Alpha's Mail Order Bride
المؤلف
Drowned Abyss
القراءات
19.8K
الفصول
48
Drowning in debt and desperate to save her sister, 28-year-old Mali Adeyemi accepts a mysterious Alaskan Matchmaking Residency: three months in a remote luxury lodge with wealthy men, and $250,000 if she leaves unmatched. She plans to keep her heart locked away—until Alpha Rowan Kincaid arrives. Powerful, controlled, and dangerously patient, Rowan wants Mali with an intensity that terrifies her. But Alderheart is hiding more than desire. The men are wolf shifters, their packs are dying, and Mali is Rowan’s rare human mate. As passion ignites and pack politics turn deadly, Mali must choose: escape with the money, or risk everything for the alpha who refuses to let her go.
Chapter 1: Nothing Left to Cut But Bone
The medical bills did not look like paper.
They looked like a kind of weather, thin, inevitable sheets of white that drifted across Mali’s kitchen table and refused to melt. Each one held its own small cruelty in black ink: dates, totals, reference numbers, the clinical vocabulary of bodies and breakdowns.
Even their envelopes felt sharp, as though the corners were designed to catch under a fingernail and draw blood, just to remind you that the world did not do mercy by accident.
Mali Adeyemi sat very still, her elbows near the edge of the table, her hands flat on either side of the most recent statement as if she could press the figure down until it behaved. The little apartment was quiet in the way of early morning—boiler ticking, a faint shudder in the pipes, the soft hum of the fridge in the corner.
Outside, the city gave a muted sigh through rain-streaked windows, as though it too was tired.
The number in the center of the page might as well have been a cliff face. It rose straight up from the printed line, merciless in its clean precision.
She read it again.
And again.
The first time, her stomach lurched. The second time, she went numb. The third time, she began to do what she always did when something tried to destroy her: she started to calculate. Rent. Utilities. Groceries. Transport. The little extras Isabelle needed when the medicines left her mouth tasting of metal and despair.
The debt was already sitting like a stone at the bottom of Mali’s chest—credit cards, personal loans, the quiet shame of being late by days and then by weeks, the dread that followed each letter through the door.
She tried to do the math as if her life were a recipe and she could adjust it by adding or taking away. Reduce the portions. Cut the luxuries. Skip the bus, walk in the rain. Sell the one decent coat. Stop buying fresh fruit. Stop paying for anything that wasn’t utterly necessary. But the truth was waiting under every equation, smiling without warmth. She had already cut everything. There was nothing left to trim but bone.
A sound came from the sitting room—soft, muffled. A cough, then the creak of the sofa as someone shifted. Mali lifted her head, listening, the way she had learned to listen these past months: not for noise, but for the pattern of it. Isabelle’s breathing, Isabelle’s movements, Isabelle’s silence.
“Mali?” Isabelle’s voice was sleep-rough, a little too thin.
“In here,” Mali called, keeping her tone as light as she could, like she was calling across a perfectly ordinary morning, like there wasn’t a cliff face on the table and a future threatening to fracture.
Isabelle appeared in the doorway with her blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a cape. She had always been the prettier one—softer features, eyes that caught the light, the sort of smile that could persuade strangers to be kinder.
Illness had not stolen that beauty so much as sharpened it into something more fragile. Her cheeks were pale, her lips a touch dry, her hair messy in a way that looked careless rather than effortless. Still—she carried herself as if refusing to be reduced to symptoms.
She padded into the kitchen, bare feet silent on the worn linoleum. Her gaze fell, inevitably, to the table. “Oh,” she said softly.
Mali reached for her mug—tea long gone cold—and took a sip anyway, as if temperature were a negotiable detail. “Morning.”
Isabelle’s eyes tracked the spread of documents like birds circling a field. “Is that…today’s post?”
“It’s yesterday’s,” Mali lied. It wasn’t even a lie meant to deceive; it was a lie meant to protect, and those had become her most practiced kind.
Isabelle came closer, leaning over Mali’s shoulder, and Mali felt her pause—as if her sister could smell the truth on the paper. Isabelle’s hand rested lightly on Mali’s, warm and small. “You didn’t sleep.”
“I slept.” Mali set the mug down. The sound was too loud in the small room. “I had a nap. That counts.”
Isabelle’s mouth quirked, the ghost of a grin. “You can’t nap your way out of bankruptcy, you know.”
Mali forced a smile. “Watch me try.”
