She Belongs To The Beast

4. Transferred as an Asset

I stared at him across the desk.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You fall under my jurisdiction,” he said, with patience. It was as if he found the situation mildly interesting. “As does every member of the Silverpine pack.”

“I’m not a member anymore,” I said. “My mate just—” The word caught in my throat, but I pushed through it. “Damon rejected me. I have no mate, no rank, and no wolf. By pack law, that makes me an omega at best and a rogue at worst. Either way, I’m not in anyone's jurisdiction.”

“Pack law,” Cain said, “is whatever I decide it is on my territory.”

“This wasn’t your territory three days ago.”

“And yet here we are.”

I stood up from the chair because sitting felt like accepting something I had not agreed to accept. The movement made my head throb, but I ignored it and planted my feet and looked at him across the expanse of his desk covered in his maps of land that used to belong to other people.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” I said. “I have no wolf. I have no rank. I have nothing you could possibly need from a pack acquisition. So, whatever this is—” I gestured between us, then at the room, “—let me go home, and we can both pretend last night didn’t happen.”

Cain looked at me for a moment. Then he pulled out the chair behind his desk and sat down, unhurried, like we had all the time in the world and he had already decided how this conversation ended.

“Damon Ashford formally surrendered you to Blackstone as part of the pack submission terms,” he said.

The room went very quiet.

“He what?” I said. I couldn’t believe my ears.

“Three days ago when your Alpha knelt.” Cain’s voice was completely even. “A list of assets was transferred as part of the agreement.” He paused. “Your name was on that list.”

I heard the words. I understood them individually. But the sentence they formed together kept sliding off my brain like water off stone because it could not mean what it sounded like it meant.

Damon had not just chosen Elena. He had sat down with his Alpha and written my name on a piece of paper and handed me over like I was something that belonged to him to give away.

Two years of his hand squeezing mine at pack gatherings and believing that he chose me.

I had not been chosen. I had been owned. And when something better came along he had found a way to make even getting rid of me useful.

“He… He didn’t tell me,” I said. My voice came out very flat.

“No,” Cain agreed. “He didn’t.”

I sat back down. Not because I was accepting anything but because my legs made the decision before I did and I was tired of fighting my own body tonight. I pressed my hands flat against my thighs and looked at the surface of his desk and breathed in and out to steady myself. Then I looked up at him.

“So what,” I said. “I’m yours now?”

He held my gaze across the desk.

“Yes,” he said flatly.

I laughed. It came out sounding nothing like my actual laugh, but it was the only response my body could produce to a man sitting behind a desk telling me I belonged to him like it was a fact he was reading from a document.

“I don’t have a wolf,” I said. “I can’t fight, I can’t shift, I can’t contribute anything to a pack. I am the least useful person you acquired in that entire submission and you know it. So whatever reason you think you have for keeping me here—”

“I don’t need a reason,” Cain said simply. “You’re on my territory. That’s sufficient.”

“That’s not—”

The door opened.

Mira appeared in the gap, her careful expression fractured for the first time since I had met her. Her eyes went to Cain immediately, urgent in a way that made my stomach drop.

“Alpha,” she said. “Someone from Silverpine is at the gates.” She hesitated. “He’s asking for her.”

Cain did not look away from me.

“Name,” he said.

Mira’s eyes slid to me briefly, something apologetic in them, before she answered.

“Damon Ashford,” she said. “He says she belongs to him, and he wants her back.”

The silence that followed was the kind that has a temperature. Cold and absolute and pressing in from every direction.

I looked at Cain.

He was already looking at me, his expression exactly what it had been since I walked into this room.

“Tell him,” Cain said, his eyes not leaving mine, “that she is unavailable.”

Mira disappeared through the door with a click.

I sat across from the most feared Alpha alive and the thought of him owning me made something in my stir but I pressed it down.

“I’m not staying here,” I said.

Cain picked up his pen and looked back at his maps like the conversation was already over.

“You are,” he said simply. “Get some rest. Mira will show you your room.”

I stood up and walked to the door and put my hand on the frame and stopped.

“This isn’t over,” I said without turning around.

“No,” Cain agreed, and I could hear something in his voice that had not been there before, something so faint I almost missed it. “It isn’t.”

I walked out and pulled the door shut behind me and stood in the corridor with my back against the wall and my eyes on the ceiling and my wolf turning over slowly in my chest like something waking up after a very long sleep.

Down the hall, Mira was waiting with her hands folded and her careful expression back in place.

I pushed off the wall and followed her.