I Cut Our Secret Mate Bond, Why Are You Begging at My Northern Throne?

Frost coated the cracked glass of my cabin window when the front door flew open with a violent bang.

The cold morning air rushed inside, followed by heavy boot steps.

I turned from the small hearth, a chipped kettle in my hand.

Julian stepped across the threshold, his broad shoulders filling the doorway. He wore a tailored charcoal jacket lined with wolf fur, his hair neatly styled, looking every bit the proud Alpha heir who had secured a prized political alliance hours before.

Luna Evelyn followed right behind him, wrapping a heavy cashmere coat tightly around herself. She wrinkled her nose the moment she stepped inside, as if the air in my home carried a foul stench.

Julian didn't look at my face. His gaze swept over the sparse room—the narrow cot, the rough wooden table, the tiny stack of firewood.

"Pack your things, Chloe," he said, his voice flat and practical. "You need to be completely out by noon."

I held the handle of the kettle, my fingers perfectly still. "Out?"

"Did you think you were staying here?" Evelyn sneered, taking a step forward on the creaking floorboards. "Selena's personal attendants arrive from Silvercrest this afternoon, along with two transport carriages of her imported luggage. Do you expect her ladies-in-waiting to sleep in the common barracks?"

"This cabin is assigned to kitchen staff," I said evenly. "It has been my home for six years."

"And today it becomes quarters for guests of actual importance," Julian cut in, his jaw tightening with irritation. "Don't make this difficult. Grab your clothes and clear out."

There was no trace of the man who had held my waist against the training fence two nights ago. No trace of the boy who had promised me a mating bite under the harvest moon.

He was just a master ordering a servant out of his sight.

"I have chores in the scullery until eleven," I replied quietly. "I will move what is mine after my shift."

"You won't move anything later," Evelyn snapped. "You'll leave right now."

Before I could answer, Evelyn strode across the small room toward the wooden shelf mounted beside my cot.

She grabbed the hand-carved cedar comb sitting on the top tier—the last thing my mother had given me before she succumbed to fever years ago.

"Luna Evelyn, don't touch that," I said, my voice dropping an octave.

"Don't tell me what I can touch in my own pack territory," Evelyn hissed.

With a vicious flick of her wrist, she hurled the comb out the open front door. It bounced off the wooden steps and landed face-down in the freezing, churning mud of the path outside.

A faint crack echoed into the quiet morning.

"Everything on this land belongs to the Alpha," Evelyn said, turning back to sweep her arm across the rest of the shelf.

My mother’s embroidered wool shawl, folded neatly in the corner, was yanked from its perch. Evelyn didn't even look at it as she dragged it through the dust and threw it into the cold slush outdoors.

Next went the small tin box holding my mother’s silver thimble and pressed wild clover. It struck a stone near the threshold, the lid popping off, scattering the dried petals into the dirty puddles.

"Stop," I said.

My voice wasn't loud, but it cut through the room like the scrape of iron.

Evelyn paused, her hand hovering over a small ceramic teacup on the table. A mocking smile stretched across her painted lips.

"Or what, orphan? You think you have rights here? You are a stray who survived on our scraps. You don't own property. You don't own keepsakes. If it's on Red Moon land, it belongs to the bloodline."

She pushed the teacup off the edge of the table.

It shattered against the floorboards into half a dozen jagged pieces.

I looked down at the shards, then up at Julian.

He hadn't moved to stop his mother. He stood by the hearth with his arms crossed over his broad chest, his expression thoroughly bored, as though watching an unruly dog get disciplined.

"Julian," I said calmly.

He sighed, shaking his head as if I were the one exhausting his patience.

"Don't look at my mother like that, Chloe. You should be thanking her for showing restraint."

"Restraint?" I echoed, the word cold on my tongue.

"Selena wanted you banished beyond the pack perimeter," Julian said, stepping closer. He looked down his nose at me, his Alpha scent rolling off him in heavy, suffocating waves designed to force an Omega to bow. "She knows you made a spectacle of yourself at the pavilion last night. She wanted you cast out into the rogue territories with nothing."

