Chapter One
“We’re finally getting out of here!”
I have spent thirteen years at the Honourhall Home for Lost Ladies, an orphanage located at the very far north of Scotland. Louise spent fifteen. Henrietta has been here all eighteen. We are all incomparably excited to be leaving, though there is a little maudlin feeling lurking behind the relief.
We are waiting to be freed, because we can no longer be kept. We are grown women who have lived almost every day of our lives behind the stone walls that separate us from the outside world.
Most of us will have to fend for ourselves, but some of us will find husbands before we leave, at the Honourhall Ball. It is for this grand occasion we have been preparing ourselves for years.
We are not permitted to date, or have much interaction with the outside world, such as it is. The island we live on is small, and the people are few. Tomorrow, when the ball is over, we will be given tickets to the mainland, and references for several employers who have taken those who leave the orphanage on as secretaries and such.
The atmosphere in our little dormitory is electric. Everybody is wearing their finest. Everybody except Bea, who is sitting at the window, staring out of it with longing. She’s always been a little strange, and a lot distant.
Her long, dark hair hangs lank and unbrushed around her shoulders. She is wearing her work trousers and a long tunic over the top. Both of them are stained. She hasn’t even bathed.
We all grew up together. In the absence of mothers and fathers, we are sisters, siblings forming a family. That means we put up with the strangeness and the sadness we all have. It comes out in different ways for each of us. Some of us are always cheerful to an irritating degree, others of us are melancholy. And then there’s Bea.
She has been a lightning rod for trouble ever since I have known her, often deflecting trouble that would have found one or the other of us if not for her willingness to take blame and punishment alike.
The others roll their eyes when they look at her. They think she is just being difficult again. I guess I think the same thing.
“Why aren’t you getting dressed, Bea?” I try to encourage her to get ready. I wouldn’t want her to miss out on her future husband just because she wanted to throw a tantrum.
“There’s nothing to celebrate,” she says. “It’s not a ball. There’s not going to be any dancing.”
“Yes, there is. There’s going to be dancing, and cake, and drink.”
“It’s an auction. They’re going to put us up for sale. We’re going to pay for our care by being sold.”
Everybody groans. “Do you have to ruin everything, Bea?” Sasha calls out.
“Don’t listen to her,” Briony replies. “Let her show up like a freakish mess. Let her miss out on a man.”
“We’ve been fattened like pigs for years, and you girls can’t wait to go to the slaughter,” Bea shoots back.
I used to worry about her being bullied, but she’s always been able to defend herself. If it wasn’t for how paranoid she is, and how seriously she takes everything, she’d be one of my favorite sisters. I do worry about what will happen to her now that we are all over eighteen, and it is time for us to find ourselves new homes and new lives.
The matrons have made it clear that this ball is a great kindness, a single opportunity for us to go from the care of the orphanage to the care of a husband. Some of us will never have to worry about providing for ourselves in a world that does not look kindly on orphans.
Bea falls silent and the buzz of excitement returns. A dozen of us are about to go out and into the world. We will not have to wake up and clean tomorrow or spend the day doing darning for the local workers, or otherwise earn our keep according to the orphanage’s liking.
Since our early teens, we have been workhorses. They frame it as learning life skills, housekeeping, looking after the younger girls, cooking for the home, but it is really just drudgery. It will be different when we are married. I would happily cook and clean and tend children for a man who loved me.
I see Bea slip out of the room. She goes quietly, as if she does not want to be noticed. Worried, I go after her. I am about as pretty as I am going to get.
“What are you doing?” I stop her in the hall, where she is poised by the fire escape.
“I’m running away,” Bea says. “I’m not going to the ceremony.”
“But you must come to the ceremony! Running away is impossible. And what happens if you try is unthinkable.”
We look at each other in horror, both aghast at the choices we are making.
“You’re so close to getting out,” I say. “Just stay another night.”
“I told you in there. We are pigs, ripe for slaughter. That ball will be a bloodbath. I will not stay. You should come with me.”
