(Sanya’s POV)

I have not left this room in three days. I know because I have counted every meal they slid under the door — six trays, two a day, and I have eaten from four of them.

The first tray I threw against the wall. Rice and stewed vegetables hit the plaster and slid down in a slow, satisfying smear that looked exactly the way I felt. The second tray I ignored on principle. By the third I was hungry enough to stop being dramatic, and the fourth and fifth I ate sitting on the floor with my back against the bed because the chair was too close to the window and the window faced east and east was the direction of the smoke and I couldn't look at that sky without my lungs forgetting how to work.

The sixth tray is sitting by the door right now. I haven't decided yet.

My phone was the first thing they took. Before the bolt even slid home, Garrett's hand was out — flat, open, patient, the way you'd ask a child to hand over something they shouldn't have. I gave it to him because the alternative was watching him take it, and I wasn't going to give him that satisfaction. Without it, the silence has no cracks. No way to reach anyone. No way to know if anyone is trying to reach me.

Three days in a room I've slept in my entire life, and it has never felt this small. The walls are the same faded yellow they've always been. The ceiling still has that water stain shaped like a crooked hand. My books are still on the shelf, lined up in the order I arranged them when I was fourteen — alphabetical, because fourteen-year-old Sanya believed that if everything had its proper place then the world would behave accordingly.

Fourteen-year-old Sanya was an idiot. But I miss her confidence.

The silence is the worst part. Not the locked door. Not the trays. Not even the fact that my brothers have turned this room into a cell with a bedspread. It's the silence. Three days of it, pressing against the walls like something physical, filling the space where sounds should be — footsteps on a path, a mallet against wood, the clink of a teacup being set down on a railing.

His footsteps.

I catch myself doing it on the second morning. My body goes still in the middle of reaching for the water glass, my head tilted toward the door, my ears straining for a sound that isn't coming. Footsteps on the hall floorboards. His particular rhythm — unhurried, even, the walk of a man who has never needed to rush because he trusts himself to arrive exactly when he means to.

I'm listening for Aaron.

I curl my fingers into my palms and press. Hard. The nails dig into the soft part below my fingers and the pain is small and sharp and specific, and it gives me something to focus on that isn't the door. White crescents appear in my skin. Four on each hand. I stare at them until they fade, and then I press again because the silence is still there and my ears are still tilted toward the hallway and I cannot — I will not — listen for a man who did not come.

He did not come.

Those four words are the only furniture in my head now. They sit in the centre of every thought like a table I keep walking into. I wake up and there they are. I eat and there they are. I lie in the dark and count the cracks in the ceiling and there they are, waiting, patient, immovable.

He did not come.

Garrett's version is simpler. Cleaner. He never planned to come. Men like him use women like you to pass time. It's a tidy sentence. It wraps the whole thing up in a bow — no loose ends, no questions, no room for the kind of doubt that eats you from the inside. If I believed Garrett's version, I could be angry. Angry is clean. Angry has edges you can hold onto.

But there's the smoke.

That column of black climbing into the grey sky from the direction of his pack. I keep seeing it every time I close my eyes — thick and wrong, the kind of smoke that doesn't come from accidents. And the question that lives underneath Garrett's tidy sentence, the one I can't stop circling: if Aaron never planned to come, then what was burning?

The silence doesn't answer. The silence does what my brothers' words couldn't. It takes Garrett's sentence and plants it in the quiet the way you plant a seed in wet earth, and three days of nothing — no Aaron, no message, no explanation, no footsteps on the hall floor — give it time to grow roots.

By the third evening, the seed has become something I can almost believe. Not completely. Not all the way down. But enough that when I press my nails into my palms, I'm not sure anymore whether I'm stopping myself from listening for him or punishing myself for still wanting to.

On the third evening, the bolt slides back.

I hear it from the bed where I've been lying on my side staring at the wall, which is a deeply productive use of my time. The click of metal and then the creak of hinges and then Garrett's voice, careful and measured, as if the words have been rehearsed: "Come downstairs."

I don't move right away. Not because I'm being defiant. Because my body has spent three days in a space the size of a closet and it has forgotten that other rooms exist.

"Sanya."

"I heard you."

I sit up. My hair is a disaster. My clothes are the same ones I wore to the crossroads — mud still on the hem, dirt still under my nails from when I clawed at the ground while they dragged me. I look like a woman who has been locked in a room for three days, which is exactly what I am, so at least my appearance is honest.

The kitchen table is set with tea and cups and a plate of biscuits arranged in a careful circle, as if the presentation of snacks can make whatever is about to happen feel civilised. Derek sits on one side. Garrett on the other. The chair at the head of the table is empty. The chair at the foot — the one that used to be my mother's — is pulled out, waiting for me.

I sit. I don't touch the tea.

Derek opens his mouth and Garrett puts a hand on his arm — a small gesture, barely visible, but I see it and I understand it. Derek is not allowed to go first. Derek will make this worse. Garrett is the one with the script.

"We've made an arrangement," Garrett says. He doesn't look at me when he says it. He looks at the table, at the biscuits, at his own hands folded in front of him. "Alpha Tyron Stone of the Blood Moon Pack has expressed interest in a union."

The words land in the kitchen like stones dropped into still water. I feel the ripples spread outward through my chest, through my stomach, through the backs of my knees where something goes cold and liquid.

