Chapter 7 Primal Instincts

Aria's pov

I tried to fight it. I truly did.

But my limbs felt weak, like they'd turned to water, and Lily was too hurt and exhausted to fight whatever my father had put in my blood.

She curled deep inside me, a wounded thing, leaving me with nothing but shallow breaths and the humiliating certainty that I was being carried like cargo, my body no longer my own.

Hands dragged me down a corridor.

Overhead lights sliced into my eyes with sterile brightness, sharpening the nausea until it clawed at my throat.

Every sound came muffled and distant: clipped footsteps, the creak of a door, voices overlapping in fragments I couldn't hold onto long enough to understand.

A door opened.

Colder air rushed in, and for one sharp second it cleared the fog just enough for me to understand: they were taking me to a cell in Silverfang territory.

Someone shoved me forward. My heels skidded as I stumbled, gripping the hem of the short, tight dress my father had forced onto me.

"Catch her!" someone barked.

They lunged.

I ran.

My legs were unsteady, my vision pulsing at the edges, yet I forced my stride into something that looked like defiance rather than collapse.

I refused to give them the pleasure of watching me break.

A hand snatched my arm. I twisted, but the drug made my reactions sluggish, and I slammed shoulder-first into the wall hard enough that pain burst behind my eyes like shattered glass.

"Still got spirit," a guard sneered, tightening his grip around my wrist as if he enjoyed the fact that I couldn't fight back properly. "Graves women always do."

Blood filled my mouth where I'd bitten my lip, metallic and hot, and I swallowed it down.

Lily stirred inside my chest, slamming against her cage.

The sensation was so strange it almost terrified me more than the guards did: my wolf was there, alive, furious, and yet muffled, as though thick glass separated us.

When she threw herself against it, the impact came through as a dull thud rather than the familiar surge of strength.

[Lilly,] I tried to call, [please-]

Silence answered.

They dragged me toward heavy doors stamped with a crest that turned my stomach to ice. Every pack knew that symbol, even if they'd only seen it in rumors: Rothwell.

My pulse stuttered. The perfume on my throat suddenly felt like a noose.

The doors opened, and the air changed so abruptly it stole my breath.

The guards who had been rough moments ago slowed.

"Out."

A single word, spoken low, without hurry, and yet it landed like law.

The guard's hand loosened at once, the smugness vanishing from his face as he backed away so quickly it bordered on panic.

The doors shut behind them with a finality that made the space feel sealed.

I lifted my head.

He stood several steps away, dressed in black like someone who had made darkness his uniform. He didn't have to move to make the room feel smaller; his presence did it for him.

Damien Rothwell's beauty was the kind that didn't invite worship so much as submission-because there was no warmth in it, only sharpened control, the predatory calm of a creature that had never needed to prove its dominance with noise.

Alpha King.

My throat tightened, and for a moment I couldn't tell whether it was fear or something worse, the instinctive, humiliating recognition of power that lived beneath reason.

Alpha Damien began to walk toward me.

Each step measured. Each step quiet enough that the sound of my own heartbeat felt obscene in comparison.

Only then did I feel a flicker in my mind, faint as a dying star.

[Aria-]

The voice was barely more than a breath, broken and strained, as if it had to drag itself through smoke to reach me.

I almost cried from relief, but I swallowed it, forcing my eyes to remain hard.

Lilly.

[MATE.] Each word cost her. [He is our second chance.]

WHAT?

My breath caught.

Second-chance mates were rare enough to be whispered about like myth, but no one who lived through them called them blessings.

The Moon Goddess only gave a bond again after she had already taken everything from you once.

I wanted to deny it, to laugh at the cruelty of being handed fate at the exact moment my body was too drugged to fight anything-but my instincts didn't laugh.

They went still, like every cell in me had leaned forward to listen.

Alpha Damien's gaze raked over my face.

I forced Clara's arrogance into my posture because it was the only shield I had.

"You ran." His voice was calm, almost conversational, which somehow made it worse. "That suggests you know why you're here."

"I ran because your guards are clumsy." I let my tone carry disdain rather than panic. "If I'm meant to pay a debt, you could at least collect it with competence."

For a heartbeat, something flashed in his eyes, interest perhaps, or irritation, but it didn't warm him.

It sharpened him.

Then he tilted his head slightly, and I realized with sick certainty that he wasn't watching me the way a man watched a woman.

He was scenting me.

The perfume at my throat was suffocatingly sweet, a crude attempt to overwrite truth-but wolves didn't rely on surface.

They read what lived beneath skin, beneath breath, beneath fear.

In that moment, the drug felt like both curse and blessing: it dulled my strength, yet it couldn't fully dull what I was.

Lilly's warning trembled in my mind.

[He'll smell you. Even through it.]

Alpha Damien stepped closer, and the pressure in the room tightened until it felt like I was being pinned by air alone.

His hand came up and caught my chin, not rough, not gentle, simply certain, and he turned my face slightly as if confirming what his senses already knew.

"You're wearing her scent," he murmured.

I refused to answer. Any lie would be measured against the truth in my blood.

His thumb brushed the corner of my mouth, and I realized too late that blood from my bitten lip had smeared there-faint but real.

A single careless mistake.

I felt it before I saw it: the subtle shift in him, the moment his calm fractured like ice under pressure. His nostrils flared.

His throat worked once. His eyes darkened as though something inside him had lunged forward, impatient with restraint.

"Not her," he said under his breath, so quiet it might have been meant only for himself.

My heart slammed against my ribs.

I forced a smile, cold and sharp. "Congratulations, Your Majesty. You can still tell one woman from another."

That should have earned me punishment.

Instead, his gaze held mine with something dangerously intimate-curiosity that tasted like possession.

"Name." The word dropped lower, demanded.

I should have said Clara.

I should have clung to the identity my father had painted onto me like perfume.

But my breath hitched.

When I spoke, my voice came out rough but steady-because pride was the only thing the drug couldn't steal.

"If you want answers," I said, "you'll pay for them."

His mouth curved. Not into kindness. Into a quiet, terrifying certainty.

"Price?" he asked.

The suffocating awareness that the room had narrowed until there was only him, and me, and the ancient pull tightening like a noose around both our throats.

Alpha Damien leaned in slowly.

Close enough that his breath brushed my ear. Close enough that my fingers caught the lapel of his coat, as if my body had decided that falling would be less dangerous if I fell into him.

He paused there, hovering at the edge of contact, the edge of ruin, as though he were savoring the moment before the world changed.

"Whatever you think the cost is," he murmured, voice like velvet wrapped around steel, "I can afford it."