I can’t stop her. I wish I could. I don’t have her bravery, or her paranoia.
“You can be a pig, Emma, or you can be a wolf,” she says. “I choose wolf.”
She always talks in these animal terms. Really, you’d think she’d grow out of it.
“We’re young women,” I remind her. “And we are to meet eligible bachelors looking for wives of good moral character.’
“I am not of good moral character.” She smiles for the first time. “Why do you think we’re behind stone walls?”
“I have no idea.”
“Best way to keep wolves out. Until the pig keepers let them in.”
The girls open the door and look out for me.
“Stop talking to her. She’s crazy. You know she’s crazy. We will be well rid of her.”
Bea has a history of some mental health problems. When we were thirteen, she became convinced we weren’t in an orphanage, but a prison. They put her on pills then. I think she’s stopped taking them.
“She’s off her meds,” Sasha says, echoing my thoughts, but much more cruelly than I would have expressed them. “Plus, let’s be real, she’s not pretty enough to get a husband. Even if she comes to the ceremony, she will be left over.”
“Don’t be cruel, Sasha. Bea is very pretty in her own way.”
Bea is actually gorgeous. I’m not sure why the others don’t see it. Her features are unconventional, but striking. She has big, dark eyes, and Slavic bone structure. If she’d just clean up and put a little makeup on, I think she would put us all to shame.
“I hope you are taken by someone nice,” Bea says to me. “But I’m sorry. I’m not staying.”
She opens the fire escape, and she goes into the night.
“Ladies! Come!” Matron comes bustling up not a minute later. “The gentlemen are waiting to meet you all. Down to the hall at once. Come along. Don’t you all look lovely!”
We forget about Bea instantly in our rush for the ball. Our excitement is at a peak as we are filed down to the hall. Matron takes us around the back, where the stage entrance is. The hall has a large open area for assembly seating, and a stage for productions and such. We have been told that we will go on stage, one at a time, and be introduced to the gentlemen that way. We are all practicing the little speeches we’ve concocted, some of us in our heads, others of us out loud. We will not get a second chance to have a first impression.
“Let me fucking go!”
Bea is dragged in by the security guards. Her clothes are torn in a vulgar way, and she is bloodied around her mouth. They have her caught with a dog catcher’s pole, a silver chain around her neck pulled tight against her throat. She scrabbles at it with her fingers, attempting to escape.
“Enough. The auction is beginning. Shut her up.”
They whip a napkin around in circles until it turns into more of a rope and they shove it in her mouth, tying it behind her head. We are all staring, shocked at the sight of her, at the roughness of her handling, and at the word that just came out of the matron’s mouth.
Auction.
She was right.
We are to be sold.
[divider]
Armand
The room stinks of lust. There must be over a hundred men here, and those who are more than men, all waiting for the auction to begin. Being here, standing shoulder to shoulder with these base creatures fills me with disgust.
There is another scent, a lighter one, but more troubling than the base need of the males. Females in distress, afraid for what is about to happen to them. I can hear gasps from the rear of the stage, as if panic just began running through them.
I turn to my companion. “We should not be here. This is no better than a slave auction. It’s immoral.”
Antoine, my advisor, responds calmly.
“The director is one of our kind, and he reached out to the packs to let them know that he has a female shifter for auction this year. It may be distasteful, Maître, but sometimes distasteful things are necessary.”
The crowd can be split into two: disgusting human men wanting to buy a barely legal girl for their own ends, and shifter males hunting the world for an elusive fated mate.
Our kind does not get a choice in the way humans do. We cannot merely pick someone we like. We need to find someone who makes our chemistry run wild, the animalistic key to our particular locks. Anything less will not do.
I am here because I am nearly thirty years old, and if I do not find a mate and start breeding up a family soon, my pack will revolt. An unmated alpha is a liability in the eyes of the de Lune pack.
I have not been lazy in my search. I have searched for my mate high and low. I have attended parties, mixers, suffered endless matchmaker events, even tried an app created by an enterprising young shifter called Howl. I am beginning to think that there is no female in this world made to suit me, that fate has left me the youngest ever alpha of the pack with nothing but decades of solo aging ahead of me.
