BOUGHT BY THE CURSED ALPHAS

They sold me for a winter of grain.

The wolves paid three times what my village asked. Nobody would tell me why.

My name was on the barter list and not one person argued. Not the council. Not the aunt who raised me. Not the boy who was supposed to marry me.

I walked up that mountain expecting to be a servant. A bargaining chip. A body in the snow by spring.

Three alphas were waiting at the treeline.

Three.

And the oldest one went completely still the second the wind carried my scent to him.

They give me a room with a fire already lit. They will not let me work. They will not tell me what I am for.

And in a hold built for two hundred and forty people, there are four children left — and something under their skin is turning them to ice.

Then the storm comes down. Four of us in one room. And the bond snaps open in front of the whole pack.

All three of them.

That is when I learn what I was really bought for. They did not pay for a bride. They paid for the last living granddaughter of the woman their bloodline destroyed sixty-one years ago — and the only blood that can break the curse killing their young.

Nine people have gone up that mountain to end it.

There are nine names cut into the rock.

There is no tenth.

I have nine days to decide whether to be one.

Falling for the men who bought me is a mistake.

Saving them will cost me everything I have left.