The rope around my wrists was tighter than it needed to be, and I'd stopped trying to work out whether that was cruelty or carelessness. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe both amounted to the same thing when you were the one bleeding under the knot.

I heard the crowd before I saw it — a low, restless murmur that rose and fell like something breathing, the particular sound a market makes when the goods being sold are still warm. My stomach had been in knots since dawn, but it was that sound, more than the rope or the collar locked cold against my throat, that made the fear finally settle into my bones instead of just circling above them.

A hand shoved between my shoulder blades, rough and impatient. "Move."

I stumbled forward onto the platform, and the wood creaked beneath my bare feet like it resented the weight of me. The morning air hit my skin, sharp enough to raise gooseflesh, and I hated more than I'd expected to hate anything — how exposed it made me feel. Not just my body. Something further in, something I'd been trying to keep locked away since the day the Calloway banners came down.

I lifted my chin anyway. It was reflex more than defiance at that point, muscle memory from a father who used to tell me, half-joking and half-deadly serious, that a Calloway never looks at the ground, not even when the ground is the only safe place left to look. He was dead now. The pack he'd built was ash and rumor. But apparently the habits he'd drilled into me outlived him better than anything else he'd left behind.

"Lot Fourteen," the auctioneer called, his voice carrying easily over the crowd, pitched for maximum effect, like he was proud of the merchandise. "Daughter of the late Alpha Calloway. Untouched. Good breeding line, for those of you who care about that sort of thing."

The laughter that followed rolled through the yard in a wave, ugly and casual, the kind of laughter that costs the people making it nothing at all. I forced myself to find its source, forced myself to memorize the faces — a promise I'd made in the dark the night before, when sleep wouldn't come and rage was the only thing that felt like it might keep me standing upright. If I survived whatever came next, I wanted to remember exactly who had laughed while I stood there like livestock.

"Do I have an opening bid?"

A hand rose near the back of the crowd, and then another, and the numbers began climbing in that flat, businesslike cadence auctioneers seem to learn from birth. I made myself stop listening to the specific figures. Listening meant understanding what those numbers represented, and understanding that was going to break something in me that I still needed intact for whatever came after this.

That was when I saw him.

He wasn't bidding. That was the first strange thing — he was simply standing there near the front of the crowd, arms crossed over his chest, watching me with an intensity that didn't match the casual posture of the men around him. There was something unnerving about the stillness of him, like a man deciding whether to step into a fire or douse it, and hadn't yet made up his mind which.

He was tall in a way that seemed to rearrange the space around him — not just his height, but the way the men near him had unconsciously widened their circle, giving him room without appearing to notice they'd done it. Dark hair. Darker eyes, even from this distance. A jaw that looked like it had forgotten how to relax sometime in the last decade and never bothered relearning.

I knew who he was before anyone said his name aloud. Some part of me had known the second I stepped onto that platform and felt the crowd's attention shift toward the front row like a held breath.

Kade Ashworth. The Alpha who had ended my father's pack. The reason I stood here at all, bound and barefoot and being sold like a length of good rope.

"Two hundred," someone called out.

"Two-fifty," another voice answered, closer.

Kade Ashworth still hadn't said a single word. He was only looking at me, and there was something in the particular quality of that look — assessing, almost hungry, entirely too controlled — that made me feel more exposed than the platform itself ever had. I didn't understand it yet, not fully, not the way I would within the hour. But I could see something coiling tighter behind his eyes with every number the auctioneer called, like a leash being pulled taut by a hand that hadn't decided whether to let go.

"Three hundred," someone else offered, and I watched his jaw tick at the sound of it.

The bidding kept climbing around him, indifferent to whatever storm was building behind that carefully blank expression, and I found myself watching him instead of the crowd, cataloging the tension in his shoulders the way I'd catalog an enemy's weak points, though I couldn't have said, in that moment, which side of this transaction I actually wanted to win.

"Do I hear four hundred?"

"Eight hundred."

The yard went utterly silent.

It was him, of course. His voice hadn't been raised — it hadn't needed to be. There was a particular quality to it, low and absolute, that made every head in the crowd turn toward him the way wolves turn toward a distant howl, some ancient recognition kicking in before conscious thought could catch up. I watched three other bidders lower their hands without a word, like they'd been struck, and understood, watching it happen, exactly how much power was standing in front of me wearing the shape of an ordinary man.

