds without written permission for the first six months."

"Correct."

"That's not something I agreed to."

"It's a standard precaution for new mates entering a pack territory."

"I'm not a mate," Nina said. "I'm a contractual arrangement. There's a difference."

Victor looked at her for a moment. "You can negotiate the radius. Not the restriction itself."

"Fine. I want the entire eastern forest included. Marta told me there are wolves out there. If they're not going to eat me, I want access to the trees."

Something moved through Victor's eyes so quickly she almost missed it. "Done," he said.

She signed.

He signed.

A man she had not noticed standing in the corner, thin and silent as a lamp post, notarized everything and disappeared with the papers before Nina could blink.

"Now," Victor said, standing. "The ceremony."

"Before we do that," Nina said, "I want to see Danny. Tonight. Proof that your doctors have already started."

Victor did not hesitate. He pulled out his phone, made a single call, and turned the screen toward her.

It was the same hospital room as before, but now there were two additional doctors she didn't recognize standing at Danny's bedside, reviewing charts, adjusting equipment. One of them looked up at the camera and nodded once, as if confirming something.

"They started an hour ago," Victor said. "Before you even arrived."

Nina stared at her brother's small face and breathed through her nose until the burning behind her eyes settled down. She was not going to cry in front of this man. She was absolutely not going to do that.

"Okay," she said. "Let's get this over with."

The ceremony room was on the ground floor, at the back of the manor where the building met the treeline. The walls were stone and the floor was stone and there were no flowers, no decorations, nothing that suggested celebration. Just candles, hundreds of them, set into iron holders along every surface, filling the room with that amber hungry light she had noticed from outside.

There were perhaps twenty people present. Pack members, she assumed. They stood in silence along the walls and watched her walk in, and the quality of their attention was unlike anything she had experienced before. Not hostile. Not warm. Something in between, something watchful and ancient, like being assessed by creatures who had been alive long enough to see many things and were reserving judgment on this particular thing.

Marta had given her a dress. White, simple, with long sleeves that Nina was grateful for because the room was cold. She had kept her mother's cardigan on underneath it, which looked ridiculous, but Marta had not said a word about it.

At the front of the room, on a low platform, was a bed.

Not an altar. A bed, with dark sheets and iron rails, and in it, perfectly still, was Eli Draven.

Nina stopped walking.

She had known this was coming, obviously. She had signed papers that described this exact arrangement. But knowing a thing and seeing it were entirely different experiences, and what she saw now made something complicated happen in her chest that she could not immediately classify.

He was not what she had pictured.

She had been imagining someone diminished. Someone pale and slack-featured, hollowed out by whatever was wrong with him. But the man in the bed looked like he had been carved out of something that refused to yield. Broad shoulders. Dark hair against the pillow. A jaw that even in unconsciousness looked like it was bracing for impact. His hands were folded across his chest and they were large hands, scarred across the knuckles, the hands of someone who had fought many things and won most of them.

He looked, Nina thought with a lurch of something she immediately refused to examine further, like someone she might have been afraid to meet in a normal context.

"Come forward," Victor said from somewhere to her left.

She came forward.

The officiant was a woman with white paint on her face and symbols drawn along her collarbones in something dark red. She spoke in a language Nina didn't recognize, low and rhythmic, and the candle flames all bent in the same direction although there was no wind.

Nina stood next to the bed and looked straight ahead and concentrated on breathing.

"You'll need to take his hand," Marta said quietly from just behind her.

"Why?"

"Pack law. The bond requires contact."

Nina looked down at Eli's right hand. She reached out and picked it up carefully, the way she might handle something that could break or, alternatively, something that might suddenly grip back.

His hand was warm.

She had not expected that. She had been thinking of him as cold, as absent, as effectively an object at the center of a transaction. But his hand was warm and it was heavy with a kind of dense, grounded weight, and when her fingers closed around his, the woman with the symbols on her collarbones went suddenly, completely silent.

Every candle flame in the room went vertical.

Nobody moved.

"Continue," Victor said, and there was something tight in his voice.

The woman continued.

Nina kept her eyes forward and tried to ignore the warmth traveling up her arm from Eli's hand, tried to ignore the way her pulse had changed rhythm without her permission, tried to ignore the fact that the twenty people along the walls had all straightened slightly, all at once, as if receiving a signal through the soles of their feet.

The ceremony lasted eleven minutes.

At the end of it, the officiant said something directly to Nina in that language she didn't know, and looked at her with an expression that was equal parts awe and terror.

"What did she say?" Nina asked Marta.

Marta was quiet for a beat too long. "She said the bond took."

"Is that unusual?"

Another pause. "With Eli, yes. With the others it did not."

Nina looked at her. "The other brides."

"Yes."

