My Own Father Chained Me and Sold Me at Auction for Three Sacks of Silver, Calling Me a Useless Defect — Then the Most Feared King in the North Emptied a Treasury for Me and Snapped My Irons With His Bare Hands
Part 1
The stone floor of the auction hall was cold enough to bruise, and I knelt on it in chains while my own father set a price on my body.
I kept my head down, my tangled hair a thin curtain against a hundred staring eyes.
The hall smelled of roasted boar and spiced wine and something worse underneath, the eager hunger of men deciding what I was worth.
In our world, a wolf who cannot shift is worse than dead.
I was twenty-one years old, and I had never once heard the call of the moon.
No heightened senses.
No strength.
No wolf at all.
To the pack that bred towering warriors, I was a joke the goddess had played.
“Stand up, girl.
Let them see what they are buying.”
My father’s voice carried no warmth.
Only the flat tone of a merchant moving damaged goods.
I struggled to my feet, the iron shackles clinking in the sudden hush.
Beside him stood my stepmother, Lady Cordelia, in velvet, a smirk painted on her lips.
Beside her stood my half-sister Lysa.
Blonde.
Vicious.
An early shifter.
The newly named heir to everything that should have been mine.
“We begin at twenty copper,” called Crale, the auctioneer, a greasy man with a wet smile.
“A defect, yes.
But she is pure-blooded and strong-backed.
She can clean, she can cook, she can warm a bed.”
The laughter that rolled through the hall was the kind that strips the skin off a person.
I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper.
This was not an auction.
It was a public execution of whatever dignity I had left.
My father had buried himself in debt to the Highland clans, and rather than sell his prized land, he had decided to liquidate his greatest shame.
Me.
“Thirty copper,” called a scarred rogue from the back.
“A full silver,” countered a voice that turned my stomach.
Lord Drogan of Murkwood.
A man three times my age who was whispered to send his omegas home in wooden boxes.
His rheumy eyes crawled over my shivering frame.
“Three sacks of silver,” Drogan bellowed, slamming his fist on the table.
The room went dead silent.
Three sacks was the price of a small estate, for a wolfless girl.
My father’s eyes lit with greed.
“Three sacks from Lord Drogan.
Going once.
Going—”
The great iron-bound doors did not open.
They were blown off their hinges.
A wall of freezing wind tore into the hall and snuffed every torch at once, dropping the room into flickering chaos.
A hundred warriors began to growl, and then every one of them went silent under an aura so heavy the air itself seemed to thin.
I gasped.
I could not breathe through the weight of it.
This was alpha command, but older and more terrible than anything I had ever felt.
Out of the swirling snow came armored men bearing the crest of the dire wolf, and parting them like water walked a legend.
King Halvard of Stormhold.
The Beast of the North.
A conqueror who had welded the savage ice packs into one kingdom by sheer strength.
He stood a head taller than any man in the room, wrapped in black fur and dark steel, a jagged scar running from temple to jaw, his eyes a glacial blue that swept the hall with pure contempt.
“Who dares intrude on our business?” my father demanded, his voice shaking.
The king did not so much as glance at him.
His gaze locked onto me, kneeling on the block, and the moment it did, the empty place in my chest where a wolf should have been gave one strange, impossible flutter.
“I am not here to intrude,” he said, in a voice like grinding stone.
“I am here to bid.”
He snapped his fingers.
A guard hurled an iron chest at my father’s feet, and it burst open, spilling raw gold across the floor, enough to buy our entire keep three times over.
“Fifty pounds of northern gold,” the king said, his eyes never leaving me.
“For her.”
My father dropped to one knee, his pride gone in an instant.
“Your Grace, the gold is more than generous, but you must know she is broken.
She has no wolf.
She is utterly useless.”
The king finally looked down at him, and the disgust on his face made my father flinch.
“The only useless things in this hall,” he said, “are the fools who throw away a diamond because it is buried in dirt.”
He climbed the steps of the block.
The crowd shrank back.
He stopped in front of me, close enough that I caught pine and woodsmoke and clean winter air, and he reached not for my hair or my waist, but for the iron binding my wrists.
He closed his fists, and the solid iron shattered like ice.
“Come,” he said softly, and I had no idea why a warlord had just spent a fortune on the most useless girl in the realm — only that I was going to follow him out of that hall and never look back.
