ELLA'S POV
I woke up and didn't know where I was, which had never once happened to me in twenty-four years, because I'd always known exactly where I was and exactly how much it was costing me to be there.
The bed was wrong. Too soft, too large, sheets with a thread count that probably had its own taxonomy. The light through the curtains was pale morning, filtered and expensive.
Then it came back.
I lay still for a moment and let it settle, the way you let cold water settle when you've jumped into something you can't get back out of. Auction. Lucien Blackwood. Ten million dollars and a bond that felt like a seam in reality and driving away from everything I'd known.
My feet ached. My eyes were swollen from crying. I still had my dinner uniform on.
The bathroom was the size of a small apartment and made of materials that had no business being in a bathroom. I stood in front of the floor-length mirror and looked at someone who looked like me but wasn't quite, because there was something different about my eyes — the way the light caught them, some quality of attention behind them that felt unfamiliar — and then I saw the mark on my shoulder.
I'd missed it in the dark last night. Now, in morning light: silver, intricate, less like a tattoo than like something that had grown there. Organic. The edges shifted faintly when I moved, the way the water shifts.
The mate mark.
I touched it. Felt warmth moving through my chest from the point of contact, a warmth that pulled slightly, like a compass needle finding north.
A knock at the door.
"Miss Monroe?" A woman's voice, gentle and assured. "I'm Sage. May I come in?"
Before I'd fully answered, the door opened. Late forties, warm brown skin, eyes that were the first ones I'd seen since Rita had told me to call tomorrow so she'd know I was alive. She was carrying a tray, and on the tray was breakfast, and the smell of it hit me like a physical blow.
She took one look at my face and set down the tray.
"Oh, honey," she said. "You look like you need a friend more than food."
That was the thing that broke me. Not the luxury, not the threats, not any of the things that should have broken me — but basic human kindness delivered by someone who wasn't getting anything from offering it.
"I don't want to be here," I said.
"I know." She moved closer, not touching, just present. "I know this is terrifying and wrong and not something you chose. But you're here now. And I can help make it less terrible, if you'll let me."
"Why would you help me? You work for him."
"I work for the Alpha." She sat on the edge of the bed, unhurried. "But I also remember what it feels like to have no floor under you. To be at someone else's mercy through no fault of your own." She patted the space beside her. "Come sit. Let me tell you something true."
I didn't want to. I wanted to stay in the armor of anger because anger was the only thing between me and something much worse.
But I was so tired.
I sat.
"Alpha Blackwood is a lot of things," she said. "Ruthless. Willing to do what needs to be done in ways that most people can't stomach. But he's not cruel without purpose. And he's desperate in a way that—" She paused, choosing. "He's dying, Ella. Has been for twenty years. Whatever he did to get here—and I won't defend that—the alternative was his death."
"I'm supposed to feel sorry for him."
"No," she said plainly. "I'm not asking that. I'm asking you to see the full picture instead of just the piece you landed on." Her hand found mine — warm, steady. "You weren't living before that. You were surviving, and barely. Working yourself hollow for a sister who was slipping away anyway. Is that really what you want to go back to?"
"It was mine to survive in."
"You're right. It was. And he took that choice from you." She didn't soften it. "That was wrong. And it was also — complicated." She looked at me seriously. "The world you've walked into is real and old and has rules you don't know yet. And you have a place in it — a significant one — that was hidden from you your whole life. That hiding wasn't Lucien's doing. He's actually the first person who's tried to show you what you actually are."
I thought about the lawyer in the expensive suit. The three weeks of letters. The missed calls.
"What am I," I said. "What does that mean? What did that woman say at the auction—non-human DNA—"
"That's a conversation best had with Helena. The pack healer." Sage stood, moved toward the window. The gardens outside looked, in daylight, even more like something out of a magazine I'd never be able to afford. "But the short version is: you're not fully human. And you never were. And the abilities you've been carrying without knowing it—" She looked back. "They're significant."
A silence.
