Substitute Marriage: The Alpha's Secret Healer

Hermina Montgomery POV:

"Sign the contract, Hermina! Tonight, you're getting into that bridal carriage in Brylee's place!"

My father, Ronald Mercer, slammed a parchment scroll sealed with blood-red wax onto the heavy oak desk. A greedy man who would sell his own flesh and blood for gold and titles, the Lord of the Mercer pack glared at me, his neatly trimmed goatee quivering with rage.

I stood in the center of the dim study, my hands resting calmly against the rough linen of my skirt. Looking down at the parchment, I gave a humorless laugh.

"A month ago, when the Carlisle marriage envoy first arrived, you all sang a very different tune," I said, my voice flat and mocking. "Back then, Brylee bragged to every noble in the borderlands that she was going to be the Luna of the North. Why the sudden generosity?"

Standing behind her mother in an expensive lace gown, my half-sister Brylee Mercer shrank back. The skin beneath her left eye twitched right under her beauty mark as she dabbed at the dry corners of her eyes with a silk handkerchief.

"Hermina, how can you be so heartless?" Brylee whimpered, her sugary voice laced with spite.

"Word just leaked out of Northwind Castle yesterday. Lord Andrae's legs are completely ruined, his wolf is dead, and his temper has turned so violent he tore three servants to pieces in a fit of madness last night. If I marry that monster, I won't even survive the wedding night!"

"And I will?" I raised an eyebrow.

"That's completely different!" My stepmother, Glenda Mercer, stepped forward, her stubby fingers absently stroking the priceless heirloom emerald pendant resting against her thick neck.

"Brylee is a highborn she-wolf with a bright future. And what are you? Twenty years old and still without a wolf to your name. An outcast like you can't use the mind-link or feel a mate bond. Even if Lord Andrae goes mad, you won't suffer the backlash of a severed bond!"

In our world, anyone born unable to shift was treated worse than dirt. For eighteen years, this family had worked me to the bone in the back stables while lavishing Brylee with silk gowns and rare tonics, all because they believed I was a defective freak.

"Enough talk!" Ronald slapped the desk again. "It cost me five hundred gold sovereigns to bribe the Carlisle envoy into leaving the bride's given name off the contract. It only specifies a daughter of House Mercer! I put a roof over your head for twenty years-now it's time you earned your keep!"

He stormed around the desk, raising a thick, calloused hand to strike the defiance right out of me.

I didn't budge. I simply angled my chin to the left.

His palm sliced through the empty air beside my ear. The missed swing threw his heavy frame off balance, sending him stumbling against the bookshelf.

When Ronald whipped around in shock, I raised my gaze and met his stare dead-on. The lethal chill in my pale blue eyes made my cowardly father suck in a breath, stumbling back two steps until his spine hit the oak chair.

"How dare you dodge him, you useless little freak!" Brylee shrieked, clutching her skirts. "Mother, look at her! If she refuses to get in that carriage tonight, the Carlisle guards outside will drag me away instead!"

Seeing that brute force wouldn't work, Glenda forced a stiff, calculating smile onto her painted face.

"Hermina, don't be foolish," Glenda said, lowering her voice.

"Have you forgotten about your dead grandmother? You've spent years trying to find out who murdered her on that northern mountain road twenty years ago, haven't you?

Well, I recently learned that a servant from Northwind Castle passed through Dead Man's Gorge that very night-and picked up your grandmother's silver wolf-fang hairpin from the wreckage. He's the only living soul who saw who attacked her."

At the mention of my grandmother, my breath hitched. A fierce heat prickled beneath my skin, and for a split second, a faint silver-white glow flickered in the depths of my eyes. I curled my fingers into tight fists, forcing the awakening power in my blood back down.

My grandmother was the only person in this world who had ever loved me. For years, I had hit one dead end after another trying to uncover who was behind her murder. As a powerless outcast trapped in the borderlands, my reach was simply too short.

"Obey your father and marry into Northwind Castle," Glenda coaxed, thinking she had me cornered. "Once the carriage leaves the estate, I'll give you the name of the servant who holds that hairpin. Otherwise, you'll never know who butchered that old woman."

I looked at the three greedy faces in front of me. I was sick to death of this parasitic family, and marrying into Northwind Castle was my only real way out.

Not only would it lead me straight to the sole witness of that night, but the Carlisle pack also commanded the most powerful intelligence network in the north-the only tool capable of helping me hunt down my grandmother's killers.

Still, I had no intention of letting the Mercers walk away thinking they had won.

"I can take Brylee's place," I said slowly, pulling a chair over and sitting down right in front of the furious Ronald. "But a verbal promise from a liar is worthless. If you want my signature on that scroll, you're going to pay my price right now."

"Your price?" Ronald's face turned purple. "What right do you have to bargain with me?"

