Episode 3

Chapter 3: The Daughter of Bloodthorn

[ INGRID ]

Ingrid Hargrave had been back in North America for exactly nine hours, and she'd already fired two maids.

The first one had unpacked her Louis Vuitton trunk with bare hands. The second one had placed her Hermès scarves in a drawer that smelled like cedar. Cedar. Like she was storing moth-eaten quilts in a lake house.

A little background on Ingrid: she'd left Bloodthorn at eleven. Her father, Alpha Victor Hargrave, had shipped her to a boarding school outside Geneva with a credit card, a bodyguard, and instructions to come back polished. Ten years later, she'd attended schools in Switzerland, France, and England. She spoke four languages. She could plan a state dinner for two hundred, identify wine by region and year, and walk in heels on cobblestone without breaking stride.

She had not visited home once in those ten years.

Weekly video calls with her mother, Luna Odessa — that was the arrangement. Odessa would sit in her parlor with tea, her face carefully made up, and ask Ingrid about her classes. Ingrid would answer. Neither of them said anything real. It was a performance they'd perfected, and performances don't require physical proximity.

Now she stood in her childhood suite, which had been redecorated in her absence — cream walls, heavy drapes, a vanity table that could've doubled as an altar. She opened her wardrobe. The staff had filled it with options for the week, per her instructions emailed from the plane.

She held a burgundy dress against her body and studied herself in the full-length mirror.

Good bone structure. Her mother's cheekbones, her father's jaw. Tall enough to stand beside an Alpha without looking fragile, but not so tall that she'd tower in heels. Her wolf was strong — not warrior-strong, but the kind of strong that came from old bloodlines and careful breeding.

It hadn't always been this way. As a child, Ingrid had been sickly — fevers that wouldn't break, a body that bruised too easily, a wolf that flickered in and out like a bad signal. Her mother had fixed it. Special medicine, delivered monthly in small glass vials, dark red and bitter. Odessa never said what was in them. Ingrid never asked. By the time she turned twelve, the fevers were gone, her wolf was steady, and her skin glowed like she'd been polished from the inside out. Whatever her mother had done, it worked.

She put the burgundy back and reached for a deep green. Better. It made her eyes look like something worth staring at.

"Ingrid."

Her father filled the doorway. Alpha Victor Hargrave was a large man who'd gotten larger with age — not fat, exactly, but thick. Barrel-chested. The kind of build that suggested he could still kill you if he felt like it, but mostly couldn't be bothered. He wore his authority the way other men wore cologne: heavily, and on purpose.

"Father." She didn't turn from the mirror.

"Alpha Ronan Ashford arrives in four days."

"I know. Mother told me on the call."

"This is what your education was for. Everything. The languages, the etiquette, the management training. All of it." He paused. "You understand what I'm saying."

Ingrid set the green dress on the bed and turned to face him. "You're saying that you spent ten years and a small fortune turning me into the perfect candidate for an Alpha who hasn't taken a Luna, and now it's time to collect on the investment."

Victor's expression didn't change. "I'm saying this is your purpose."

Another girl might have flinched at that. Might have felt the weight of being called a purpose instead of a person. Ingrid didn't flinch. She agreed with him.

She'd known since she was eleven what she was being built for. She hadn't resented it. She'd leaned into it. Every language class, every etiquette lesson, every hour spent learning pack politics and resource management — she'd consumed it all with the focus of someone who understood exactly what the finish line looked like.

"I'll need the Chanel No. 5," she said. "The vintage. Not the reformulated one."

"I'll have it sent up."

"And fresh flowers in the guest wing. White roses, not red. Red is aggressive."

Victor looked at her for a long moment. Whatever he saw satisfied him. He left without another word.

Ingrid turned back to the mirror. She lifted her chin, squared her shoulders, and practiced the smile she'd use when she first met the Alpha of Ironhowl. Warm but not eager. Confident but not challenging. The smile of a woman who knew she was the best option in the room and didn't need to prove it.

She picked up a pearl earring, held it to her ear, and decided it was too conservative.

Twenty minutes later, she walked the east corridor toward her mother's parlor. Her heels clicked against the stone floor — a sound she liked, because it announced her. People should know when Ingrid Hargrave was coming.

Halfway down the hall, a girl was on her hands and knees scrubbing the baseboard. Young. Thin. Wearing clothes that had been washed so many times they'd gone gray. A bucket of soapy water sat beside her, and her hands were red and cracked from the work.

Ingrid's heel clipped the edge of the bucket as she passed. Water sloshed onto the stone.

The girl flinched and looked up. Big dark eyes in a hollow face. She smelled like cheap mint and wet cloth.

Ingrid glanced down — a brief, clinical look, the way you'd glance at a stain on a tablecloth before calling someone to deal with it.

"You're dripping on the floor," Ingrid said. Not to the girl. To the air in the girl's general direction. "Clean that up before someone important walks through."

The girl dropped her gaze and started mopping the spill with her sleeve.

Ingrid walked on. She'd already forgotten the girl's face by the time she reached her mother's parlor. People like that didn't register. They existed to scrub floors and stay out of the way, and the ones who couldn't manage even that were simply beneath notice.

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