Maid For The Cursed Alpha Daddies

No Way Out

Nora POV

I waited until the estate went completely silent.

No footsteps. No voices. Nothing but the wind pushing against the stone walls and the distant sound of something moving through the west wing.

I got up. Pulled on my shoes. Grabbed my bag.

And ran.

Not walked. Not crept. Ran - down the corridor, through the kitchen, out the back door and into the cold dark of the grounds, the grass wet under my feet, the night air hitting my face like a slap.

The gate was ahead. Tall iron, locked. But I could climb. I had climbed worse than iron gates in my life. I would tear my hands to pieces if I had to and bleed on the other side and keep running until I hit a road and flagged down a car and got as far from this estate as my legs would carry me.

I was ten feet from the gate when it happened.

The ground seemed to breathe. The air thickened. The darkness between the trees at the edge of the grounds shifted - not wind, not an animal - something older than both. A pressure that started in my chest and spread outward until my legs slowed without my permission.

I fought it. I kept moving. Seven feet. Five feet.

Then something stepped out of the dark.

Rhys.

He was not running. He was just there - standing between me and the gate like he had always been standing there. Like he had known before I did that this was where I would end up tonight.

His eyes in the dark were wrong. Not fully human. The curse sitting right behind them, pressing against the surface.

"Don't," he said quietly.

"Move," I said.

"Nora-"

"Move." My voice broke on the word. "Get out of my way. I am not your sacrifice. I am not your Rite. I am not whatever my mother promised you and I am walking out of that gate right now-"

"You can't." His voice was steady - gentle almost, which was worse. "The contract-"

"I don't care about the contract!" It came out as a scream, raw and ugly, and I did not try to stop it. "I don't care what my mother signed. I don't care what your goddess requires. I did not agree to any of this and you cannot hold me here-"

I tried to push past him.

His hand caught my arm.

Not rough. Not violent. Just firm. Immovable, the way stone is immovable. And something in that touch - something in the simple fact of being stopped, physically stopped, by a man I had never chosen, in a place I had never chosen, because of a family that had never chosen me - broke something open inside me that I had been holding shut since the moment I walked through those front doors.

My knees went.

I did not fall. He caught me before I hit the ground. One arm around my shoulders, lowering me down until I was sitting in the wet grass, and then he stepped back and gave me space and just stood there while I fell apart.

I pressed my face into my hands and sobbed. The kind of sobs I had been holding back for two days - the fiancé and the sister and the parents who chose him over me and the car that drove me here and the locked gate and the Blood Rite and however long they want you - all of it, every single piece of it, coming out at once in the cold dark of these grounds with the moon somewhere above the clouds and nowhere to run.

I don't know how long I sat there.

When I finally lifted my head, Rhys was still standing a few feet away, silent, watching me with those barely-human eyes.

Caspian and Dorian were behind him.

All three of them. In the dark. Watching.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand.

"I want my freedom," I said. My voice was wrecked but I held it level. "That is what I want. Not a room in your estate. Not a maid's uniform. Not a contract with no end date." I looked at all three of them. "I want out. I want a real life - far from here, far from my family, far from all of you." My voice cracked and I pushed through it. "I want enough money to disappear somewhere no one can find me and I want to live the rest of my life without owing anyone anything." I pressed my fist against my chest. "That is what I want. Give me that and I will consider your Rite. Give me anything less and I will sit in this wet grass until I die."

Silence.

The wind moved through the trees.

Then Dorian crouched down in front of me so we were eye level. His voice was quiet and completely serious.

"If we could give you that," he said, "we would."

"Then give it to me."

"We can't." He held my gaze. "Not because we won't. Because the Rite doesn't work that way. The Moon Goddess doesn't accept a bargain made under conditions of escape. The female has to stay - present, within the pack - or the Rite means nothing." He paused. "If you disappear, the blood moon still rises. In six weeks. And everyone in this territory-"

"That is not my problem," I said.

"No," Dorian said. "It isn't. You're right. None of this is your fault and none of it should be your problem." He did not look away. "But it will happen. And you will know it happened. And you will spend the rest of your free life knowing that you had the power to stop it and didn't." He let that sit. "Can you live with that?"

I stared at him.

I wanted to say yes. I wanted to say yes so badly it physically hurt. I wanted to stand up and climb that gate and never look back and let three cursed Alphas and their Moon Goddess and their blood moon be someone else's disaster.

But I thought about Rhys's hand cracking the window frame like paper. I thought about four people who did not survive last time. I thought about what came after four people - a territory full of lives that had nothing to do with my mother's deal or my family's betrayal or the wedding I would never have now.

I pressed my eyes shut.

Why, I thought - not to anyone, just to the dark, just to the wet grass and the locked gate and the moonless sky. Why is this mine to carry? What did I do?

Thunder rumbled somewhere far away.

I opened my eyes.

"I want something," I said. My voice was flat now, past breaking. "And it has to match what I'm giving."

"Name it," Caspian said from behind Dorian.

"I'm giving you my body," I said. "My freedom. My future. Every choice I should have had." I looked at all three of them. "So what I want in return is this - when this is over. When your Rite is done and your blood moon has passed and your goddess is satisfied - I am not a maid. I am not a servant. I am not property that gets put back in a room when you are finished with me." My voice dropped to something quiet and final. "I want your sworn oath - all three of you, on your goddess and your blood - that whatever I become in this pack after the Rite, I am someone. Not something. Someone." I held Dorian's gaze. "Give me that. Swear it. And I will stay."

The three brothers looked at each other.

Then Dorian stood. He lifted his right hand, palm open toward the sky.

"On the Moon Goddess," he said. "And on our blood. You will not be property. You will not be discarded. Whatever you become in this pack - you will be someone." His eyes held mine. "We swear it."

Caspian, behind him. One slow nod. "We swear it."

Rhys, quietly, from the dark. "We swear it, Nora."

I sat in the wet grass at the base of the locked gate and breathed.

It was not freedom. It was not the life I had been promised or the future I had planned or anything close to what had been taken from me.

But it was the only oath anyone had ever sworn to me that did not come with a lie underneath it.

I got up. My knees shook. I did not let them show it.

"Then we have an agreement," I said.

I walked back toward the estate between the three of them and did not look back at the gate.

From deep inside the west wing, low and barely contained, a growl rolled through the walls like a warning.

Six weeks.

Moon Goddess, I thought, stepping back through the door I had fled thirty minutes ago.

You had better be worth this.