"And the bond, not taken, that's why they..." She stopped. She wasn't sure she wanted to finish that sentence in this room, surrounded by these people.

Marta said nothing. Which was its own kind of answer.

The pack members filed out slowly, each of them glancing at Nina as they passed with that same unreadable expression, that mix of things she couldn't name. She was still holding Eli's hand. She couldn't seem to make herself put it down.

Victor was the last one left. He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at his son with an expression that Nina, even in her distracted and overwhelmed state, recognized as wrong. There was ownership in it. Calculation. The look of a man surveying an investment, not a father watching over a child.

"Someone will bring you dinner," he said, without looking at her. "You'll stay in this room tonight."

"In here? With him?"

"Pack custom. The first night after bonding, the pair remains together." He finally looked at her, and his expression smoothed back into something neutral. "He won't disturb you. He never has."

He left.

Marta paused in the doorway. "There's a call button on the nightstand. Press it if anything changes."

"What would change?" Nina asked.

Marta looked at Eli for a moment, and then back at Nina, and her ice-colored eyes had something in them that looked, improbably, like guilt.

"Sleep lightly," she said, and closed the door.

Dinner came and Nina ate it sitting in the chair beside the bed because there was nowhere else to sit. Roast chicken and vegetables that were genuinely very good, which felt surreal. She had expected the food in a place like this to be theatrical. Goat and root vegetables. Something medieval.

She ate and watched Eli breathe and tried to organize her thoughts into something manageable.

You're married, she told herself. To an unconscious man. In a werewolf compound. Your brother is getting better. You are safe. This is fine. This is a transaction and you are going to treat it exactly like that.

Eli breathed in. Breathed out.

His heartbeat was visible at the side of his throat, slow and steady and somehow louder than it should have been, as if the room itself were amplifying it.

She put the dinner tray aside and pulled her chair closer to the nightstand, where someone had left a lamp with a low amber bulb. She thought about calling Danny's nurse, thought better of it for the hour, thought about calling her friend Rosa instead, and then thought about what she would possibly say. Hey, I got married tonight to a comatose billionaire werewolf's son for four hundred thousand dollars, how's your Tuesday?

She put her phone away.

"I don't know if you can hear anything in there," she said aloud, because the silence had gotten very large and she needed to put something into it. "Probably not. But just so you know, I'm not here to hurt you. I know that probably sounds ridiculous given the context, but I needed you to know that. I have a brother. He's sick. And I would do pretty much anything for him." She looked at her hands. "I guess you can tell that."

Eli breathed in. Breathed out.

"I'm going to be a good..." she tried the word and abandoned it. "I'm going to keep my side of the deal. Whatever this is. I'm not going to make it harder than it already is."

She pulled her mother's cardigan tighter around herself and leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes.

She was not planning to sleep. She was simply resting her eyes. That was all.

She was asleep within four minutes.

She did not know what woke her.

Not a sound, exactly. More like a change in pressure. Like the room had exhaled.

She opened her eyes and it took her a moment, suspended in that cotton confusion of waking in a strange place, to remember where she was and why.

Then she looked at the bed.

Eli Draven's eyes were open.

Not the vacant unfocused open of someone unconscious and unresponsive. Open and dark and completely, absolutely alert.

Nina sat up so fast the chair scraped back against the stone floor.

He was looking at her.

Not at the ceiling. Not at nothing. At her. With an intensity so concentrated it pressed against her like a physical thing, like standing too close to a fire, like the moment before lightning.

His lips moved.

She leaned forward without meaning to, tilting toward him like something pulled on a string, and she heard it.

Two words. Barely sound at all, more like the shape of sound, rough and wrecked and weighted with something that had been waiting a very long time to get out.

"You finally came back to me."

Nina's blood went cold.

"I've never," she said, and her voice came out strange, too high, "I've never met you before."

His eyes stayed on her face. Something moved through them that she could not read, something that was not confusion but was somehow its own kind of pain.

"Nina," he said. Her name, in his voice, like he had been holding it somewhere for a long time and had almost stopped believing he would get to say it.

The lamp on the nightstand flickered.

Every instinct she had was screaming at her to press the call button. To get Marta. To get Victor. To get someone who knew what this was and could explain it.

But she didn't move.

Because Eli Draven was looking at her like she was the only real thing in a room full of shadows, and something in the very bottom of her memory, in a place she had never thought to look, felt the faint, terrible pull of recognition.

She didn't know his face.

But something underneath knowing did.

"Who are you?" she whispered.

His eyes stayed open for three more seconds.

Then they closed, and he was still, and the room went back to silence, and Nina sat in her chair with her heart hammering and her hands gripping her mother's cardigan and tried to convince herself that she had imagined it.

She did not sleep again that night.

To be continued in Chapter Three: What the House Remembers