Novels by mrzbarbie2

Chapter 4: The Heel That BrokeThe cover was already glowing on my phone when I admitted I was looking at it.Black silk. One bare shoulder. My own face, polished and cropped by a team of strangers, and across the bottom in gold letters: The Woman Who Dressed the Kingdom. Underneath, the columnist's pull quote, already trending. Tonight CORINNE signs the Crown contract. The Winter Gala will never be the same.I locked the screen. Five years ago I had walked out of Silverbrook with fourteen hundred dollars and a pair of my mother's shears. Tonight I owned a glass tower with her name on the door.The CORINNE suite sat above the ballroom, all white orchids and mirrored walls and a vanity ringed in bulbs. Through the one-way glass below me, six hundred of the most powerful wolves in the territory were drinking my champagne. I pinned the last diamond at my collarbone and turned in the triple mirror. The sheer panel over my left shoulder blade was perfect. Black tulle, thin as smoke. Beneat

Chapter 3: The Bride Who Never CameThey measured me like I was something to be shipped.A woman from the Crown's household arrived on the first morning with a tape measure, two silent assistants, and a garment bag she wouldn't let me touch. She wrapped the tape around my ribs, my waist, the length of my arm, and called each number out to a girl with a tablet. She never once asked my name. She did not need it. Everyone on that tablet already knew what I was for."The King's brides wear white," she told the mirror, pinning silk against my collarbone. "Tradition."I thought of the two girls who had worn it before me. Two funerals. I kept my mouth shut and my collar buttoned to the chin, because the crescent beneath it had not stopped glowing.By the second day, my phone had become a countdown clock.Bettina: 4 days!! Have you picked a nail color? Bettina: Mommy says you should practice smiling. Seriously. It's giving funeral.Bettina: Don't even think about running, Del. I'd find you.

Chapter 2: Poison in a Honeyed GlassThe world went soft at the edges.I stumbled out into the storm, and the cold didn't touch me. That was the first terrible sign. Rain hammered my face and ran down my neck and soaked the green dress I had bought for a boy who wasn't worth it, and all I felt was heat. It rolled up from my stomach in slow, hungry waves until my skin prickled and my breath tore out of me in ragged clouds.Behind me, the front door banged against the wall. Lowell's voice. "Delphine, wait."Then Bettina, light and unbothered, heels clicking across the porch boards. "Let her go. Let her walk it off. Honestly, babe, she'll embarrass herself enough without our help."Embarrass myself. The words slid around in my head and wouldn't hold still.I ran. Or I tried to. My legs belonged to somebody else, and the pines along the road bent and smeared into long black streaks. Linnet paced frantic circles inside me, whimpering, clawing at my ribs. Something's wrong, she kept saying.

Chapter 1: The Night I Saved MyselfThe cake was a disaster, and I had never been prouder of anything.Three layers of lemon sponge, leaning left. Frosting smeared on with the back of a spoon because my hands wouldn't stop shaking. One crooked candle, carried a mile through the rain under my coat.I stood on Lowell Danforth's porch with water running down my neck and my heart pounding in my teeth, and I thought: tonight. Finally, tonight.I was twenty-one. Nobody at home had remembered. That was fine. I had somewhere better to be.For a year, Lowell had made me wait. The bond caught the moment he touched my hand at the Harvest Gathering, and my wolf, Linnet, had claimed him on the spot. Mine, she'd said. But Lowell said we should wait until my wolf was strong enough for a full claiming. He would rather have me whole than have me fast. I had loved him for it.Tonight I was done waiting. I wore a green dress under my coat. I had practiced the words in the mirror until they stopped sound