They start to bring the girls out. The first one is a pretty blonde in an old-fashioned dress. Her voice wavers as she introduces herself nervously. I don’t think they knew what they were going to get when they came here. I scent confusion as well as fear.
The auctioneer is the orphanage director, a tall man with a belly that speaks to indulging amply in beer. His hair is thinning and his skin is marked with ill health. His power lies in collecting helpless females and selling them. A more grotesque creature does not exist.
“Let’s start at ten thousand euros,” he says. “Do I have ten?”
The bidding is immediate. She is just a human, so half the crowd stays silent. The human men looking for a virginal young women place their bids until finally she is turned in. Another girl follows, and then another. They are all pretty, all innocent, all deserving of better fates than this, but we wolves are waiting for the one of our blood.
I think I am starting to pick up her scent. I think we all are. I feel the stirring of the crowd, shifters starting to show interest, aware that we are all competition for one another.
“Now we have the last of the evening, a spirited girl who requires firm handling,” the auctioneer says, his jocularity at odds with the state of the poor creature who is dragged bodily onto the stage with a silver collar around her neck.
She is not pretty in her current state. She is a dirty, bloodied mess. She is ferocious and she is feral—and I am immediately in love.
You can spend a lifetime looking for something… someone. You can search so long you become certain the thing you are looking for does not really exist. And then, all of a sudden, there it is, as perfect as you imagined, and immediately feeling as though it has always been there, as much a part of you as your own heart.
She is mine.
Instantly.
Irrevocably.
Entirely.
She is mine the way my hand is mine. She is a part of me I did not know I was missing until this very moment.
I feel elation and outrage in equal measure at her treatment.
She looks like she’s been fighting. Not just tonight. Her whole life.
I am immediately, desperately, violently drawn toward her. Every single one of my senses focuses on her as if she were the only creature left in all creation.
The other, better presented girls are nothing. Not even wallpaper. They are background static. She is everything.
I know in this instant, there will never be anything, or anyone other than her.
I stand up and lift my voice above the hubbub of the crowd yet to be brought to order by the auctioneer who is still fussing with the sheet and the gavel.
I say one word, my voice ringing out across the crowd with complete conviction as I claim her.
“Mine!”
There’s a brief pause from the crowd, and then some laughter as those who are human mistake me for a foolishly effusive man. The shifters are quieter, but watchful. They may not be reacting as strongly, but that does not mean they will not try to lay a claim.
“Please, Mr. de Lune. The auction will proceed in an orderly fashion.” The auctioneer tries to impose the schedule, but I do not care about schedules. I do not care about anything other than her.
Some might be patient, let the auction start, feign disinterest, bid as low as possible. I will be doing none of those things. My passion is too intense, and my need is too great. This is not a time to hold back. This is the moment to go all in.
“I want her now. If anyone so much as dares to think about so much as bidding on her, I will kill them.”
There’s a ripple of indulgent laughter from the crowd. Some of the shifters understand the hunger I am experiencing. They wish the same thing for themselves. They wander the world, disappointed at how every pretty, smart, suitable girl is somehow lackluster because she is not the one. I was one of them just minutes ago. Now I am forever changed.
“Sir, the auction…”
“I want her. Now. Ten million.”
There’s a collective gasp. That’s a record price by quite a ways. These girls aren’t normally considered prizes. They are considered instead to be servants, slaves, and toys. Their worth lies in their lack of connections. Their inherent disposability. The highest price paid before this barely cracked half a million.
The money doesn’t matter to me. Ten million is a rounding error on my balance sheets.
The director slams the gavel down. “Sold!”
I move through the crowd with the intention of saving her from this horrible predicament. I notice immediately that the silver around her neck appears to be nearly pure. They’re keeping her nature muted, treating her like a mutt. They’re trying to stop her from shifting. Interesting.
“My name is Armand, pup,” I tell her, crouching next to her. “And I am not going to hurt you. Come with me.”
