Chapter 3 - Charlize
I feel the tight ropes on my wrists biting mercilessly into my skin as I sit in the cart, wedged between three random women I’ve never met before.
My heart is hammering in my chest, and my lips are quivering. Not because I’m cold. But because I’m scared, confused, and furious at the same time. Two of these other women are sobbing with their heads bowed while the oldest amongst them sits in silence.
Just like me, they too had been sold out to the traders that own this cart. We have no idea where we’re being taken to or what fate awaits us at our destination—wherever that might be.
I still can’t believe this is happening right now. I’m yet to come to terms with the fact that I’ve lost my one chance at escaping this cursed island for good.
Unshed tears sting my eyes while the cart jolts under me and my heart races.
I had it all figured out; the best time to make my move and the exact route to take. I was ready, and I genuinely believed that freedom was within my grasp. Then everything went sideways and spiraled out of control before I even knew what was happening.
***
It starts with the shouting.
I’ve been up before dawn, wearing my favorite dress. Well, I only have two if I’m being honest. But it’s still my favorite. Mostly because it’s the dress that has my hidden pouch.
I lay on my small mattress, going over the plan one more time in my head. Southern docks by midmorning. Find the ship’s quartermaster before the captain, because quartermasters take bribes more easily. Don’t look nervous. Don’t look like I have anything worth stealing.
“You’ve got this,” I whisper under my breath, drawing a deep, long breath.
Then I hear it—Ricky’s voice. It’s so loud it tears through the house, raw in a way I’ve never heard from him.
“Mother! Father!” He bellows, his tone laced with anger and something I can’t label yet. “Where are you??!”
I rise from the bed immediately and reach the door with a few long strides. Curious to find out what’s making that spoiled brat lose his mind, I quietly push my door open, leaving just enough gap to watch the scene unfold.
“My darling!” Elene rushes over to him, already reaching to comfort him. “What is it? What happened?”
“It’s Chloe!” he barks, knocking her hands off before she can even touch him.
“What about her?”
“She’s been sold off!”
My brows knit together, hating how these people refer to the girl like some cheap property.
“What?” Elena’s voice rises.
“Her crazy old man sold her off to traders looking for beautiful Omegas!”
Okay, I did not see that coming—makes sense why he’s so distraught.
“That bastard,” Elena cussed softly.
“What’s going on here?” My father appears out of nowhere and joins them. “Why all the noise?”
“Chloe’s father sold her off,” Elena says to him.
“He did what?”
“What’re we gonna do?” the golden boy snaps at his parents. “I can’t lose her.”
“Don’t raise your voice at me, boy,” Father warns him with a low, firm voice. “None of this would’ve happened if you’d gone out and raised the money for her bride price like a real man.”
Finally, someone said it.
Ricky’s face turned ugly, and he stepped forward. “That’s rich coming from a man who basically lets his first daughter feed his home and take up his responsibility as the breadwinner.”
Wow. Nothing could’ve prepared me for this. The drama just keeps getting interesting.
“That’s enough, both of you!” Elena steps between them with her arms apart. “There’s enough blame to go around. But right now, we need to come up with a plan, and we need to do that fast.”
Ricky combs his fingers through his hair and begins pacing the length of the room. I watch them from behind my door, and although I’d never accept it, a part of me is enjoying this drama.
“Any ideas?” Ricky’s desperate voice breaks the silence.
“Shut up, I’m trying to think!” Father shuns him.
I don’t realize there’s a small grin on my face until Elena’s head snaps in my direction.
Uh-oh.
My heart sinks into my stomach when we lock eyes, and I feel weak in my knees. She doesn’t say anything. But the way she looks at me tells me that a crazy, bold idea—one I’m definitely not going to like—is forming in her head.
“Did Chloe’s father sell her to settle a debt?” The question is thrown at her son.
“No. I told you he sold her off to traders looking for Omegas,” comes his rude response.
“Fantastic.” A small, knowing grin tugs at the corners of her mouth as she stares at me. “Have the traders left the village yet?”
“No. They’re still rounding up some more girls.”
That evil smirk of hers broadens. “In that case, I think I know exactly how to fix this mess.”
“How?” Father and son chorus.
They both trace her gaze until all three of them are looking right at me.
