The Alpha King Chose the Hooded Woman — Then She Learned Her Love Was Killing Him

Part 1

I was the woman everyone looked past.

That was the point of the hood.

In the mating auction hall, under the cold stone archways of the great castle, twenty women stood on a raised platform like something being sold at market.

Which, of course, we were.

I was the one no one could see.

Heavy wool shrouded my face completely.

Not even my hands were visible.

The woman beside me was beautiful once — you could still see it in the architecture of her face, in the way she held herself even now as the auctioneer listed her qualities like livestock.

She was weeping quietly.

I didn’t blame her.

At least she could show her face.

Behind my hood, I held myself still and thought about what my father had said when he left me here.

No one will bid on a woman who hides her face, Nora.

When no one does, I’ll have the right to sell you properly.

As a slave.

He hadn’t said it cruelly.

He’d said it pleasantly, like a man who has waited a long time for something and is finally going to get it.

He had hated me my whole life for what I am.

A witch.

My magic had manifested when I was thirteen — fire, wild and untrained — and my father had immediately had it bound, sealed away.

He couldn’t have it known that his daughter carried a witch’s blood.

It would have destroyed him.

So I became the family’s secret.

Hidden at home, then hidden at the auction, my face covered not just by wool but by the weight of a crime I may or may not have committed — the death of my sister’s betrothed in a fire that everyone agreed had my name on it.

I couldn’t prove I hadn’t done it.

My bound magic meant I hadn’t been able to call fire in years, but nobody cared about that.

They cared about the brand on my forehead.

The witch’s mark.

The seal burned into my skin when I was seventeen.

Proof of what I was.

Proof, they said, of what I’d done.

So I kept my face covered.

Because the moment anyone saw the mark, they would know, and knowing would be worse than not being chosen at all.

The auctioneer’s voice droned on.

The hall was nearly empty.

My father’s plan was working.

Then the doors burst open.

The noise in the room didn’t fade.

It simply stopped.

Every conversation ended mid-word.

Every head turned.

I felt it before I saw anything.

A presence rolling through the doors like a tide.

Not the ordinary dominance of an alpha — I had felt that before, had grown up around it.

This was something else entirely.

This was the kind of power that comes from a bloodline so pure it has become myth.

Alpha King Dane of Arttoria walked into the hall as if he owned it, which he did.

Tall.

Pale gold hair.

Eyes the color of winter frost.

Women in the crowd stepped back.

The auctioneer could not find his voice.

I held very still under my hood and thought: He’ll look at the others.

He’ll take one of them and leave.

He doesn’t know I exist.

The king’s footsteps moved down the platform.

A pause at the first woman.

A pause at the second.

The third.

Then his footsteps stopped directly in front of me.

The entire hall went silent in a way silence rarely achieves.

I kept my head bowed.

I stared at the stone beneath my feet.

My hands, hidden inside the wool, were shaking.

“I’ll take her,” the king said.

The hall erupted.

I couldn’t breathe.

They led me to him.

The king looked at me — or rather at the darkness inside my hood where my face should have been — and said four words I had not prepared for.

“I will not look.”

He said it simply.

An offer.

A contract.

Marry me, be my queen, give me an heir.

And I swear on my crown that I will never look beneath your hood.

I waited for the condition that would make this a trap.

He told me then.

His eyes on the place where my eyes would be.

“The only thing I ask,” the king said, very quietly.

“Is that you never expect me to love you.”

“I cannot love.”

“I will not.”

“This is not a failing I intend to remedy.”

I almost laughed.

My entire life, everyone had wanted to look at me against my will.

The one thing anyone ever wanted to take from me was the face I kept covered.

The king was offering me protection from the one thing I feared most.

In exchange for the one thing I had never expected to miss.

I agreed.

I had no choice.

And for weeks, I told myself the arrangement was perfect.

A cold king who wanted nothing.

A safe house.

A life where no one could see the mark on my face.

I told myself this every morning when his servants came to help me dress.

I told myself this every evening when he arrived at my chamber door and knocked — always knocked — and waited for me to answer.

I told myself this for three months.

And then I woke one morning to find frost spreading across my husband’s chest as he slept beside me.

Frost.

In summer.

On skin that had always run cold but never like this.

When the frost appeared on his chest, I finally understood what the cold in his touch had always meant.