I speak English to her. Like most educated Frenchmen, my English is better than some English people’s. I know it is accented, but I am sure she can understand me. She will understand the pack too, for all of us speak at least two languages. The de Lune pack has always prided itself on education and refinement. We may be wild wolves and vicious predators, but there’s no reason not to enjoy the finer things in life.
My terrified mate lifts her eyes to mine, and I reach for her, wanting to caress her cheek, wanting to gentle her, reassure her that I will not hurt her. She is safe with me. I am going to take her from this terrible place and I am going to look after her.
She whips her head around and bites my hand hard enough to very nearly draw blood. She is feral, she is terrified, and if she feels the mate bond, she does not know what it is, or what it means. I take the pain without reacting. Best not to show a mouthy pup that it has the ability to hurt.
“Are you done?” I ask the question as mildly as I can.
She looks at me with fury in her dark eyes, and an unmistakable sentiment of loathing as she releases my hand.
“I do not want to stay here a moment longer than I have to, and I can only assume that you also want to go, so let us go, now. Swiftly.”
She pulls away from me, indicating she has every intention of making this as difficult as possible. The crowd is stirring, and I can feel the director watching us. He will want to move on with the auction, but I do not care.
“I can pick you up and carry you out of here if I have to, but I don’t think you’ll like that.”
Fuck. Off.
She doesn’t say it, but I feel it in her energy, the narrowing of her eyes, the curl of her upper lip.
“Second thoughts, Mr. de Lune?” The director raises his voice so everybody can hear. “I’m afraid all purchases are final. Even ones you will quickly come to regret.”
The crowd laughs.
“Some hands, please, to help Mr. de Lune claim his property,” the director calls out.
“No! Nobody touches her besides me.” I snarl the warning. The very idea of seeing so much as another man’s finger on my mate is enough to make me near feral with fury.
Her resistance is exciting everyone. I could drag her out of here, but this is introducing a new complication; she is showing me up in front of representatives from packs all over Europe and beyond. How I handle her will become a matter of record worldwide. They all just saw her bite me. Am I going to stand for that? I cannot.
I have to subdue her before we leave, show everyone that I am not a flailing, useless alpha. Several years ago when I took command of the de Lune pack, I was one of the youngest men to ever become alpha of a major pack, and that has created interest and gossip in equal measure.
Perhaps I am too sensitive, but weakness cannot be shown when you are an alpha. It can encourage others to try to exploit it, and create situations where the entire pack is in danger.
This moment is not just about my mate and me. It is about the whole pack. It is about the stability of the European wolves as a whole. I am on display as much as she is, and it would be very good for my reputation to tame her live.
Just how rebellious can one young whelp be?
“I don’t want to hurt you, but if you don’t come with me right now, I am going to spank you long and hard in front of everybody and carry you away regardless. I want you to get up, compose yourself, and come with me.”
I offer my hand for her to take.
Again she bites it. It hurts more the second time, and the laughter from the crowd is louder.
“You’re going to need a gag, ma cherie,” I growl, picking her up in my arms. She can fight all she likes now, and she does, turning into a human ball of fury, fists, knees, teeth, elbows, feet. Holding onto her is practically impossible.
I can see Daniel and Marcel down in the crowd, ready to come up if necessary. I shake my head. I want to take care of this myself. My mate is fiery and frightened and fierce. A part of me is inordinately proud of what a problem she already is.
The fantasy would be for me to sweep in, throw money around, and carry her off as her rescuer, with her ever so grateful to me and wanting nothing more than to submit to me in bed. This is messier, dirtier; this is going to end more intensely.
She is going to force me to make her obey. Here. In front of everyone. Where I cannot allow them to see me in what they will consider to be weakness. I have to put on a show of what they will call strength.
The director has a chair, which I take for my purposes. Sitting down, I wrestle her over my knee and start swatting her bottom, throwing up the tunic dress that barely covers her upper thighs. I begin giving her what in most circles would be regarded as a good old-fashioned spanking, right there on stage in front of a crowd of predatory shifters and even worse men.