They stood like that for a moment, the elder sister braced against the table, the younger hovering just behind her, both of them pretending the same thing—pretending they were merely tired, that everything was normal, that their lives were not being held hostage by numbers.
Isabelle’s gaze drifted to the top sheet again. Her expression tightened, almost imperceptibly, then she looked away too quickly, and Mali knew she’d seen. Not the exact figure, perhaps, but enough of it. Enough to understand.
“I could—” Isabelle began.
“No.” The word left Mali’s mouth too fast, too sharp. She softened it immediately. “No. Don’t start. Don’t even think about it.”
“I could go back to work,” Isabelle said stubbornly. “Just part time. Something easy.”
“Your doctor said—”
“My doctor says a lot of things.” Isabelle lifted her chin. “You can’t carry this alone.”
Mali turned in her chair to face her properly. Isabelle’s eyes were wide and bright, and in them Mali saw a familiar fire—stubbornness, pride, the fierce refusal to be helpless. It was one of the reasons Mali adored her. It was also one of the reasons Mali was afraid.
“You are not a burden,” Mali said, gently now. “Do you hear me? Not ever. You’re my sister. You’re my…you’re my favorite person. I’m not carrying you. I’m standing with you.”
Isabelle swallowed. For a second, the brave mask slipped, and Mali saw the scared girl underneath—the one who lay awake at night listening for Mali’s footsteps, the one who flinched at post through the door. “It doesn’t feel like standing,” Isabelle whispered. “It feels like I’m dragging you under.”
Mali rose, crossed the little space between them, and pulled Isabelle into her arms. Isabelle clung to her as if afraid Mali might vanish. Mali pressed her cheek to Isabelle’s hair and inhaled the scent of her—shampoo, skin, the faint sterile tang of medication that clung to her no matter how often they washed the sheets.
“You’re not dragging me anywhere,” Mali said, fierce with it. “We’re going to get through this.”
Isabelle gave a wet laugh against Mali’s shoulder. “You sound like a motivational poster.”
“Good.” Mali kissed the top of her head. “Because I’m about to start charging you for my inspirational services.”
Isabelle pulled back, wiping at her eyes with the edge of her blanket. “How are you going to fix it?”
Mali’s heart thudded once, hard. There it was—the question that had been scraping at her all night, sharp as bone: How?
But Mali did not let her face change. She did not let the fear show. Instead, she reached for humor like a well-worn tool. “I’ll rob a bank,” she said briskly. “Or marry a millionaire. Whichever is quicker.”
Isabelle’s smile wavered but held. “If you marry a millionaire, make sure he’s nice.”
“I’ll put it on the list.” Mali steered Isabelle toward the kettle, toward the small rituals that still made them feel like people rather than problems. “Tea. Then toast. Then you take your meds, and I go to work, and we pretend the world is not trying to ruin us.”
“You can’t pretend forever.”
Mali’s hands paused on the cupboard handle. She let out a slow breath. “No,” she admitted. “But I can pretend long enough to get through today.”
She made Isabelle’s breakfast carefully, as she did everything—toast not too dark, butter melted just so, the kind of attentiveness that was half love and half prayer. While Isabelle ate, Mali gathered the bills into a neat pile and slid them into a drawer, as if tidiness might make them less real.
By the time she’d tied her hair back and shrugged into her work coat, Isabelle was sitting on the sofa again, blanket tucked around her knees, watching Mali with too much quiet in her eyes.
“You’re going to run yourself into the ground,” Isabelle said.
Mali grabbed her bag, the weight of it familiar against her shoulder. “Not today.”
“That’s what you said yesterday.”
Mali paused at the doorway. For a heartbeat, she allowed herself to look at Isabelle properly—to see the pale line of her jaw, the shadows under her eyes, the stubborn set of her mouth. To see what the bills represented, what the debt threatened to steal.
“I’m going to fix it,” Mali said again, softer.
Isabelle’s voice dropped to a whisper. “How?”
Mali held her gaze. She could not offer a plan. Not one that would make sense. Not one that wouldn’t sound like desperation dressed in hope. So she offered the only thing she could, the thing she had always offered: herself.
“Because I’m me,” Mali said. “And you’re you. And we don’t lose.”
Isabelle’s eyes shone, and she looked away quickly, as if she refused to cry again. “Bring home fries,” she muttered, and it was an absurd little request that broke Mali’s heart open in the gentlest way.
Mali smiled. “If you behave.”
Isabelle made a rude noise with her mouth. “I am always an angel.”
“A menace,” Mali corrected, and stepped out into the corridor.