"I want to see my sister," I said. "That's what I want. Whatever else is happening — I want to know if Lily is actually okay."
"I can arrange that." Sage smiled, and it was a real one, the kind that reached the eyes. "But first — shower, eat, put on clothes that don't smell like a twelve-hour shift. Everything you need is in here." She gestured toward the bathroom. "Take your time. The door locks from the inside."
"The room locks from the inside?"
"You're not a prisoner in this room, Ella. Just on the property." She said it without irony, which meant she'd said it enough times that she'd lost track of how it sounded. "Small mercies."
She left.
I stood in the shower until the water turned cool, trying to wash away the feeling of being bought. It didn't work. Some feelings are structural — they don't wash off, they just get wet.
But I ate the breakfast she'd left, and the yogurt was real, and the fruit was fresh, and the toast was the kind that made you realize every other toast you'd had was a compromise, and slowly my body did what bodies do when they're given what they need: it came back online.
Clothes laid out on the bed. Not designers, not the expensive stiff things I'd glimpsed in the closet — jeans, soft, in my exact size. A sweater. Underwear. All correct.
Because he'd had me watch for six months and knew every detail that mattered.
I was still deciding how to feel about that — the violation of it, and the strange parallel care embedded in it — when the door opened without a knock.
Lucien Blackwood in daylight was different from Lucien Blackwood in a warehouse at midnight, and not in the direction I'd hoped. He was wearing dark jeans and a black shirt with two buttons open at the collar, and he looked like someone who had slept well and moved through the world like he owned it, which technically, in the case of this particular corner of the world, he did.
"Good morning," he said pleasantly.
"Go to hell."
"Still angry." He stepped into the room, unhurried. "Good. Anger is honest." He looked at me with those gold-lit eyes that were clearly not human and that my body — traitorously — had a response to that had nothing to do with anger. "We're going to the training grounds. You need to meet your wolf before she decides to introduce herself without help."
"I'm not going anywhere with you."
"Ella." His voice shifted into something lower, something that moved through my chest before I could stop it. "You can walk willingly, or I can carry you. But you are coming with me."
My body moved before the decision was completed. Standing. Walking toward him.
I stopped myself after two steps, furious. "What are you doing to me?"
"Alpha command. Your wolf recognizes the hierarchy and responds to it." He held out his hand, patient. "It's easier if you don't fight."
"I'll fight everything about this."
"Good." Something in his expression was almost warm. "I prefer my mates with a spine." He dropped his hand, turned toward the door. "Come. It's time to meet what you really are."
The grounds were gardens, then forest. And the forest — as soon as I stepped into it — did something to me.
A shift in awareness. The air against my skin felt different. Textured. Alive. I could identify every bird by its call, which I had never been able to do. I could smell the specific difference between the pine at the edge of the tree line and the pine twenty feet deeper in. Something in my chest that had been tight since I woke up — since before that, since always — began, infinitesimally, to loosen.
"You feel it," Lucien said, watching me.
"I feel like my nervous system has decided to malfunction in a new direction."
"You feel home," he said without drama. "Your wolf recognizes the land. The trees. The world she was designed for." He stopped in a clearing where sunlight came through in shafts. "This is where you start learning."
"I don't want to learn anything from you."
"That's fine. Your wolf doesn't care about your preferences." He looked at me evenly. "The suppression your father placed on you is failing. Within days — possibly hours — she'll force a shift whether you're ready or not. I can help you through it now, when there's time, or you can deal with it alone in a way that will be considerably more painful." He paused. "Your call."
I stared at him.
"That's the first actual choice you've offered me."
"I'm aware."
"Why?"
A pause. He looked at the clearing for a moment — the light in the trees, the particular stillness of a forest that knew something was about to change. "Because the rest of what I've done is already done. I can't give you back what I took. But I can stop taking." He met my eyes. "Starting with this."
I looked at the trees. At the gold-filtered light. At the man who had bought me and was standing here offering me something that felt, despite everything, like honesty.
"Fine," I said. "Teach me."