Bound To The Enemy Alpha

Ten Days

Chapter 2

Ten days, Diana learned, was not very long at all when it was the last ten days of your life as you knew it.

Her mother — not by blood, she'd always known that much, though it had never mattered before now — found her sitting on the floor of her closet on the fourth day, surrounded by half-folded dresses and the wreckage of trying to pack a life into three trunks.

"You're doing it wrong," Lira said, stepping over a pile of silk. "You're folding those like you're trying to punish them."

Diana looked down and realized she'd balled up one of her good gowns into something closer to a fist. She let it go, embarrassed. "I don't know what I'm supposed to bring. Nobody tells you what to pack when you're being handed over like a war reparation."

"Diana." Lira's voice had an edge of warning in it, gentle but real. "Don't talk about yourself like that. Not even to me."

"Why not? It's true."

"It's true and it's not the whole truth, and you know the difference." Lira knelt down across from her, careful with her knees the way she'd started being in the last few years, and took the dress from Diana's hands, refolding it properly. "Your father has not slept one full night since he signed that treaty. I've been married to him for fifteen years, Diana. I know what it costs him to make you do this. Don't mistake his desperation for not caring."

"I don't." Diana pulled her knees up to her chest, an old habit from childhood she'd thought she'd outgrown. "I just don't know how to feel about any of it. I'm angry at him. And I understand him completely. Both at once. Is that allowed?"

"That's called being an adult," Lira said, with the ghost of a smile. "Welcome to it. Terrible timing, I know."

Diana almost laughed. It surprised her, how close to the surface a laugh still was, even now.

"Tell me something," she said instead. "Do you know anything about him? Edwin Odin?"

Lira's hands stilled on the fabric for just a fraction of a second — so brief Diana might have imagined it, except she'd spent her whole life reading rooms for a living, and she didn't imagine things like that. "I know what everyone knows. That he's cold. That he's dangerous in the way young Alphas-in-waiting are dangerous — untested, unpredictable, with something to prove. That he lost people in the war, same as we all did."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have." Lira met her eyes, and there was something careful there, something weighed. "I won't lie to you and tell you it will be easy, Diana. I won't do that. But I will tell you this — you are the strongest young woman I have ever known, and I did not raise you to walk into that house and disappear into it. Whatever he is. Whatever they expect of you. You go in as Diana. Not as a peace offering. Do you understand me?"

Diana nodded, throat tight in a way she didn't want to examine too closely.

"Good." Lira stood, brushing off her skirts, business-like again. "Now stop murdering your dresses and let me help you pack like a person who intends to survive this."

On the seventh day, her father called her to the training grounds instead of his study, which was how Diana knew the conversation was going to be harder than the last one.

He was already there when she arrived, practice blade in hand, and for a moment he just looked at her the way he used to when she was small — like he was trying to memorize something.

"Spar with me," he said.

"Father—"

"Humor me." A faint, tired smile. "It's the last time I'll get to teach you anything before you belong to someone else's house."

Belong. The word landed harder than she expected. She picked up a blade anyway, because refusing him felt crueler than either of them could afford right now, and because some small, aching part of her wanted this too — one more ordinary thing, before nothing was ordinary again.

They fought the way they always had — her father pulling his strikes just enough to teach without humiliating, Diana pushing harder than was wise because she'd always hated being handled gently. She caught him twice. He let her, probably, but she chose to believe otherwise.

"You're better than most of my warriors," he said, breathing hard, lowering his blade. "You always have been. I don't think you know how good."

"Is that supposed to comfort me? That I can hold a sword?"

"It's supposed to remind you that you are not walking into Ashwood as someone helpless." He set his blade down, and his voice changed — dropped the training-ground briskness for something rawer. "Diana. Whatever happens there. Whatever he is like, whatever his pack is like — you do not have to earn the right to defend yourself. You do not have to earn the right to be treated with basic decency. If it comes to it—"

"Father, I'll be fine."

"If it comes to it," he pressed on, like she hadn't spoken, "you fight. You survive. And you find a way to send word to me, and I will not care what treaty is on the line. Do you hear me?"

Something in his voice made her actually look at him — really look — and what she saw frightened her more than the treaty ever had. Her father was not a man who begged. He was not a man who let fear show. And right now, standing in the training yard with a blade in his hand and thirty years of leadership on his shoulders, he looked like a man who was terrified for his daughter and could do absolutely nothing to stop what was coming.

"I hear you," she said quietly.

He nodded, once, and looked away first — which was its own kind of answer.

On the tenth day, Diana stood at the edge of Silver Moon territory with three trunks, a single guard escort, and a wedding dress she hadn't chosen folded on top of everything else she owned.

The Ashwood envoy was already waiting at the border. Four warriors, grim-faced, none of them looking at her like she was a person so much as a delivery being confirmed.

Their leader — older, scarred along one side of his jaw — inclined his head with exactly the amount of respect the treaty required and not one ounce more. "Lady Diana. Alpha Odin sends his regards. We'll reach Ashwood by nightfall."

Diana looked back once, at the pack lands she'd grown up in, at her father standing rigid at the border with his jaw locked tight and Lira's hand wrapped around his arm, and made herself commit it to memory the way she'd once memorized training forms — carefully, completely, in case she needed it later.

Then she turned and followed the Ashwood envoy north, into enemy territory, toward a man who had sworn to hate her before he'd ever met her.

She did not look back again. She'd decided, somewhere between the seventh day and this one, that she wasn't going to give anyone the satisfaction of watching her leave like something being taken. She was going to walk in like something arriving.

It was a small distinction. It was the only one she had left to hold onto.