Page 1 of Curvy Sold Mate

Chapter 1 - Olivia

The banners were crooked.

Olivia stood at the bottom of the great hall steps with her arms crossed and her clipboard angled against her hip and counted three—no, four—banners hanging at angles that would have been generous to describe as intentional. The iron sconces had been polished, at least. The stone floor swept. Someone had arranged wildflowers in copper vases along the tables, which she hadn’t asked for but which she’d allow. The alternative was having a conversation with Elena about artistic vision, and she did not have the stamina for that before noon.

“The second one from the left is the worst,” Caitlynn said, appearing at her shoulder with a cup of ginger tea. “But nobody’s going to notice.”

“I notice.”

“You notice everything. It’s both your best and most exhausting quality.”

“The bar behind the dais is listing. If the wind catches it during the invocation—”

“It won’t.”

“—it’ll swing into the ward candles and set the ceremonial cloth on fire, and then we’ll have a ritual that begins with the whole pack watching a bonfire instead of a pairing, which is not the symbol we’re going for.”

Caitlynn sipped her tea. “I’ll have someone fix the bar.”

“I’ll fix the bar.”

“You’ll delegate the bar.”

“I don’t delegate things that matter.”

“You don’t delegate things at all. That’s a different problem.” Caitlynn caught the look Olivia threw her and smiled behind the rim of her mug. “Everything looks beautiful, Liv. It does. You’ve done incredible work.”

Olivia’s chest tightened at the edges. She looked away, down at the clipboard, at the list she’d been building for six weeks—items crossed off in her own hand, notes in the margins, a system she’d constructed from nothing.

The old lottery had been Gideon’s domain. A ritual passed down through generations of men who’d built it for men—names drawn from a pool of eligible she-wolves, candidates paraded through trials designed to test obedience dressed up as endurance, the winner handed to the Alpha like a prize at the end of a hunt. It had worked for centuries, which was the only argument anyone had ever needed.

Until Caitlynn—a human name in a shifter ritual, a woman who wasn’t supposed to be there, breaking every rule the system had been built to enforce. The lottery hadn’t just failed. It had exposed itself, shown the rot in its foundations to anyone willing to look.

Most of the pack hadn’t been willing. But Olivia and Caitlynn had looked, and between the two of them, they’d torn the old structure down to its bones and rebuilt.

The new ritual was cleaner, fairer. Caitlynn’s magic—stronger now than anyone in living memory had documented—would reach upward, touch whatever ancient current the old lottery had drawn from, and let it speak clearly. No trials, no competition, no women lined up for inspection. The magic would name the pairings directly, and both parties would have a voice in what followed.

It had taken eight months. Olivia had written the framework. Caitlynn had tested the magical architecture. They’d fought about the wording of the consent clause for three days straight, during which Olivia had consumed enough coffee to develop what she suspected was a permanent tremor, and Caitlynn had set a curtain on fire by accident and pretended it hadn’t happened.

The result was a ceremonial binder sitting on the dais, bound in leather and sealed with Kahn’s mark. Their work—hers and Caitlynn’s.

She was not going to be sentimental about it.

“The candidates are assembling at eleven,” Olivia said, flipping a page on the clipboard. “The inner circle at ten-thirty. Kahn wants the perimeter—”

“Secured. Viktor’s handling it.”

She shifted uncomfortably at the name, though she made sure to keep the emotion off her face. “Good. Then we’re on schedule.”

Olivia moved through the hall with the clipboard, her expression firm. Two junior wolves adjusting the dais platform straightened when she passed. A woman arranging seats near the east wall caught her eye, started to ask a question, and thought better of it.

This was the version of herself she’d spent years engineering—capable, precise, unignorable.

The Alpha’s sister, she’d overheard someone say weeks ago, introducing her to a visiting pack delegate. The Alpha’s sister, as though her most relevant feature was proximity to a man she shared blood with.

She’d forced a smile onto her face. It was the most effective blade she owned, that smile—sharp enough to cut and polite enough that no one could call it a weapon.

She adjusted the banner herself. Climbed the stepladder in the ceremonial dress she’d chosen that morning—deep green, fitted at the waist, a thing that required commitment and rewarded it. The fabric pulled across her hips as she reached. She felt the stretch of it, the seam sitting against her thigh, a dress designed for a different frame than hers, altered to fit by Elena’s steady hands but still holding the ghost of its original shape in the way it tightened where it shouldn’t have needed to.