I didn't blink. I didn't drop my chin. The pressure of his aura pressed against my temples, but inside me, nothing yielded.

"I talked her out of it," Julian continued, pride creeping into his tone. "I convinced my father to let you stay on the territory. You're being reassigned to the pack clinic's storage basement. You'll wash linens and haul medical waste."

A dark, windowless cell beneath the clinic where they kept expired tinctures and soiled bandages.

"You'll still have a roof over your head," Julian said, leaning down slightly so his face was inches from mine. "You'll still get a bowl of broth twice a day. Any other Alpha would have had an insolent Omega whipped for humiliating him in front of the Silvercrest delegates. Be grateful I remember our past enough to show mercy."

I stared into his dark eyes.

I didn't yell. I didn't plead. I didn't let out a single ragged breath.

I just watched him, completely silent, letting the stillness stretch between us until the casual arrogance on his face began to fracture.

Julian shifted his weight. His eyes flicked from my left eye to my right, searching for the tears that usually came when an Omega was discarded.

He found nothing. Only an icy, bottomless quiet that made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

His lips twitched. He opened his mouth to say something more, but under my steady, unblinking gaze, the words died in his throat. A strange flicker of unease flashed through his features, pulling his brow into a tight, nervous knot.

"Julian, come," Evelyn called from the doorway, wiping her palms with a silk handkerchief. "Don't waste your breath on a mute simpleton. The luggage carts are already crossing the western bridge."

Julian broke eye contact first, clearing his throat and adjusting the lapels of his jacket.

"Be out in twenty minutes," he muttered, turning his back on me and hurrying through the doorway as if eager to escape the suffocating silence of the room. "If your rags are still here when Selena's staff arrives, the guards will burn them."

Their heavy footsteps crunched against the gravel, accompanied by Evelyn's sharp laughter, until the sounds finally faded down the hill.

I stood alone in the center of the cabin.

The wind whistled through the open doorway, stirring the hem of my skirt. Outside, my mother's shawl lay soaked in dark, filthy mud, the fine embroidery ruined.

I didn't rush to pick it up.

I walked over to the door, gripped the wooden handle, and pulled it shut, sliding the rusted iron bolt into place.

Then, I walked past the shattered teacup toward the far corner of the cabin, beside the narrow cot.

I knelt down on both knees.

Using the tip of a small iron fire poker, I wedged the edge beneath an uneven seam in the floorboards and levered it upward. The timber groaned, popping free to reveal a dry, dark hollow beneath the foundation.

Inside lay a heavy, rectangular case made of matte-black carbon fiber.

My hands did not shake as I lifted it out.

I blew away a thin layer of dust and pressed my thumb against the biometric scanner embedded in the latch. A soft chime echoed through the silent room, and the lid sprang open.

Nestled in the velvet interior was a military-grade, encrypted satellite communicator, bearing the silver crest of a crowned frost wolf—the royal insignia of the sovereign Northern Territory.

*“Never use this, little bird,”* my grandfather’s deep voice echoed in my memory from ten years ago, when he placed the device into my mother’s weeping hands before we fled into exile. *“Unless the world leaves you nowhere else to turn. If you press that key, the entire Northern Army will march to bring you home.”*

I had swallowed every insult. I had scrubbed their floors. I had even allowed myself to believe an Alpha's son could love a woman he thought was a nobody.

I looked at the mud-stained glass of the window, thinking of Julian's smug sneer and Evelyn's cruel laughter.

"Mercy," I whispered to the empty room.

I reached out, flipped up the protective crimson casing, and pressed the emergency transmission key.

The green indicator light flared to life, pulsing rapidly as an encrypted frequency cut straight through the atmosphere, beaming thousands of miles north toward the snow-capped throne.

A low beep confirmed the connection.

*Signal received. Royal Guard mobilized.*

I snapped the lid shut, a cold, dangerous smile finally touching my lips.

They wanted an Omega servant in the basement.

They were about to answer to an empire.