Sacrifice to the Cursed Alpha King

Chapter Two

Ivy.

For one heartbeat, the whole world was that smile.

Then it died.

I watched it happen in pieces, the way you watch a cup slip from a shelf and know, before it hits the ground, that nothing will stop it shattering. His eyes went wide. His mouth, still curved from that first unguarded flash of joy, flattened into something cold and deliberate.

“Mate,” I said again, my hand still outstretched, because surely I'd misread him. Surely it was a trick of the firelight. ‘It's you, Vincent. It's always been you.”

He stepped back from me like I was something diseased.

The crowd noise, which had swelled into a roar the moment I bolted for the dais, dropped into total silence. Every eye in that circle swung to us. Vincent's gaze flicked once toward his father's dais, and something in his face shut like a door closing.

“Get off me,” he said, and shoved my outstretched hand aside even though I hadn't touched him yet.

“Vincent—”

“Don't.” His voice climbed, pitched to carry to every corner of the gathering. “You actually thought the goddess would give me you? A wolfless nothing whose parents sold this pack to its enemies?”

Laughter broke out behind me, delighted and ugly, and it spread like fire finding dry grass, rolling around the circle until it seemed to come from the torches themselves, from the mountains, from the sky I'd have sworn was kind to me an hour ago.

“I let you follow me around because it amused my father, watching a Winslow beg for scraps.” Each word landed like a blow, precise and unhurried, nothing like the boy who'd knelt by the creek that afternoon and cleaned tomato pulp from my sleeve. Nothing like the boy who was my best friend and who had always told me he loved me. “Did you actually believe any of that was real?”

His words hurt in a way I never thought possible. Not because they were cruel, but because they came from him. Every memory I had of him, every moment where I believed he saw me as more than a burden, suddenly felt like it was being rewritten before my eyes.

My chest ached with a pain I couldn't explain, and I pressed a hand against it as if I could somehow stop the feeling from spreading. I wanted to tell myself he was angry, that he didn't mean it, that there had to be another reason.

Then he delivered the final blow.

“I, Ashford Thorne, reject you, Ivy Winslow, as my mate.”

The moment the words left his lips, the bond that had only just formed snapped.

This time, the pain was not only in my heart.

It was everywhere.

It ripped through me like something had reached inside my chest and torn me apart from the inside out. I collapsed on the ground, my fingers digging into the as I struggled to breathe.

“She thought she'd be Luna.” Someone's voice, gleeful. "Look at her."

“Should've known. Blood tells.”

I found Alpha Ethan's face across the fire. He wasn't laughing. He watched me with a cold, patient satisfaction I didn't have the strength to understand, and I didn't stay to try. I got up. I don't remember deciding to. My legs simply obeyed some older instinct that understood staying on the ground was its own kind of surrender, and I turned and ran, shoving through bodies that didn't part for me, catching elbows and someone's outstretched foot that sent me stumbling before I caught a tent pole and kept going, out past the torches, out past the laughter, into the dark trees where the cold finally swallowed the sound of my own name being turned into a joke.

I don't know how long I sat on the flat grey rock at the tree line, the one I'd claimed as mine years ago, back when I'd needed somewhere to be invisible that wasn't also somewhere I was despised. The moon had climbed high enough to silver the frost on the pine needles before my sobs finally wrung themselves dry, leaving behind something worse than grief. A terrible, hollow quiet.

My hand rested over my chest, where the bond had been. It was strange to think that something so powerful could exist one moment and be torn away the next. I had spent my entire life wishing to be chosen, only to discover that being chosen could hurt more than being forgotten.

I sat with the wreckage of it for a long time. Long enough that the fires at the gathering circle must have burned low, long enough that my hands had gone numb against the rock. And somewhere in that long, empty stretch of night, a small, foolish hope began to stir in the wreckage, the way green things stir in ash. Alpha Ethan had looked so satisfied. Vincent's eyes had flicked to his father right before his face changed. Maybe something had happened between them, some argument, some threat, something that had nothing to do with me at all.

I told myself I only wanted to understand. I told myself that was different from wanting him back.

I rose from the rock, brushed the frost from my skirts, and walked back toward the pack house, toward the one lit window on the second floor where I knew his room to be.

*

*

*

The corridor outside his door was empty, the household long since asleep or still down at the dying fires, and I knocked, once, twice, my knuckles trembling against the wood. When no one answered I pushed it open, some fragile hope in me insisting he'd be alone, that I'd find him pacing, guilty, ready to explain.

But he wasn't alone.

Dahlia Grey lay across his bed with the sheet barely covering her, her hair mussed, a satisfied little smile curling her mouth the moment she saw my face in the doorway. Vincent sat up beside her, bare-chested, and for one breath neither of us moved.

“Oh,” Dahlia said, delighted. “Did she already accept the rejection? Or is she here for round two of humiliating herself?”

The pain of the broken bond was still fresh enough that this second wound landed almost gently by comparison, a small, quiet devastation instead of a roar. Vincent didn't even have the decency to look ashamed. He looked, if anything, irritated that I'd interrupted him.

“I accept your rejection,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected, steadier than I felt, and something in me was glad of that even as the rest of me was breaking apart. “I hope you're both very happy.”

I turned before either of them could answer and walked back out into the corridor, down the stairs, toward the front doors, moving on nothing but the last dregs of whatever pride I had left.

I made it as far as the courtyard.

Rough hands seized my arms from both sides before I even registered the warriors stepping out of the shadows, and I was spun around to find Alpha Ethan himself standing in the doorway behind me, watching with the same cold satisfaction he'd worn at the fire.

“Going somewhere, little traitor?” he asked.

“I've done nothing—”

“You've done exactly what I expected.” He nodded once to the men holding me, and they began dragging me toward the stone steps that led below the pack house, toward the cells I had visited a number of times before. “Chain her. Let's see how much fight is left in a wolfless girl once the sun comes up.”

The last thing I saw before they hauled me down into the dark was the lit window of Vincent's room, still glowing gold above the courtyard, as if nothing below it mattered at all.