Bound To The Enemy Alpha

Chapter 1 Diana had been raised to believe that duty didn't ask permission — but she hadn't expected it to knock on her door with a treaty in one hand and her name signed away in the other. The parchment sat on the long table between her and her father, and Diana stared at it the way she might stare at a wound that hadn't started hurting yet. "Say something," Alpha Edward said. He hadn't looked at her since she'd walked in. "What is there to say?" Diana kept her voice level. Twenty years of practice had taught her that much — however the ground shifted beneath her, her voice did not. "You've already signed it." His jaw tightened, and for a moment he looked less like the Alpha who ruled Silver Moon with an iron hand, and more like a man who hadn't slept in days. "I signed it because it's the only thing standing between this pack and a war we cannot win. Ashwood has three times our numbers, Diana. Three times our warriors. If this treaty fails—" "Then you sell your daughter to stop it." The words came out sharper than she meant them to, and she watched something in her father's face flinch, just slightly, before it closed again. "I am not selling you." His voice dropped, low and rough. "I am trying to keep you alive. Keep this whole pack alive. The Odins have wanted Silver Moon land for two generations, and the only reason they haven't taken it by force is that neither side can afford the losses of another war. A mating between the heirs closes that door. Permanently." Diana looked down at the parchment again. Her name, in her father's hand. Diana Edward, daughter of Alpha Edward of Silver Moon, to be mated to Edwin Odin, heir of Ashwood, upon the full moon of the harvest month, in accordance with the Treaty of Two Packs. Three weeks from now. Three weeks until she belonged to a stranger who had grown up learning to hate everything she was. "Tell me about him," she said quietly. "At least give me that." Her father was silent long enough that she almost thought he wouldn't answer. "Edwin Odin," he said finally, "is nothing like his father. Which is not a comfort, before you take it as one. Alpha Odin is ruthless because he was born into ruthlessness and never questioned it. Edwin is ruthless because something made him that way. I don't know what. I only know that the boy I've heard about in the last ten years is not a boy anymore, and not someone I'd choose for you if I had any other choice." "But you don't." "No." For the first time, he met her eyes, and what she saw there wasn't the cold calculation of an Alpha protecting his territory — it was grief, plain and unguarded. "I don't. And I am sorry, Diana. I am more sorry than I know how to say." She wanted to hate him for it. She searched for the anger, the betrayal she was entitled to — and found instead something quieter and worse: understanding. She had grown up watching her father carry the weight of four hundred lives on his shoulders every single day. She had watched him make impossible choices before, watched the cost of them age him years in months. This was simply the first time the impossible choice had her name on it. "When do I leave?" she asked. "Ten days. Ashwood wants time to prepare the ceremony." A pause. "And to look you over, I imagine, before they agree to the terms being final." Look her over. Like livestock at a market. Diana kept her spine straight and did not let it show on her face how much that cost her. She found her way to the training grounds after, because she didn't know what else to do with the restlessness clawing under her skin. The pack's junior warriors scattered when they saw her coming — even now, even with her world rearranging itself beneath her feet, she was still the Alpha's daughter, and that still meant something here. It wouldn't mean anything at Ashwood. At Ashwood she would be an outsider wearing her enemy's name, and nothing else. She picked up a practice blade from the rack and ran through the forms alone, the way she had a thousand times before, letting the motion empty her mind of everything except the next strike, the next block. It was the only thing that had ever quieted the strange, persistent hum she carried under her skin — a restlessness she'd never had words for, not since she was a child. Her father called it a warrior's temperament. Her old pack healer had once looked at her a beat too long and said nothing at all. She didn't know, yet, that the hum had a name. That it wasn't temperament, or nerves, or the anxious energy of a girl who trained too hard. She only knew that when she moved like this — blade cutting air, breath even, muscles burning — something in her felt almost like it recognized itself. She had no way of knowing that three hundred miles north, in a house built of colder stone and older grudges, a man was standing in front of his own father, staring at the same treaty with the same fury she'd swallowed down an hour ago. "I won't do it," Edwin Odin said. His father didn't even look up from the papers on his desk. "You will." "She's a Silver Moon wolf, Father. Her pack killed—" "I know exactly what her pack did." Alpha Odin's voice was quiet in the way that meant something worse than shouting. "I was there, Edwin. I don't need you to remind me what we lost." "Then how can you ask me to mate her? To put my hands on a woman with that blood in her veins and pretend it doesn't mean anything?" His father finally looked up, and there was nothing soft in his eyes — there never was. "Because thirty years of war taught me that pride is a luxury the dead don't get to keep. You'll mate her. You'll seal the treaty. And you will hate her every single day if that's what it takes to keep this pack standing. I don't care what you feel, Edwin. I care that Ashwood survives." Edwin said nothing. There was nothing to say to a man who had never once, in twenty-three years, asked him what he wanted instead of what was necessary. He left his father's study with the treaty's terms burned into his memory — the date, the place, the name. Diana Edward. He didn't know anything about her. Didn't want to. He'd built himself, brick by brick, around one unbending certainty since he was thirteen years old: that Silver Moon had taken something from him that could never be given back, and no treaty, no mating, no full moon ceremony was going to make him forget it. He would take her as his mate because his father commanded it and his pack required it. He would never, under any circumstance, let himself feel anything for her at all. He didn't yet know that somewhere under her composed, careful silence, something in her was already straining toward him — a pull neither of them would recognize for what it was, not for a long time yet. Not until it was far too late for either of them to pretend it away.