Just then, the heavy rumble of iron wheels and the snorting of giant warhorses echoed from the courtyard outside. The Carlisle escort had arrived at the main gates.

Brylee's face drained of all color. She grabbed Ronald's arm and shook it wildly. "Father, the guards are here! Hear her out, hurry!"

A cold smile touched my lips as I pointed a finger at Glenda's throat.

"After my grandmother died, you ransacked her room and stole her black iron apothecary case, along with that heirloom emerald pendant around your neck," I said evenly.

"Bring me the case, take off that pendant, and write down the name of that Carlisle servant right now. You have until those guards reach the front door-or I'll walk out there and tell them the real bride is hiding in this study."

"You greedy little bitch!" Glenda screeched, clutching the gleaming emerald pendant to her chest as if I were ripping out her heart. "This stone is worth a king's ransom! I've worn it for ten years-it's mine!"

"They're almost at the door," I said, glancing toward the window as the heavy boots of the Carlisle guards thudded up the front steps.

"Sounds like the escort captain is losing his patience. Brylee looks lovely in that lace gown, though. I'm sure Lord Andrae will enjoy tearing it to shreds."

"Mother! Give her the pendant! Take it off!" Brylee burst into real tears of terror, reaching up to claw at the gold chain around Glenda's neck. "Do you want me to die in that castle?!"

"Take it off right now!" Ronald roared at his wife, terrified that the powerful Carlisle Pack would slaughter them all for breaking the marriage alliance. "And go get that useless iron box from the vault! None of us could ever open the damn lock anyway!"

Shaking with rage and humiliation, Glenda unclasped the emerald pendant from her neck and threw it onto the desk.

Moments later, a breathless servant hurried in with a compact, untarnished black iron case and a slip of paper bearing a single name: Ab Mckay, Head Butler of Northwind Castle.

I pocketed the slip of paper and tucked the warm emerald pendant into my inner pouch. Picking up the black iron case with one hand, I grabbed the quill with the other and slashed my signature across the blank space on the marriage contract.

"Pleasure doing business with you," I said.

Leaving the three of them choking on their own fury, I turned around and walked out of the study with my head held high.

I left the perfumed hallways of the manor behind and climbed the narrow wooden ladder to my drafty hayloft behind the stables.

Bolting the rotting door shut, I set the black iron case on a battered wooden crate and pricked my index finger, pressing a drop of my blood onto the hidden wolf-head engraving on the bottom.

With a crisp click, the medical box that the Mercers had failed to crack for ten years popped open.

Inside lay a leather roll of long, moon-tempered silver needles, gleaming like cold stars, alongside a small crystal vial containing several dried crimson snow-berries-rare alpine berries my grandmother had preserved to pull the dying back from the brink.

Silver was lethal poison to werewolves, capable of searing their inner wolves to ash. Yet in my hands, these silver needles were the signature instruments of the realm's last master Healer.

I tucked the vial of snow-berries into my pocket and strapped the leather needle roll inside the lining of my wristbands. Catching sight of my reflection in the cracked bronze mirror on the wall, I paused.

From my anger earlier, the gray disguise on my left cheek had cracked, revealing a sliver of smooth, porcelain skin beneath. A faint, crisp fragrance like winter plum blossoms was beginning to rise from my skin.

It was the scent of a pure-blooded White Wolf-the royal bloodline blessed by the Moon Goddess herself.

My grandmother had been a legendary elder of the White Wolf royal court. Before she died, she warned me to hide my bloodline at all costs, or the shadowy forces that hunted our clan would tear me apart.

Pulling a packet of charred marsh-vine ash from beneath a loose floorboard, I mixed the dark powder with cold water in a clay bowl. I smeared the acrid, foul-smelling mud over my cheeks and neck.

Within seconds, the paste dried into rough, ash-gray blemishes, completely masking my true face and sealing my royal White Wolf scent beneath the surface.

Once again, the girl in the mirror looked like a hideous, wolfless peasant.

Heavy pounding echoed from the courtyard below, followed by a guard's impatient bark.

I threw on a ragged black hooded cloak, pulled the brim low over my scarred face, and walked down the stone stairs into the cold night wind. Under the main porch, Ronald, Glenda, and Brylee watched me from a distance with venomous eyes, eager to watch me ride to my death.

A burly werewolf guard standing beside the black iron carriage sized me up like cheap cargo and yanked the heavy door open.

"Get in," the guard sneered. "No one who steps foot in Northwind Castle ever walks out alive."

Without a word, I stepped onto the iron footboard, climbed into the dark cabin, and took my seat on the wooden bench. Lifting my eyes under the shadow of my hood, I looked calmly through the iron bars at the stunned driver.

"What are you waiting for?" I said coolly. "Drive."