Chapter 6: I Want You

Jason didn’t set me down once the ceremony ended.

He carried me straight out of the cathedral in his arms, past two hundred guests still too stunned to do anything but stare, moving through the crowd with the kind of unhurried authority that made people step aside without being asked, the way a tide simply parts around whatever stands in its way rather than fighting for the space.

I could feel the weight of every eye in that room following us, could feel the particular quality of silence that only followed genuine fear, thick and heavy enough that I swore I could hear my own veil rustling against his shoulder over the total absence of sound.

Behind us, I caught a glimpse of Virginia’s face — twisted, furious, jealousy burning bright even now, even though she knew as well as I did that I hadn’t wanted any of this, hadn’t asked for a single moment of it.

It made no sense, and yet there it was, plain as anything, the same jealousy she’d worn my entire life whenever anything good happened to me instead of her, regardless of how that good fortune had actually arrived. I almost laughed at the absurdity of it.

She’d slapped me twenty minutes ago for daring to be chosen by a man I hadn’t asked to be chosen by, and now she looked at me like I’d stolen something from her by surviving it.

My stepmother’s expression wasn’t much different, calculation already replacing her earlier outrage, no doubt recalculating exactly how much status my new marriage might bring the family, regardless of how it had come about, regardless of the daggers that had been drawn against her own throat not ten minutes earlier.

The wind hit us the moment we stepped outside, cool and sharp after the stuffy heat of the packed cathedral. My veil caught on the breeze, streaming out behind me like something trying to escape on its own, and I let my head fall back just slightly, watching the pale fabric snap and billow against the gray afternoon sky.

A line of black cars waited at the base of the steps, engines already running, doors held open by more of Jason’s armored guards, their formation precise and disciplined in a way that spoke of long practice. I’d never seen this many vehicles gathered outside our pack house before, not even for my father’s own coronation, and the sheer scale of it made my chest tighten with the reality of exactly whose world I’d just been pulled into.

I was scared. Genuinely, thoroughly scared, in a way I hadn’t quite let myself feel since the doors of the cathedral first exploded open and changed the entire course of my second life. But underneath the fear sat something colder and more practical — the understanding that I didn’t have a choice here. Not really. Not with a father who’d sold me twice over, not with an Alpha powerful enough to punch a man’s tooth out and never even glance at the consequences.

That was when I saw Sherwood.

He was on the ground near one of the cars, surrounded by three of Jason’s guards, his once-immaculate suit torn and bloodied, one eye already swelling shut, his knuckles scraped raw where he’d apparently tried, briefly and uselessly, to fight back. They weren’t holding back. Every blow landed with brutal, practiced efficiency, the kind of violence that came from men who did this often enough to have perfected it, and Sherwood’s groans carried across the courtyard louder than the wind.

“You’ll pay for this!” His voice cracked as he shouted, spitting blood onto the cobblestones, glaring up at Jason with a hatred so pure it made my skin crawl even from a distance. “Do you hear me, Salford? All of you! You’ll pay!”

Jason didn’t even break stride. He glanced over at the scene with something close to boredom, the same expression he might have worn watching rain fall, and smirked — a small, cold curve of his mouth that promised Sherwood’s threats meant absolutely nothing to a man in his position.

“Finish up,” he said to the guards, almost lazily, before turning and carrying me toward the nearest car.

I twisted in his arms, watching Sherwood over his shoulder until the guards blocked my view entirely, until his screaming faded beneath the sound of engines and wind and my own frantic heartbeat.

Jason ducked into the back of the car without ever loosening his grip on me, settling me onto the leather seat beside him before the door sealed shut, cutting off the noise of the courtyard entirely, Sherwood’s screaming reduced to nothing more than a muffled memory beyond the glass. The silence inside the car felt suffocating after the chaos we’d just left behind — just the two of us now, and the low hum of the engine, and my own ragged breathing filling the small space between us.

I stared at him, this stranger who’d just claimed me in front of two hundred witnesses, who’d broken a man’s tooth without blinking, who’d ordered guards to beat my former fiancé bloody on the very steps of the cathedral where I was supposed to have married someone else entirely, in a version of today I could still feel clinging to the edges of my memory.

“What do you want?!” The words tore out of me before I could soften them, fear and fury tangling together until I couldn’t tell which one was driving my voice anymore. “You don’t even know me. You showed up out of nowhere, you humiliated Sherwood, you dragged me into a marriage I never agreed to — what could you possibly want from me, from someone you just met an hour ago?”

Jason turned to face me fully, and something shifted in his expression, something that stripped away every ounce of the cold authority he’d worn since walking through those cathedral doors.

“I WANT YOU!”