I do not want to hurt her, but I need her submission and there is no way to gain it in this moment besides through force. If I can stimulate her arousal, there is some chance she will succumb to the mate bond and relax.
“I would not have given a dollar for that one,” the director says, standing just off to the side of our little domestic squabble. “She is of feeble mind. I doubt they will give you your money back, but they might let you leave her behind.”
The reason I have so very much money is because people, of all kinds and persuasions, are incapable of seeing value. They are blinded by the obvious. They follow one another around, assuming things that other people like are things they like. Then they call it an economy.
I am used to people saying transparently stupid things, but this outrages me to the point physical violence is dangerously within my grasp. I’d rip the director’s throat out, but I don’t have time right now. I am busy trying to handle a wild creature.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I growl in her ear. “But if you want to be dramatic, we will put on a show.”
“You disgust me, old man.”
Not the first words I thought my mate would say to me, but I see how they’re fair. An eighteen-year-old thinks a twenty-eight-year-old is practically dead. And a twenty-eight-year-old who wants to fuck an eighteen-year-old probably should reconsider everything about themselves. But this is different. This is mate bonding. Nature doesn’t care about social mores in the same way we do. In terms of pure animal connection, we are aligned.
I don’t feel disgust emanating from her. I feel fear and anger, two states that make sense given what is taking place. I can already tell that the girls were not told what awaited them. They were told to prepare for something much more wholesome. But she did not prepare herself. Her instincts told her better. I wish they would tell her better now.
“I can smell your desire. I know I don’t disgust you. Now quiet down and come with me.”
She responds by elbowing me in the torso, flipping off my lap, and stamping on my foot as she tumbles to the floor on all fours, almost as if she’s trying to force a shift that will never happen with that collar on.
A laugh goes up from the crowd. This has turned from an auction to a performance.
I can’t afford to stomach this kind of public disrespect. If she wants to tussle with me in private, that’s one thing. I’d enjoy that. But I have an image to maintain. There are those here who will spread the word if I do not seem every inch the wild, dangerous alpha I appear to be.
“Remember I didn’t want to do this,” I growl. I don’t want to hurt her, but she’s given me no option. Snagging her up from the floor, I pull her back over my knee.
I spank her hard, aiming low for the place where she has the most flesh on her ass. She has long legs and a shapely ass. She needs more meat on her, but she will be fed up when I get her home.
For now, I claim her with my palm, but I am not immune to the sight between her legs, a very pretty pussy covered in glossy dark hair already starting to pout for me, her outer lips swelling and her inner ones presenting themselves like sweet midnight blooms.
My lust surges. I have waited to feel this intensity of connection all my life. I need her, and I know that she needs me. I can see it. I can smell it. I can feel it in my fucking bones.
I pull her head up, my hand fisted in her hair, a thick chunk so it doesn’t hurt, but does control. I lower myself over her body and murmur in her ear.
“Why are you so turned on, if you don’t want this?” I ask the deeply unfair question, knowing full well she cannot help it. Her reaction to me is powerful, chemical, and preordained.
“Tell me you want to be bred. Tell me the only thing you can think of right now is my cock, knotting in your virgin pussy.”
She lets out a moan that very quickly turns into a feral growl. If I had any less control, I would throw her on the floor right here on the stage in front of strangers, sold girls, my pack, and more and breed her until we were both sated.
But she is my mate, and she is hurt enough already, and adding humiliation to punishment in this moment feels cruel. I need her under control, but I do not want to destroy her entirely. I have no idea what the act of being pinned and mated would do to her bruised psyche, and so I restrain myself to simply whipping her like the feral stray she insists on emulating.
She hisses, writhes, and curses at me, her passion and her strength on display. She is putting on every bit of the performance I need her to, almost as though she had been given stage notes. She behaves as though she hates me, as though she cannot tell the difference between me and the director, as if I am a new captor, and not her savior.
