Alpha Draco And His Omega Luna

Sofia

I had stopped counting the days somewhere around month three.

After that, time became something that happened to other people, people who had places to be, people who were expected home for dinner, people whose names hadn't been reduced to a number scrawled on a tag and fastened around their wrist. Mine said 07, that was all I was now.

The cell they kept us in before the auction smelled of damp stone and fear. Fourteen of us. Fourteen women who had, at some point, been someone's daughter, someone's friend, someone's whole world. Now we were merchandise, lined up and catalogued like items in a shop window, waiting to see whose hands we would pass into next.

I had made peace with a lot of things over four years. The cold, the hunger. The particular cruelty of men who had decided that power meant ownership. I had not made peace with this rhe idea of being sold. Of standing on a platform while strangers calculated my worth in dollars.

But here I was.

They came for the others first.

I stood at the back of the holding room and watched them go, one by one, each disappearance punching a small, quiet hole in my chest. Beatrice. Amara. The girl whose name I never learned but who used to hum to herself at night when she thought no one could hear, all gone.

Kara squeezed my hand before they took her. She was trying not to cry, and the effort of it made her face do something terrible this awful, brave crumpling that she immediately smoothed away.

"I'll be alright," she said. To me, or to herself. Maybe both.

I didn't say anything. I held her hand until they made me let go.

Lilly went next. She didn't look at me when they led her out. She kept her eyes forward, her small hands folded in front of her. Lilly had never needed words to say everything, a glance, a tilt of her chin, the careful stillness of her expression. But she couldn't look at me, and that told me more than any words could have.

She was terrified.

We all were. We just wore it differently.

When they came for me, the auction hall was already thick with smoke and the low murmur of men who had too much money and no conscience whatsoever.

I had expected something grimier. I don't know why perhaps because everything else about this life had been grim. But the room they led me into was almost elegant in a twisted, grotesque way. Crystal chandeliers threw fractured light across the walls. Men in tailored suits sat in tiered rows, their faces half-hidden in shadow. Candles burned on iron sconces, their flames casting long, restless shadows that made the whole place feel like the inside of a fever dream.

I walked onto the platform and I did not look down.

I had decided, somewhere in the past four years, that whatever they took from me, they would not take that. My eyes. My spine. The particular way I held my chin when I wanted the world to believe I wasn't afraid.

I was always afraid. But they didn't need to know that.

"Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed bidders, and honoured guests."

The auctioneer's voice sliced through the noise like something serrated. He was a small man with a large voice and the kind of smile that made your skin want to leave your body.

"We have the rare privilege of presenting to you Sofia Fletcher. A true treasure. A masterpiece of refinement. We expect fierce competition for her hand."

I stared at a fixed point on the back wall and breathed.

"Who will start the bidding at five hundred thousand dollars?"

The numbers meant nothing to me. They never had. I was not a number. I was not a treasure. I was Sofia Fletcher, daughter of Marcus Fletcher, Beta to the former Alpha King, and I was going to survive this the same way I had survived everything else by refusing, on some fundamental, bone-deep level, to break.

"Seven hundred and fifty thousand. Do I hear seven hundred and fifty thousand?"

I scanned the crowd without meaning to. Force of habit, four years of training myself to read every room for exits, for threats, for the specific quality of stillness that preceded violence. The faces in the rows were cold and calculating. Some curious, some bored in the way that only obscenely wealthy men could be bored, as though even their cruelty had become routine.

No one here was going to save me.

I had known that. I had accepted it. Still, something small and stupid in my chest kept looking anyway.

"One million dollars. Do I hear one million? Going once... going twice,"

The silence came first.

Not the polite, expectant silence of a room waiting for a number to be called. Something else entirely a sudden, total, suffocating absence of sound, as though the air itself had been instructed to stop moving. The auctioneer's mouth was still open. The men in the rows had gone very, very still.

Then I heard the footsteps.

It was slow and deliberate. The kind of footsteps that belonged to someone who had never once in their life needed to hurry, because the world had always waited for them.

I turned to look.

He was tall, very tall. That was the first thing the sheer, almost unreasonable height of him, the way he filled the doorway without trying, broad shoulders and a presence that seemed to extend several feet beyond his actual body. Dark hair, perfectly dishevelled. A jaw cut from something harder than bone. Eyes that were even from across the room, even in the candlelight, an impossible, electric shade of blue.

He was the most beautiful and most terrifying thing I had ever seen.

And every single person in that room had dropped their gaze to the floor.

The auctioneer. The bidders. The men in their tailored suits who had been calculating my worth in seven-figure increments thirty seconds ago. All of them heads bowed, eyes down, shoulders curved inward in an instinctive, animal submission that made the back of my neck prickle.

He didn't acknowledge any of them. He wasn't looking at them.

