Chapter 2 – Blood-Tied Chains

Serena POV

The hiss of iron leaping from the fire split the quiet like a scream.

The brand seethed molten red as Luca pulled it from the brazier. Smoke coiled up in bitter threads that stung the back of my throat. Even across the room the heat reached for me, licking invisible tongues along my bare skin as if the metal already knew where it belonged.

Wolves pressed in until the circle felt like a tightening snare. Their eyes shone yellow in the torchlight; breath fogged the cold air in hungry bursts. They wanted a spectacle—me pinned and writhing while their Alpha wrote his name on my body.

Hands shoved me forward. My chest hit stone. Grit scraped my cheek; ash smeared my mouth with the taste of old fire. The ropes at my wrists bit deep enough that my fingers tingled.

Luca’s boots struck the floor behind me, unhurried, steady as a drum. The glow at the edge of my vision thickened, and the heat swelled until my skin prickled.

He fisted my hair and dragged my head back until my throat arched, bared. The iron hovered above the hollow at the base of my neck, just over the fragile ridge of my collarbone.

“Blood-tied chains,” he said, voice even, ritual sure as law. “Mark of oath and womb. From this night forward, she belongs.”

The iron came down.

Agony bloomed. It wasn’t a line of pain; it was a coin of fire pressed straight into the place where breath begins. Flesh hissed, wet and obscene, and the smell was thick—fatty, metallic, almost sweet. My scream tore loose before I could bite it back. It spun up into the rafters and the wolves answered in one savage, delighted roar.

They could see it. That mattered as much as the burn itself. Branded at the collarbone: the place the elders called the Queen’s Gate. Close to the heart so the bond set deep. Close to the throat so the voice remembered who owned it. No cloak or collar would ever hide it completely. The law did not permit it to be hidden.

I thrashed on instinct. Claws dug into my shoulders, pinning me; someone laughed above the noise. Luca ground the brand a fraction deeper and the edges bit, sending a flare of white through my vision. Every breath dragged across the wound, a rasping bellows of heat. Every exhale seemed to pull a thread of me out and leave it on the stone.

Do not give him more.

I bit my tongue until I tasted blood, copper bright. Another scream fought up anyway, smaller, torn. Humiliation stung worse than smoke.

Beneath the blaze, something else rose.

My wolf.

She surged like a storm under earth, slamming at the walls I had kept around her for years. She didn’t whimper. She bared her teeth, furious at the touch, furious at the crowd, furious at me for kneeling. Up, she demanded. Bite. Tear. The brand answered her with heat, and she howled inside my skull, a note no one else could hear.

At last, he lifted the iron. Air slapped the wound cold; smoke curled from my skin in thin, gray ribbons. Pain throbbed in time with my pulse, a second heart caged under bone. The mark would scar. It was made for mutilating.

The pack inhaled as one, a greedy, intimate sound. Some swayed as if drunk. Others whispered superstition: “Closer to the heart. Harder to break.” I heard my name hissed between teeth, not Serena but Valente—legacy, omen, threat. A few faces had gone still, as if they saw something they hadn’t expected: not an offering, but a fuse.

Luca dropped the iron back into the brazier. The hiss of cooling metal slid through the chamber.

He turned to the table beside the throne and chose a blade. It was simple steel, no ornament, honed to a narrow crescent that would part skin with the smallest pressure. Firelight ran along its edge like blood.

“First the mark,” he said, lifting it for the pack to see. “Then the oath.”

Silence gathered like snow. Even the torches seemed to hold their breath.

I dragged air into my lungs and the wound burned like the sun. My voice came out cracked but steady. “I won’t swear. Not to you. Not to them.”

Murmurs rose—jeers from some, uneasy silence from others. A she-wolf near the front pressed fingers to her own throat, as if guarding it. Another sneered, “She’ll scream it soon enough.” A third said nothing at all and didn’t look away.

Luca smiled, slow and sharp. “You already have.”

The guards hauled me upright. My knees slammed the stone. Fresh fire licked across the brand when my chest stretched; I swayed and forced myself still. If they wanted a broken thing, they could find another girl. I straightened until my spine was a blade.

Luca crouched in front of me. Up close, the scar along his jaw gleamed pale as a cut moon. His silver eyes held mine with a cruelty that made my stomach drop.

“This is the law of the blood oath,” he said, loud enough for the last row to hear. “Pain is proof. Proof she was chosen. Proof she can survive what weaker flesh cannot.”

The hall answered with fists on stone and the scrape of claws. The old runes along the walls drank the noise and gave it back, an echo that sounded like history agreeing.

My wolf pressed hard against my ribs. Take his throat. I stared back at him and let all the hate I had left show through, because hate was a kind of breath that didn’t burn.

He took my right hand, palm up. His fingers were colder than I expected. Or maybe I had gone too hot to feel anything but contrast. His thumb pressed into the center of my hand until the skin whitened.

The blade lowered.

I felt the first kiss of steel, cool and inevitable, where lifelines cross and futures are told.