Chapter 103
Kara
The taillights disappear into the storm.
She kneels there in the snow, sobbing, her shoulders shaking so hard I think she might fall apart.
A large hand lands on her shoulder.
A man—bigger than Daddy, with the same black hair as the boys but silver at the temples—pulls her to her feet. His face is carved from stone.
"Enough, Victoria. He made his choice."
Alpha Marcus Sterling. The former Alpha of the Silver Frost Pack.
He looks at me—this tiny, shivering thing on his doorstep—and his expression doesn't change at all. Like I'm a package someone left. An inconvenience.
"She can't stay here, Victoria. This isn't a charity."
Victoria's still crying, mascara streaking her face. "She's Connor's daughter. My niece. Marcus, I can't just... I can't send her to some state facility. I can't."
"Then she works." His voice is flat. Final. "We paid Connor's debts—two hundred fifty thousand dollars that we'll never see again. This girl can work off what her parents owe."
"She's eight years old—"
"And she'll start earning her keep. Cleaning. Dishes. Helping the kitchen staff. She can work and go to school, or she can leave." He looks down at Victoria with something almost like pity. "I'm being generous because he's your stepbrother. But she is not a Sterling. She's a debtor's child. She'll be treated accordingly."
Victoria's green eyes meet mine across the snowy distance.
For a moment—just one moment—I think I see something soft there. Something that might have been love, once.
Then it hardens.
She walks over to me. Grabs my arm—not gently, not like Mommy did, but like she's picking up a dropped grocery bag.
"Get inside before you freeze."
She pulls me across the threshold.
The three boys are standing in the grand entrance hall, watching with identical blue eyes. One of them—the serious one—looks almost... sad?
But their father's voice cuts through: "Asher. Blake. Cole. Listen carefully. This girl is not your friend. She's not family. She's here because her parents owe us, and she'll work to pay that debt. You will not play with her. You will not treat her like one of your own. Understood?"
"Yes, Father," they chorus.
The door slams shut behind me.
The sound echoes through the marble halls—final, like the sealing of a tomb.
I stand there, dripping melted snow onto the polished floor, staring at the massive Christmas tree, the chandelier that costs more than every place I've ever lived combined, the warmth and light and wealth that surrounds me.
None of it's for me.
I'm not a child who lives here.
I'm a debt.
I clutch my snow wolf—the only thing I have left of the parents who promised to come back in "just a few weeks"—and make myself a silent promise:
I'll be good. I'll do everything they ask. I'll work so hard. And then Mommy and Daddy will see I'm worth coming back for.
I don't know yet that they'll never return.
I don't know yet that Victoria will look at my face every day and see the woman she blames for destroying her beloved stepbrother.
I don't know yet that the three boys watching me from the stairs—Asher, Blake, Cole—will become my tormentors. My jailors.
My mates.
All I know is the cold, the fear, and the weight of a debt I didn't choose.
---
The memory shatters.
I'm back in the yacht's pool, Cole's arms around me, warm water lapping at my shoulders.
But I can still feel it—the snow, the cold, Victoria's grip on my arm, Marcus's eyes looking at me like I was nothing.
Blake and Asher are in the water now, surrounding me, their scents mixing in the humid air—ebony and gunpowder and mint, trying to soothe.
But all I can smell is cheap vodka and fear and snow.
"They didn't leave because I was bad." My laugh is broken, jagged. "They left because I was inconvenient. Collateral damage. And Victoria hated me because I looked like the woman who 'ruined' her precious brother."
"Kara—" Cole tries.
"No." I shove away from him, water sloshing. "You knew. All of you. Asher, you said you've known since you were sixteen. You watched me scrub floors and sleep in a storage closet and get called Carrot for years, and you knew it was all because of something I had no control over!"
"I'm sorry—" Asher starts.
"Sorry?!" The word rips out of me. "Sorry?! I thought I was paying off gambling debts! I thought if I just worked hard enough, long enough, I could fix what my parents broke! But it was never about money, was it? It was about her. About Celeste. About Victoria deciding I should suffer for my mother's sins!"
Blake reaches for me. "Baby, please—"
"Don't. Touch. Me."
I'm shaking. Crying. Drowning in the weight of it all.
Eight years old. Abandoned in a blizzard. Marked as a debt before I even understood what debt meant.
"I need—" My voice cracks. "I can't—"
I dive under the water.
Let it swallow me whole.
And for one perfect, silent moment, I pretend I'm eight years old again, still believing my parents will come back.
Still believing I'm worth saving.
My lungs are burning.
The water presses down on me like the weight of ten years—like every lie, every secret, every moment I scrubbed floors thinking I was paying off gambling debts when really I was just the living reminder of Victoria's greatest failure.
But I can't stay down here forever.
I break the surface gasping.
And immediately choke on the air.
Because it's not air anymore. It's a wall of scent so thick I can taste it.
Blake's gunpowder-and-leather explodes across the enclosed pool room, wild and uncontrolled. Cole's mint-and-ozone spikes sharp enough to make my eyes water. And underneath it all, Asher's ebony-and-tobacco rolls out in heavy, suffocating waves.
My wolf keens.
She doesn't care that I'm furious. Doesn't care that they lied. All she knows is that our mates are in distress and their scents are calling to us and we need to go to them right now—
"No," I gasp, gripping the pool's edge with white knuckles. "No, no, no—"
"Kara." Blake's voice is raw. Desperate.
I look up.
He's in the water, five feet away, and his eyes are wrong. The usual blue is rimmed with gold—wolf-gold, bleeding through—and his chest heaves like he's been running. Like he's fighting something inside himself.
"Baby, please." He's swimming toward me, slow but inexorable. "Please don't—don't swim away. I can't—we need to know you're okay—"
I paddle backward instinctively.
And Cole appears in my path.
I didn't even see him move. One second the pool's empty, the next he's there, mint-and-ozone trying to wrap around me like a blanket, and it's too much, I'm being surrounded—
"Let me go!" My voice cracks.
"We will." Asher's still at the pool's edge, fully clothed, but I can see the effort it's costing him. His hands grip the tile so hard his knuckles are bone-white. A vein throbs at his temple. And his eyes—God, his eyes are flickering between blue and gold like a strobe light. "We will, Kara. Just—just let us know you're safe first. Please."
Through the bond, I feel it: their wolves are screaming.
Not with anger. With fear.
The kind of primal, instinctive terror that says mate in danger, mate drowning, mate rejecting us, can't lose her, can't survive without her—
My own wolf whines, caught between my hurt and their distress.
"I'm fine," I manage, even though I'm shaking. "I'm—I just need you to back up."
For a moment, nobody moves.
Then Blake's whole body goes rigid. A low growl rumbles from his chest—not threatening, but agonized—and I feel his wolf fighting to surge forward, to close the distance, to touch me and confirm I'm real and whole and—
"Blake." Asher's voice drops into Alpha-command territory. "Stop. Back away. Three steps. Now."
The words hit Blake like a physical force.
His jaw clenches. His shoulders shake. Through the bond, I feel the internal war—wolf instinct versus Alpha order, need versus obedience—and for a horrible second I think he's going to ignore Asher and lunge for me anyway.
But then he moves.
Backward. One stroke. Two. Three.
He stops with his hands gripping the pool's edge behind him, every muscle coiled tight, gold eyes locked on me like I might disappear if he blinks.
"Good." Asher's voice is still steady, but I can hear the strain underneath. "Cole. You too."
Cole raises both hands, palms out. "I'm not moving closer, Kara. I swear. I just—" His voice cracks. "We were so scared. When you went under and didn't come up right away, we thought—"
"I was only down there for thirty seconds," I say flatly.