"A union," I repeat. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. Someone calmer. Someone who is watching this happen from across the room instead of sitting in the chair with her dirty nails and her mud-stained hem.

"He's an Alpha," Derek says, and Garrett's hand tightens on his arm but Derek pushes through it the way he pushes through everything — with force and no finesse. "A real Alpha, Sanya. Blood Moon Pack. That's power. That's protection. That's a future that actually means something."

"For whom?" The question slips out before I can stop it, and I see Garrett's jaw tighten the way it does when a conversation is departing from the script.

"For this family," Garrett says quietly. "For our parents' legacy. For the reputation they spent their lives building. This is what they would have wanted."

Our parents. He's invoking our parents.

My mother who planned her own wedding and chose her own dress and ate last at her own reception but never — not once, not for a single day of her life — lost her posture. My father who served her first at every meal. My parents who loved each other with the kind of steady, unperformative devotion that didn't need an audience.

And Garrett is sitting at my mother's kitchen table telling me that they would have wanted their daughter sold to a stranger because their sons couldn't be bothered to ask her what she wanted.

I look at Derek. I search his face for the boy who carried me on his shoulders through the market when I was five. The boy who made up songs about dragons and taught me to whistle with two fingers. I look for him — really look, the way you look for something you've dropped in the dark, on your hands and knees, running your fingers across the floor.

I find nothing.

I look at Garrett. I search for the boy who read to me when I couldn't sleep. The boy who braided my hair on school mornings because our mother was already at work and he was the only one with the patience to get the parts even.

Nothing.

These are not my brothers. These are men who wear my brothers' faces and sit in my brothers' chairs and invoke my parents' names to justify decisions that my parents would have burned this house down before making. These are strangers with authority over my life, and they are using it with the calm, administrative efficiency of men filling out paperwork.

"You've never met him," I say. It's not a question.

"I have," Garrett says. "Briefly. At a council gathering. He's — impressive."

"Impressive."

"Powerful. Well-positioned. The pack is strong."

"And what am I in this arrangement? The dowry? The signing bonus?"

Derek's face flushes. Garrett's doesn't change. Garrett's face never changes. He has spent twenty-seven years practising the art of looking like nothing affects him, and he has perfected it to the point where I sometimes wonder if he's actually feeling anything behind those flat brown eyes or if the machinery has simply replaced the man.

"You're the Luna," Garrett says. "You'd be his Luna. That's not nothing, Sanya."

"I didn't say it was nothing. I said I'm a person, not a contract term."

The kitchen is very quiet. The tap drips. A floorboard settles somewhere overhead. The biscuits sit in their careful circle and nobody eats them.

I could fight this. I could scream and throw the tea and refuse and make it ugly and loud and dramatic, and at the end of it I would still be sitting in this chair because I have nowhere else to go. My brothers control the pack structure. No other pack will take in a she-wolf who publicly defies her guardians — that's not courage in this world, it's contamination. I have no allies, no money of my own, no way to reach Aaron even if I knew where he was. Even if he was still —

I stop the thought. Press my nails into my palms. The crescents are deeper this time.

If this is my life now, then I will live it the way my mother lived hers. Not with joy. Not with belief. But with posture. My mother scrubbed floors in her early marriage. She cleaned and cooked and served and endured, and through all of it she kept her back straight and her chin level and she never — not when the money ran out, not when the neighbours whispered, not when the world told her she was less — she never let them see her fold.

I will not fold.

If I am going to walk into a marriage I did not choose, in a pack I have never seen, beside a man I have never met, I will do it with my chin up and my shoulders back and whatever is left of my dignity held between my teeth like a blade.

"Fine," I say.

One word. It leaves my mouth and the air in the kitchen changes — something settles, something tightens, something closes. I feel it the way you feel a door shutting in a house you're standing inside. Not the slam. The click.

Derek exhales. The relief in it is so obvious it's almost funny. He's been holding his breath, I realise. Genuinely holding his breath, as if the possibility of my refusal was something his lungs couldn't accommodate. He reaches for a biscuit and bites into it and the crunch is offensively casual.

Garrett nods once. That's all. One nod, as if I've confirmed a delivery time or agreed to a meeting, and the transaction is complete.

I push back from the table and stand. My legs are steady. My hands are not shaking. My face is the blank, carefully composed face I have been practising since I was old enough to understand that showing a man your feelings is the same as handing him a weapon.

I walk back to my room. The door is open now — they didn't lock it behind me. How generous. A cell with visiting hours.

I sit on the edge of the bed. The water stain on the ceiling is still shaped like a crooked hand. The books are still alphabetical. The sixth tray is still by the door, untouched.

And somewhere behind my ribs, behind the blank face and the straight posture and the single word that closed the door — somewhere in the part of me that I have just locked from the inside — there is a porch. A crooked porch that leans to the left. A mallet against wood. A cloth bundle with shaved coconut packed tight. A cup set down first, without being asked.

A grin. Shy and proud at the same time.

A sweet start.

I close that door. I turn the lock myself. Not because the memory deserves to be shut away, but because carrying it into whatever comes next would break me, and I have already decided that I will not break.

Alpha Tyron Stone of the Blood Moon Pack.

My future husband.

A man I have never met.

I pull the sixth tray toward me and eat the rice cold, because she-wolves eat last and I might as well start practising now.