Fortunately, I do not have to rely on her behavior. I can scent her true reactions, her real feelings. At first there was fear and loathing, but now there is so much more. Arousal is mixing with fear, mixing with hatred, with outrage. She is furious at being disciplined this way, but she is not shocked by it. She is melting into it, bit by bit, moment by moment becoming more mine.
These brutal fools have clearly given her more than one beating in her life. There is a big different between whatever rough punishment they handed out and what I will do with my discipline.
“Settle, submit, cry if you must, but stop acting out like this.”
[divider]
Beatrix
I hate him, I hate all men. I hate all women too; they’ve not been any better. I hated a lot of the girls I was left with in the dormitories, but them the least—or sometimes more because I never understood why they didn’t see what I saw. They clung to these ideas of being happy even when we were all obviously miserable, and even though I’d been right so many times before, they didn’t listen when I warned them about this.
He leans down and he bites me on the back of the neck. Not a savage playground bite. He settles his teeth over my spine and he holds me there. It’s not a move that feels particularly human. It makes something rouse inside me, something that has been getting bigger and bigger, something I have been struggling to control for years now.
At first, it was just something I felt from time to time, a playful wild thing in my belly. But it has grown to the point I now feel as though it is stretching against my spine and my skin. It is uncomfortable, and it is often angry.
But when he places his teeth on my neck, and when his hand clasps the curve of my heated, punished ass, I feel a sudden calm, as though the storm has always had an eye to it that I was never able to find.
I stop. Not because he told me to, but because he made me feel a little moment of peace in the midst of internal and external chaos.
“Good girl,” he growls, just barely coherent against my skin. “Do you want me to make you feel better?”
He rubs his hand over my cheeks, his fingers just brushing against the seam of my most private place. He touches me as though he owns me, as though my body is his to explore as publicly as he pleases. I should hate him all the more for this, but I am aroused. I don’t know why. It’s a fucking weird reaction to being spanked. I have been punished many times before, but never felt even remotely like enjoying it.
“Do you want me to take you somewhere private? Or do you want me to make you feel better here, and now, in front of everybody?”
He presses his finger between my lower lips, not penetrating me, but spreading them just a little, scandalously exploring part of my body that has never been touched before.
I find myself holding my breath, telling myself I don’t want this while wanting nothing but it. I don’t care about the crowd. I don’t care about anything besides the way I need him and his touch, and how good he smells, and how his voice seems to slide down the inside of my spine, soothing and arousing me at the same time.
“I want to take you home,” he says. “I want to get that cheap silver foil collar off your neck. I want to bathe you, and feed you, and I want you to start a life with me. Now is that what you want? Or do you want me to rut you right here on stage like the wild little bitch you are?”
I arch my hips and I do my best to draw his finger in.
“I don’t know if I can hold off breeding you,” he tells me. “Do you want that? Spread out on the floor, fucked deep? Held in place while you take your mate’s cock for the first time in the eyes of the world?”
“Mmmm…” I let out a little animal sound as his finger finds the very entrance of my body and swirls around it. I have started to pant, to silently beg for his touch with arched hips and desperately tingling clit. I need his touch.
He dips his finger in and out of me, barely entering me, but giving me a taste, then moving down and finding my wet clit, circling it with his finger, tapping the bud now and then.
For the first time in my life, I want a man to touch me. The lust I feel is all consuming. I want him inside me, and the slow circling of his finger around my clit is driving me a kind of crazy I have never felt before.
My hips rise, his finger sinks deeper, and he finds a little scrap of resistance inside me, something nature made for him. I hear him make a soft sound, and I feel him explore it and me.
“You belong to me,” he purrs. “I want to take you out of here before I mate you, but if you won’t settle, I’ll fuck you for the first time here. I’ll show everybody what I’m made of, and what you are made for.”
It’s a potent promise, and I believe it.
“Are you ready to be a good girl and come with me?”
He purrs the question again, and this time I don’t bite him. I give him my permission by stopping fighting him. I can’t do more than that. I won’t do that. He takes that as consent and picks me up, over his shoulder this time, striding straight off the stage and through the crowd with me as his prize.
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