I gulp against the sudden dryness in my throat as I watch them exchange glances as though united by one single thought. Before I can even birth my next thought, they rush at me.
Elena’s hand closes around my arm hard enough to bruise as she yanks me out of my room.
“Wh…what’re you doing?” I stutter, struggling against Elena’s tight grip. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Shut your mouth!” she barks in my face, her bad breath invading my nostrils. “Charles, hold her down!”
My father wastes no time doing as she says. He binds my hands together behind my back and forces me to kneel.
My brain is foggy right now, and I don’t understand what’s actually happening.
“Ricky, get the pills!” she tells him.
“Pills?” Confusion settles on my face.
He sprints toward her room.
“What’s going on here?” I’m almost crying. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Elena crouches before me and looks me dead in the eyes. “Those traders want an Omega, and we’re gonna give them one.”
My brows arch in disbelief as their plan finally dawns on me.
“At least for once, you’re actually going to be useful to us,” she says, her face twisting into something that resembles a mix of irritation and jealousy.
“It pains me to admit it, but you’re prettier than Chloe.
If we strike a good bargain, I’m sure the traders will take you instead.
” A pause. “And my darling Ricky will get his Omega back.”
They’re going to exchange me for Chloe. These people’s hatred for me truly knows no bounds.
“This is a bad idea,” I say, my voice breaking under the weight of my aching heart. “It won’t work. The traders will know that I’m not an Omega. I’m barely even a wolf, remember?”
She laughs evilly. “You naive little thing. By the time I’m done with you, the traders will think they’ve won the jackpot.”
Ricky returns with the pills and I instantly recognize them. They’re heat-inducing pills. On an actual Omega, one pill is enough to send them into heat. On a regular wolf, a little more would act as an aphrodisiac.
On a shiftless wolf like me, however, a lot more is required to create the illusion of being flushed in heat.
These people hold me down, open my mouth—against my struggles—and force-feed me the whole bottle, regardless of the side effects.
When they’re done, I feel strange—sick, like I’m about to vomit.
“Throw up and I’ll end you myself here and now,” Elena warns me with a stern glare that says she’s not bluffing.
After the pills, she dumps an entire bottle of fake pheromones on me. A perfume sold so that lesser Alphas could mate with Beta women and pretend they were with Omegas.
“She’s shiftless,” Ricky says, somewhere above me, sounding uncertain for the first time in his life. “Will it even work on her?”
“It should,” Father replies, his tone dripping with a hint of uncertainty as well.
“Should?”
“It’ll work,” Elena insists, confident. “She’s already starting to burn up, and she smells like enough of an Omega in heat. The traders won’t look too closely at the rest.”
“You’re crazy! All of you!”
I rise. I fight. I scratch, I get my teeth into Ricky’s hand before it’s wrenched away.
“Fuckin’ bitch!” He strikes me across the face.
It doesn’t matter. I continue to struggle anyway.
But I’m one shiftless girl against three wolves. And the pills they’ve forced into me are already working, weakening my whole body.
Everything is fuzzy from here on. My head’s spinning, my legs can barely carry my weight, and my vision is blurry.
They carry me on the cart and ride away from the house. Although I’m disoriented, I know they’re taking me to the traders.
When we arrive at the destination, I hear my father’s voice, negotiating. I see him and his wife through the wooden bars, discussing with three traders.
I can’t really make out what they’re saying, but I hear something along the lines of “this one is prettier, and she’s an Omega in heat.”
The men walk over to the cart and inspect me for a moment. They sniff my scent, check my eyes, and sweep their gazes over my plus-sized body.
I watch them exchange glances before turning to face my family again.
“I agree that she is pretty… and being in heat will draw attention,” one of them says to my father.
“I told you, she’s perfect.”
I don’t hear anything else—not while drifting in and out of consciousness. I see Chloe, though. I see her running to embrace Ricky. I also see coins being exchanged between my father and the traders.
Two men yank me out of my father’s cart, bind my wrists with a rope, and drag me along the dirt. They then toss me into another cart, locking me in with three other girls.
Hot tears stream down my cheeks as the cart starts to move away from our small village. My stepmother waves mockingly at me with a smile so wide it reveals the green stuck in her teeth.
