Being Sold Is Not the End

Jacinda learned early that a father can be a debt waiting to happen. Hers gambles away everything but his beer money, and when his debts to the local Alpha come due, he pays with the only thing of value left in the house: his daughter. One minute she is stuffing a duffel bag; the next, the seven-foot Alpha she privately nicknames the P.O.W. — Pissed Off Wolf — is hauling her off to his pack lands to cook and clean until a ten-thousand-dollar price is worked off.

She has a plan. Play the cowering Omega. Watch everything. Memorize every hallway, every exit, every patrol, and run at the first real chance. What her plan has no line for is his son.

Colin Smith is the future Alpha, and from the moment the pack's newest purchase walks through his door, his wolf is certain of two things: she is his mate, and he can never say so. An heir claiming a bought Omega would shame the bloodline — so his father schemes instead. The insults, the unfair orders, the endless chores: every cruelty is designed to spark a rebellion Jacinda doesn't know she is supposed to perform. All she sees is a P.O.W. who hates her and a gorgeous, impossible son who keeps showing up anyway — teaching her to link with her wolf in a clearing, cooking for her, taking her for pizza, getting close enough that pretending not to want him becomes its own full-time job.

But Jacinda is hiding more than an escape plan. In this pack, every wolf can speak mind to mind. She can't. Her nightmares keep staging a slaughter she can't explain, and Galina and Keelia, her only friends here, keep whispering about a runaway plan they swear she should join. Then the nightmare comes true on the forest road home: Rogues, an ambush, Galina bleeding out, Keelia dragged away screaming, and Jacinda holding the line until she shatters.

Dying, she wakes in a garden that cannot exist, across from a multicolored wolf with her mother's flower-purple eyes. The Moon Goddess calls her neither dead nor alive and asks her to choose — and leaves a riddle behind: Jacinda does not have one pack. She has three. Only her flowers ever visit the garden.

Jacinda chooses to wake up, and what is waiting is worse. The P.O.W. has been doing his own math: a gambler father who sells his daughter and vanishes, a house wiped clean, friends who spin stories and disappear, Rogues who knew exactly where to strike. He has decided she was planted in his pack on purpose, and this time he intends to prove it, whatever it costs her. To save the ones the Rogues took, Jacinda will have to stop performing weak — and when she wakes in the enemy's cage, she will fight her way out with her teeth bared, showing everyone, the Alpha who bought her, the boy who believed in her, and the enemies who fear what she really is, that being sold was never the end.