Chapter Three — What Exactly Am I Here to Be?

The knock came at nine in the evening.

Not Isla. Isla knocked twice, soft, the way someone does when they're checking if you're decent. This was one knock, sharp, official, and when I opened the door a wolf I had never seen stood in the corridor dressed in all black, arms behind his back, expression empty.

"You're wanted," he said. "Second floor. West wing. Now."

He turned and walked away before I could respond.

I looked at Isla. She was already on her feet, already moving toward me, already smoothing the front of my dress with quick hands like she could press the nerves out of me along with the wrinkles.

"Don't speak unless he asks you something," she said under her breath. "Don't sit unless he tells you to. Don't let him see you shake."

"Who said I'm shaking?"

She glanced at my hands.

I pressed them flat against my sides and followed the wolf in black down the corridor.

The study door was open.

I knocked on the frame anyway. Something in me needed the small defiance of announcing myself like a person rather than walking in like a piece of furniture being delivered.

"Close it behind you."

Alexander didn't look up when I entered. He sat behind a desk stacked with files, one hand moving across a document, the lamp throwing sharp gold light across the hard line of his jaw. The rest of the room was dim. Bookshelves floor to ceiling. A fireplace with no fire in it. A single chair placed across from his desk like a throne designed to make whoever sat in it feel smaller by comparison.

I stood at the door and waited.

He made me wait for a full minute. I counted every second.

"Sit."

I sat. I kept my back straight. I folded my hands in my lap and looked at him directly because looking away felt like losing something I couldn't afford to lose.

He set his pen down. He looked at me for the first time.

His eyes moved across my face, assessing, clinical, the way a person looks at a problem they are deciding whether to bother solving. Whatever he found, it didn't impress him. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms and when he spoke his voice was the same temperature as the fireplace behind him.

"You've been here one day and you've already unsettled my household."

"I haven't done anything."

"You exist in my house," he said. "That is enough."

The words hit differently than rudeness would have. Rudeness would have meant he felt something, irritation, dislike, anything. This was simply a statement of fact, delivered without heat, which was somehow worse.

"My Beta has taken it upon himself to make you comfortable," he continued. "My staff is distracted. I don't run a charity house and I don't tolerate disruption." He held my gaze. "You are here because my father made a decision. A decision I was not consulted on. You will not make that decision any more inconvenient than it already is."

I said nothing.

"You'll take your meals in the east dining room. Not the main hall. You attend pack events when required. You remain invisible otherwise." His eyes didn't move from mine. "You do not come to me. You do not seek me out. If you need something you go through Isla. Are we understood?"

"Understood," I said.

He held my gaze one beat longer than necessary. Something crossed his expression, not warmth, not curiosity, something harder than both, and then it was gone and he was already looking back at his files.

"Draw my bath before you go."

I blinked. "I'm sorry?"

"The bathroom is through that door." He nodded toward the far end of the room without looking up. "Hot. Not scalding. There are salts on the shelf, the black jar."

I sat very still.

He wasn't looking at me. He was already reading, pen moving, like he had asked me to close a window. Like the request was so unremarkable it barely registered as one.

I was not a maid.

I was supposed to be his bride.

The thought burned all the way through me and came out the other side as something quieter and more dangerous, the first real question I had let myself ask since arriving. Not why is he cold or why doesn't he want me. Something sharper than that.

What exactly am I here to be?

I stood. I crossed the study. I pushed open the bathroom door.

The room was black marble and gold fixtures and entirely too large for one person. I found the taps. I found the black jar on the shelf. My hands moved through the motions without my permission while my mind stayed very still in the centre of something it didn't yet have words for.

The water ran hot. The salts dissolved. I turned off the tap and stood over the full bath and breathed.

Then I walked back into the study.

"It's ready," I said.

He didn't look up. "You can go."

I walked to the door. I was one step into the corridor when his voice reached me one final time, quieter than before, stripped of the indifference, carrying something I couldn't name.

"Your mother," Alexander said, his pale eyes dropping back down to the heavy, ancient ledger open on his desk, the files he had been moving his hand across when I first entered. "She was a Carew before she married Marcus Voss, wasn't she?"

I turned slowly, my brows furrowing as a sudden prickle of unease hit my spine. I had never told anyone in this pack her maiden name. "Elena Carew. Yes. Before she married."

Nothing moved in his face. He didn't look up, but his fingers gripped the edges of the paperwork tightly, the ancient pages crinkling under his touch.

"Go," he said.

I was almost back to my room when I heard it.

Liam's voice around the corner, low, meant for someone else, not for me.

"Just leave her alone. She didn't choose to be here."

"None of them do," another wolf muttered.

"She's different. She's not..." A pause. The sound of footsteps slowing. "Just don't make it worse for the debt girl. That's all I'm asking."

The footsteps moved away.

I stood in the corridor and did not move for a very long time.

Debt girl.

Not chosen. Not bride.

Debt girl.

I walked the rest of the way to my room with careful, even steps. I closed the door behind me. Isla was sitting on the small chair by the window and she took one look at my face and started to rise.

"Hazel..."

"What," I said quietly, "is a debt girl?"

The colour left her face so completely and so fast that I had my answer before she opened her mouth.

And in the silence that followed I understood two things simultaneously.

The first was that my parents had lied to me.

The second was that everyone in this house already knew.