And just like that, I’m out of their lives forever. Not because my plan to escape was a huge success. But because I was traded in for someone more valuable.
I was supposed to run away later tonight. However, fate decided to pull a fast one on me.
My eyes squeeze shut, and tears trickle down my face.
***
The cart stops.
I don’t know how long we’ve been moving. Time has gone strange and slippery, the drug still thick in my blood, my skin too tight and too hot everywhere at once.
The three women beside me—Omegas, real ones—have gone quiet, watching me with a wariness I don’t understand.
One of them leans close enough to whisper. “You don’t smell right.”
If she can tell that something’s off about me, how come those dummies are so clueless? How come they can’t detect that my family tricked them?
My tongue feels too thick for my own mouth, my thoughts arriving a full second behind everything happening around me. It feels like I’m hearing the world through water.
We’re pulled out into daylight so bright it hurts, and my knees nearly buckle the second my feet hit the ground.
A trader’s hand closes around my arm to keep me upright, not out of kindness, of course, just keeping the merchandise moving.
I hate him for it. I hate all of them, the whole chain of hands that passed me from one set of owners to the next without once asking what I wanted.
My only consolation in all this madness is that my money pouch is still there. I feel it against my hip through the fabric of my skirt, and some small, stubborn part of my mind fixes on it like a lifeline. Still there. Still mine.
Whatever happens next, they haven’t found it, haven’t taken it, haven’t managed to strip me of the one thing I built with my own two hands over months of aching backs and split knuckles.
When the drug wears off, when I can string two clear thoughts together again, I will find a way out of this. I’ll buy my way free if I have to. How hard can it be to talk my way past men who only care about coin?
I just need this fog to lift first.
It doesn’t lift. If anything, the world tilts worse the longer we stand there, herded into a line with a dozen other women, all of us facing something I can’t yet make sense of through the haze. I just know it’s a wide stone square with banners in colors I don’t recognize.
Ahead of the line is an entrance coated in golden with embroidery that seems like royalty.
“Come on, let’s go,” one of the traders growls, pulling me along with him.
He and his companions lead me to the front of the line, shouting about me being in heat. There’s some pushback, but then we’re let through. I guess they must have paid to cut in line. It’s not until we reach the giant doors that I realize where we are.
I also hear two girls whispering about how they wish to be picked as the Kings’ shared mate. That’s when it hit me just how terrible things are about to get for me.
Oh, no. This is bad. This is really bad.
These people brought me to the palace—before the three Alpha Kings, presenting me as something I’m not. An Omega.
The Alpha Kings aren’t dumb. They’ll know. This fake heat and fake pheromones won’t be able to deceive them. They’ll see right through the deception. And they might have us all killed.
No, no, no, no, no. Panic sets in.
I’m standing at the entrance, behind three other girls, meaning in no time, I’ll be presented before the Kings. My pulse is racing, and my heart is beating fast. I try to calm myself, but fear has already sunk deep into my bones.
I lift my head, managing to assess the three Alpha Kings seated on their magnificent thrones.
The one in the center is the kind of beautiful that doesn’t invite you closer—it warns you off. White-blond hair, a dark expression, and a pair of ice-colored eyes—the kind that’s intense enough to make anyone shit their pants.
There’s something in the stillness of him that’s worse than anger. Something very dangerous.
To his right stands a man built like more of a beast than a man. He’s not still at all. He shifts his weight, rolls one shoulder, glances toward the line of us with open curiosity, like we’re mild entertainment, not possible brides.
He has this looseness to him that the other one lacks. He’s slightly taller with black hair and green eyes.
And on the left—the last one is younger than the other two, or looks it. His blond hair glows as it catches the light, amber eyes moving over the line of women with none of the boredom or menace of his companions.
He looks tired in a way I recognize but can’t really explain. When his gaze reaches me, it doesn’t slide past the way it did with the others. It stops. Just for a moment. Long enough that the burning under my skin flares hotter, sharp enough to make me suck in a breath.
I don’t understand it. But I feel something strange rising inside me.
Why’s he looking at me like that?
Does he know? Can he already tell that I’m not an Omega?
My heart skips a beat, overwhelmed by fear.
Is this where I die?
My breath hitches in my throat, and a cold shiver sprints down my spine.