Reject Me, Alpha. I Belong To Your Enemy

Chapter 2

ARINA.

The sun was already rising by the time I smoothed the last of the dirt down with my palms.

Past six in the morning. I had been here for hours. My fingernails, which I had perfectly manicured and painted in preparation for my party, were broken down to the skin, my hands bleeding in four places, and the knees of my white dress had soaked through with wet earth. I didn't feel any of it.

The Traitors' Dump sat at the far eastern edge of Black Thorn territory, past the tree line where the pack didn't bother maintaining the grounds.

There was no marker for it. No fence, no path, nothing to indicate that what was thrown here had once been people. Bodies arrived, and the earth simply received them without ceremony.

This was where they had thrown my parents.

I had found them by scent. That was the part I would never be able to scrub from my memory.

I had dug with my hands because I had nothing else. The earth was hard and uncooperative, and it took a long time. I talked to them while I worked. I don't know what I said. I know I didn't cry — I had run out of that somewhere around the third hour, and what replaced it was something quieter and more permanent than tears.

I buried them together. It wasn't deep enough. It wasn't marked. It wasn't anywhere close to what they deserved.

But it was mine. The only thing I could still give them.

I pressed both palms flat against the mound of fresh dirt and held them there.

I didn't know what was left of my life after this. I couldn't face the pack members. They all detested me. Leaving Black Thorn should have been the obvious answer. Knox would reject me. He had to. No man could murder my parents and still want the bond.

I stayed like that until the sun fully cleared the trees.

Then I stood up, looked at what I had made, and made myself a promise over it.

It wasn't a prayer to the Moon Goddess who had seen fit to bind me to the man who had done this.

It was a promise to myself, in my own name.

'I will not leave this earth until they answer for what they did to you.'

*

The walk back through the pack grounds was its own kind of punishment.

I kept my head down and moved quickly, but not quickly enough.

"Traitor's daughter."

"Look at the state of her."

"Should've been thrown in the dump with them."

I didn't stop or look up. I let the words land and kept walking, dirt-caked and bleeding, past the pack houses, past the communal grounds, until the Alpha's mansion came into view.

My parents' house sat directly beside it. That's how close our families once were.

The next thought on my mind was how to see my brother.

I needed to talk to him to know what our next step would be.

The moment I stepped inside my parents' house, my mother's shawl was still folded over the armrest. My father's reading glasses sat on the side table beside a book he would never finish.

I sat on the couch where they had both been sitting yesterday morning and pressed my face into my mother's shawl.

I cried until I had nothing left.

Nyra had not spoken since the bond snapped into place.

She was there, wounded, recoiling every time Knox’s scent drifted across the territory on the morning air.

I was just by myself.

I was still sitting in the wreckage of it when the door flew open without a knock.

Four of Knox's guards filled the frame.

"On your feet."

I stood slowly, confused. "What is this? What did I—"

Nobody answered. Two of them grabbed my arms, and the other two moved behind me, and that was the entirety of the explanation I received.

I fought them. I screamed and twisted and dug my heels into my own floor until they dragged me through the door and out into the open air, and I already knew, before I saw the familiar stones beneath my feet, where they were taking me.

The pack square.

They threw me down on the same ground where my parents had bled out six hours ago. I caught myself on my hands and felt the sting of the stones against my already broken skin.

The crowd gathered fast. They always did for this kind of thing.

Amongst the crowd stood three men I had never seen before. They stood at the edge of the square. They were the only ones not enjoying the show.

The first one was tall enough that he cleared the heads of the people around him without effort. His eyes — even from this distance — were pale and unreadable as winter water.

He stood completely still, with two men flanking him, his dark, almost black hair with startling streaks of silver-white at the very tips of the locks falling just above his eyes.

The man beside him had his hands in his pockets, but his eyes moved restlessly over everything, like Knox was personally offending him. The third man looked bored.

They were not Black Thorn.

I did not know what they were, but every instinct in me knew they were worse than ordinary wolves. The aura radiating off of them was paralyzing.

My heart skipped several beats, and they looked at me intently without blinking.

I got to my knees, and my stomach turned to water.

Knox was crossing the square toward me. Behind him was Hetel.

She looked destroyed. Her clothes were torn at the shoulder and hem, her hair pulled loose from its roots in places, her face streaked with dirt and dried tears. She was shaking — a fine, visible tremor — and her eyes when they found mine were red and swollen and radiating injury.

She looked like a victim.

The crowd saw her, and the murmuring started immediately.

Knox stopped in front of me. He looked down at me on my knees with an expression I had no category for — not rage exactly, but something colder than rage.

"You never stop." His voice was quiet. It was always quiet. "Even after everything, you never stop."

"What are you talking about?" I looked between him and Hetel. "What happened to her?"

"You really don't know...?"

"I don't." I got to my feet. My legs were unsteady, but I made them hold. "I have been at the eastern tree line since midnight, burying my parents with my bare hands. I haven't spoken to a single person. Whatever you think I did—"

"She sent men after me. To r**e me." Hetel's voice broke on the last word, perfectly timed. She pressed closer to Knox's side, one hand curling into his shirt. "Three of them. They said... they told me you sent them, Arina. That this was your message to me."

"That's a lie!" I defended.

"They had already torn my clothes before Knox's patrol found me." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Another five minutes and they... They..." She pressed her lips together and looked away, like the rest of it was too much to say aloud.

"I didn't send anyone." My voice came out steady. I was proud of that. "I don't know three men who would do anything I asked in this pack. You know that. Everyone in this pack watched you murder my family and cheered.”

There was a beat.

“Your parents killed my father,” Knox said. “Now you send men after the woman who exposed them. You are exactly what your blood made you.”

Hetel looked up at me with her wet eyes and her torn sleeve and said, softly, with infinite sadness:

"Arina. I know you're in pain. I understand why you hate me. But I only did what my education and my conscience required me to do." She paused. "I looked at the evidence, and I told Knox the truth. I'm sorry that the truth hurt your family. I'm sorry. But please — please stop trying to hurt me for it."

She said it like a woman forgiving someone who had wronged her.

The crowd believed every syllable.

I watched Knox's arm go around her shoulders and felt something in me go very, very quiet.

Not grief. Not even rage.

Just clarity. The specific cold clarity of understanding exactly what kind of person you are dealing with, and knowing that nothing you say in this square today will matter because the verdict was written before you arrived.

Knox turned back to me.

"You want to use this pack against her?" His voice dropped low enough that the crowd leaned in to catch it. "Then this pack will be your punishment."

His eyes dropped to my throat, then snapped away like the sight of me offended something inside him. The bond pulled. I felt it. He felt it too. Then he crushed whatever it had touched.

"Every unmated male in Black Thorn." He said it slowly and clearly so there would be no confusion. "She is yours to take. From now till dawn."

The square erupted, and I stopped breathing. My gaze traveled to where the strange men stood again, but this time I saw them turn and walk away.

Maybe a stupid part of me thought for one second that they would stop this injustice being done to me, even though I didn't know them.

But no. Of course they didn't. I was nothing to them. I was nothing to anyone standing here. I needed to stop looking for people to save me in a crowd that had assembled specifically to watch me be destroyed.

"Knox... No! Please! I didn't do it!" I cried desperately, my eyes going around as I saw more than a dozen men trooping forward, their eyes glinting with wicked intent.

"Consider it justice." He turned away from me like I was already beneath his attention. "An eye for an eye, dear mate."