The auctioneer actually laughed, startled into it. "Alpha Ashworth, that's — that's triple the going rate for—"

"Do you want the money or not."

It wasn't posed as a question, and nobody in that yard was foolish enough to treat it as one.

"Sold," the auctioneer said, a beat too quickly, like he wanted the transaction finished before anyone had time to reconsider. "Lot Fourteen, to Alpha Ashworth."

The crowd's attention slid away from me almost immediately, already drifting toward the next lot, already forgetting the girl who'd just watched her entire life get reduced to eight hundred coins. I stood there with my wrists still bound, my pulse loud in my own ears, and made myself breathe slowly through the part of me that wanted, very badly, to scream.

He climbed the platform himself. That struck me as strange even before Dorian later confirmed it, alphas didn't usually bother with the physical logistics of a purchase; that's what handlers were for. But Kade Ashworth took the three wooden steps like he wanted a closer look at exactly what he'd just bought, and something about the deliberateness of it made my skin prickle.

Up close, he was worse. Or better. I genuinely couldn't tell which part of me was answering that question.

"You're smaller than you looked from the crowd," he said, studying me the way you might study a piece of furniture you were reconsidering.

"You're ruder than I expected," I said, "from a man who just paid for a person like she's livestock."

Something flickered across his face — not anger, which I'd braced for, but something closer to reluctant amusement, like I'd surprised him without meaning to.

"You have a mouth on you."

"I have a name." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "It's Isla. Not Lot Fourteen. Not 'her.' Isla Calloway."

"I know exactly who you are." His voice dropped low enough that it seemed meant only for me, a private register beneath the noise of the yard. "That's why I bought you."

My stomach turned over slowly, like something unmooring. "For ransom, then. Or leverage. Whatever it is your people do with the daughters of dead alphas."

"Maybe."

"Maybe?"

He reached out and closed one hand around my bound wrists, testing the rope with an almost clinical thoroughness, and I hated — genuinely hated — the way my pulse leapt at the contact regardless of what my mind thought about it.

"I didn't plan on buying you," he admitted, quiet enough that I had to lean in slightly to catch it. "I don't have a good explanation for why I did. So don't ask me for one, sweetheart, because whatever I gave you wouldn't make either of us feel better about it."

"Don't call me that."

"I'll call you whatever I want." His grip on my wrists didn't tighten, exactly, but something in his tone did. "You're mine now."

The word landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples through every part of me I hadn't braced in time. Mine. As though I were an object capable of belonging to someone. As though eight hundred coins could erase twenty-four years of being a person with a name, a father, a home — even a home that was ash now, even a father who was dead.

"I am not yours," I said, and made certain every word left my mouth steady, even as my hands, still bound, trembled faintly at my sides. "You bought a body. You didn't buy me."

For one unguarded second, something in his expression cracked open — surprise, I thought, that I'd said it directly to his face instead of only thinking it, the way anyone sensible would have.

Then it closed again, faster than it had opened, like a door remembering it was supposed to stay shut.

"We'll see about that," he said, and drew a blade from his belt to cut the rope from my wrists himself, as though he wanted to be the one who freed me and chained me in the very same motion. "Walk. My men will take you to the carriage."

"And if I run?"

He leaned down, close enough that I felt his breath against my ear, and every instinct in my body told me to step back. I didn't move.

"Then I'll enjoy the chase," he said. "But you won't clear the tree line before I catch you. And I don't think you want to find out what happens when I do."

I believed him completely. That, somehow, was the worst part of the whole morning.

I walked toward the waiting carriage with my chin held level, because my father was dead and my pack was ash and the only thing I had left that no one had managed to auction off yet was the way I carried myself through a room and I was not, under any circumstances, going to let Kade Ashworth take that from me too.

Behind me, I heard him murmur something to one of his men, pitched too low to fully catch, except for my own name in the middle of it, and something that landed, unmistakably, like a warning.

I didn't turn around to ask what it meant.

I had a feeling I'd find out soon enough. I always did.