Page 8 of Curvy Sold Mate

“What else?”

“Marcus’s ransom was leverage. An unmated, unbonded she-wolf is vulnerable under pack law—targetable, claimable. The pairing alone doesn’t offer full legal protection.” He heard himself delivering this the way he delivered tactical briefings, clipped and sequential, the structure of facts arranged to prevent feeling from leaking through the joints. “Marriage does.”

The silence lasted four seconds, and he counted every one.

“Marriage,” she said.

“A political marriage. A legal protection. It neutralizes any future claim on you and extends the pack’s security framework to cover—”

“You’re telling me I’m marrying you.”

“Yes.”

“You paid for me, and now you’re telling me I’m marrying you.”

“The ransom and the marriage are separate decisions driven by separate—”

“Are they?” Her voice didn’t rise. It dropped, which was worse—a blade didn’t need volume. “Because from where I’m standing—and I’ve been standing in some interesting places today, Viktor, including the floor of a tent—it looks like a man put a price on me and you paid it. And now you’re standing on a trail in the woods informing me that I’m going to be your wife. Like a delivery. Like terms of a transaction you negotiated without me in the room.”

Every word was true, so he didn’t defend, didn’t reach for the context that would have explained what he’d felt when Chris brought the ransom note, what had moved through him with seismic force when Caitlynn said her name and then his, what his wolf had done to the inside of his chest during the four-hour drive to this place. He didn’t say any of it. How could he?

“It’s not negotiable,” he said instead. It was a fact, and facts were the only language he trusted himself to speak right now.

Her chin lifted. The fury in her eyes had gone past hot into rigid, white-hot, the temperature at which metal stopped glowing and started looking like ice.

“I helped build that ritual,” she said. “I wrote the consent clause. I spent three days fighting Caitlynn over the wording because I believed—I believed—that no woman in this pack would ever again be handed to a man without a choice.” Her voice cracked on the last word. “And now you’re telling me the ritual I built chose me, and nobody thought to ask whether I agreed.”

He had no answer for that, because every answer available to him was the wrong shape—too honest, or too small, or too close to whatever was thrashing at the center of him.

“We need to keep moving,” he said. “Caitlynn needs to examine the shard. The longer it stays in your system, the more it integrates.”

She stared at him, and he could feel the force of it against the side of his face, the way you felt heat from an open furnace. He wanted nothing more than to close the distance between them, put his hands on her arms, and tell her that when Marcus’s man had dragged her out of that tent with dirt on her dress and her hair in her face… it affected him in a way he had not expected.

“Fine,” she said, and the word dropped between them with the finality of a door slamming shut.

She turned and walked, and he followed. The forest thickened around them. Neither spoke, and the bond between them stretched taut in the silence and held.

Chapter 5 - Olivia

The compound gates opened before they reached them. Someone on the watchtower had seen them coming—or smelled them, more likely. After all, Olivia was downwind, covered the residue of a day that had started with a sacred ritual and ended with zip ties.

Kahn was in the courtyard. He didn’t run—her brother had never run toward anything in front of people—but his stride covered the distance in a way that had nothing to do with walking, and when he reached her, his hands closed around her upper arms, and his eyes moved over her face worriedly.

“I’m fine,” she said.

His grip tightened, anchoring her. “You’re not fine.”

“I’m upright, I’m talking, I’m here. That qualifies.”

He swallowed dryly, and she watched the war play out across his face in real time—the muscles around his eyes loosening before the rest of him caught up, the softening lasting half a second before his mouth hardened again. He pulled her in, one arm around her shoulders, the other across her back, and for three seconds she let herself disappear into the bulk of him.

She pulled back before her burning eyes turned into anything visible.

“The shard. In my arm. I need Caitlynn to look at it.”

Kahn’s gaze dropped to her forearm, where the purple veining had spread since the forest. His hand moved to cup her elbow with a gentleness that cost him. “Caitlynn’s in the infirmary. She’s been prepping since we got word.” He looked past her, at Viktor standing six feet behind with the stillness of a man waiting to be addressed or dismissed. “Viktor.”

“Alpha.”