Page 9 of Curvy Sold Mate

“We’ll debrief after she’s been examined,” Kahn said, his eyes staying on Viktor a beat too long.

The infirmary smelled like dried sage and antiseptic. Caitlynn was already at the examination table with her sleeves rolled and her auburn hair twisted back.

“Sit,” Caitlynn said. She took Olivia’s arm, turned it, and hovered her fingers over the entry point. Golden light gathered at her fingertips, diagnostic, and the shard reacted—pulsing harder, the purple lines flaring bright enough to cast shadows.

“It’s bonded to the tissue. It’s not just suppressing your wolf, it’s integrating—building connections to your nervous system.” Her voice had gone clinical. “If I pull it now and it’s anchored to anything vital—I need to study it. A few days. Maybe a week.”

A week—seven days without her wolf, seven days stripped of the current that had run beneath her skin since she was thirteen.

Kahn was waiting in the corridor. Viktor was with him, standing three feet apart in the configuration of men who had been talking and stopped when they heard the door—shoulders angled inward, conversation interrupted mid-sentence.

She looked between them.

“So,” Kahn said simply, his eyes moving from one to the other.

Viktor clenched and unclenched his fists. “You know it wasn’t a choice, Kahn. You know the ritual made this happen. So… Olivia agreed to marry me.”

Agreed was generous. But correcting the terminology in front of her brother would open a door she wasn’t ready to walk through.

Kahn nodded, though his lips were pursed.

“Olivia,” he said. “Give us a minute.”

The sting of it hit between her ribs. The geometry of exclusion—two men, a closed door, a decision-shaped conversation she wasn’t invited into. She’d spent years watching this: briefings she wasn’t called to, strategy sessions where her input arrived secondhand.

She walked away because fighting this battle in a corridor with shard-venom crawling up her arm was not the version of herself she wanted to bring to the argument.

She found Caitlynn in the kitchen, making tea—which was what Caitlynn did when the world was burning.

Olivia sat at the table. “He paid for me.”

Caitlynn set a cup down, sat across from her, and waited.

“Marcus put a number on my head, and Viktor paid it, and now I’m marrying him. That’s what happened today.” She pressed her thumb into the wood grain hard enough to leave a crescent. “I helped build that ritual. I wrote the consent clause. And the first person it chose was me, and nobody asked whether I wanted any of this.”

“The magic chose you before any of the kidnapping happened,” Caitlynn said, quiet. “The pairing was drawn during the ritual. It existed before Marcus, before the ransom. The bond isn’t a product of what happened to you—it’s separate.”

“Is it? Because it doesn’t feel separate. It feels like I got taken, purchased, and assigned, in that order.”

Caitlynn held her gaze without flinching.

“And the pairing itself—” Olivia’s hand went to the back of her neck, a self-conscious gesture she’d trained out of herself years ago, surfacing the moment the armor cracked. “Have you seen him, Cait? Have you looked at Viktor Hale? And then have you looked at me?” The laugh that came out of her had no humor in it; it was dry and brittle. “Tell me the magic wasn’t drunk.”

Caitlynn didn’t laugh. She leaned forward.

“The magic I channeled doesn’t see bodies, Olivia. It sees bonds, compatibility, the threads that already exist between two people, whether they’ve acknowledged them or not.” She paused, let it land. “Whatever you think Viktor sees when he looks at you—that’s your voice.”

Her throat closed. She picked up the tea and put it down without drinking.

“I’m not ready to hear that,” she said.

“I know.” Caitlynn reached across the table and squeezed her hand knowingly. “But I’m going to keep saying it.”

Outside, the compound settled into the sounds of evening—patrols changing, doors closing, the low murmur of a pack absorbing the day’s damage and rearranging itself around the wound.

Olivia sat with cooling tea, a shard in her arm, and a bond she hadn’t asked for humming faintly in the hollow of her chest, and she thought: I helped build this. I built the cage I’m sitting in.

She drank the tea. It had gone cold, but she finished it anyway.