He was looking at me.

His gaze found mine across the room and held it, and I felt it physically felt it like a hand pressed flat against my sternum. Something electric and inexplicable and deeply, deeply inconvenient.

I did not look away.

I don't know what made me hold his gaze when every other person in that room had crumbled. Stubbornness, probably. Four years of training myself not to flinch. Some furious, irrational refusal to be the only one standing on a platform who couldn't manage basic eye contact.

He crossed the room toward me without breaking stride, and the crowd parted before him like water.

When he reached the platform, he looked up at me, and up close, the blueness of his eyes was almost violent, like staring into something that had no business existing in a human face.

He held out his hand.

"Let's go," he said.

His voice was low and unhurried, resonating somewhere in my ribcage, and I hated the way it moved through me like a frequency I hadn't known I could receive.

I looked at his hand. I looked at the crowd of bowed heads. I looked back at him.

"I don't know you," I said.

Something shifted in his expression not surprise, exactly. More like the faintest shift. As though he had expected resistance and was, despite himself, almost pleased by it.

"No," he agreed. "You don't."

"Then I'm not going anywhere with you."

I heard the ripple move through the room that collective, horrified intake of breath that told me I had just done something that people in this room did not do. Ever.

He didn't react the way I expected. No anger. No threat. He simply looked at me for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind those impossible eyes, and then before I could so much as step back, he reached up, closed his hand around my wrist, and lifted me clean off the platform as though I weighed nothing at all.

"Put me down!" I drove my fist into his back. Once, twice, but was like hitting a wall.

He walked, and I kept hitting him but he kept walking. The crowd kept their eyes on the floor, and not one of them, not one made a single move to intervene.

"Hey..." I shoved at his shoulder. "I said put me down. I don't know who you think you are, but you do not get to just.. "

"Draco."

A man stepped forward as we reached the door, dark-haired, younger, with a face that was warm where the man carrying me was cold. He was looking at Draco with an expression that might have been concern, or might have been the particular exhausted affection of someone who had been navigating this personality for a very long time.

"Take care of that Xavier," Draco said, without slowing.

The other man nodded once. His eyes cut briefly to mine something apologetic in them, and then he turned back toward the room.

I didn't understand what take care of that meant.

The car was obscene. Black and low and the kind of expensive that didn't need to announce itself. Draco opened the passenger door actually opened it, with his own hand, which struck me as absurd given that he had just abducted me placed me inside with a care that made no sense, fastened my seatbelt, closed the door, and walked around to the driver's side as though this were a perfectly ordinary evening.

I considered running. I did the maths quickly, unfamiliar territory, no money, no allies, nowhere to go. The maths were not in my favour. I stayed.

For now.

He got in. The car started with a sound like a controlled exhale. He pulled out of the lot without speaking.

I stared through the windscreen and tried to slow my heartbeat down to something less humiliating.

"Where are you taking me?" I asked.

"Home."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have right now."

I turned to look at him. In profile, he was even more absurdly constructed, the sharp angle of his jaw, the straight line of his nose, the way he held the wheel with one hand like the car itself was beneath his full attention. He smelled of something I couldn't name. Sandalwood and something darker, something older. Something that made the werewolf in me sit up and pay attention in a way I immediately resented.

"You didn't bid," I said.

"No."

"You just walked in and took me."

"Yes."

"And no one stopped you."

"No."

I let that settle for a moment. "Who are you?"

He glanced at me then just briefly, just a flicker of those blue eyes and something in his expression was almost careful.

"Someone who has been looking for you for a very long time," he said.

I didn't know what to do with that, so I looked back at the windscreen.

A few minutes later, an orange glow appeared in the side mirror. I turned. Behind us, against the dark sky, the building where I had spent the last hours of my captivity was engulfed in flame great churning columns of fire reaching upward, black smoke billowing into the night.

My breath stopped. Kara. Lilly. The others.

"My friends were in there," I said. My voice came out very quiet. Very controlled. The way it always did when I was about to lose it entirely.

He said nothing.

"My friends," I repeated, turning to him, "were in that building."

He kept his eyes on the road. His jaw was set. His expression gave me nothing.

Something cold and hard settled into my chest that familiar weight I had carried for four years. There is no one coming. There is no one who will help you. You are alone, and you have always been alone.

I turned back to the window.

I did not cry.

I had learned, a long time ago, that tears were a luxury I could not afford. So I pressed my lips together, and I breathed, and I watched the fire shrink in the mirror as we drove away into the dark away from everything I had known, toward something I couldn't name, sitting beside a man I didn't know, who smelled like danger and moved like a king and had, for reasons I couldn't fathom, decided that I belonged to him.

I didn't belong to anyone.

I was going to make sure he understood that.