Alpha Prince's Little Dagger

ASTRID

The colorful marketplace outside of Mooncrest Castle has been busier than usual today, with guests streaming in from all corners of Phaegia to attend Prince Cassius’s wedding.

Typically, this would be a boon to my sticky-fingered business, but with the crowds come even more guards. They’ve been vigilant as ravens all morning.

The castle looms up like a dark mountain. Even its shadow cannot eclipse the chaotic excitement of the packed bazaar.

Every which way are stalls draped in bolts of bright fabric, stalls laid out with pots of fragrant spice, stalls hocking the lowest prices on horseshoes, on fresh eggs, on mulled wine.

“A pretty bracelet for your pretty wrist!” an older woman calls through the scramble of voices, her wares winking in the early morning sunlight.

If I could afford it, I want to tell her, pulling the hood of my cloak up and over my halo of dark curls, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.

I’m exhausted, but I can’t justify calling it a day just yet. I’ve barely nicked enough coin to cover the week’s bread.

Sighing, I scan the fat crowd, my eyes skipping from a blacksmith bearing down on an anvil to a juggler walking on stilts to—

There!

Two women so lost in conversation, they’ve tuned the rest of the world out.

Casually, I make my way toward them, inspecting gleaming trinkets as I go: golden goblets, ruby earrings, perfectly balanced daggers.

“—must try the peach mead,” one of the women, dressed in peacock blue, is saying. “Who knows when there’ll be another royal wedding?”

The other woman, dressed in rich plum, snorts. “Prince Cayden may be supposedly unlovable, but with a face like that? King Ashton will have no trouble finding a match.”

Now that I’m close enough to the two women to count the pearl buttons down their lushly dressed backs, I register the topic that has consumed their entire world: Mooncrest’s bachelor royals.

The woman in blue fans herself, sweat beading on her forehead. The day is unusually hot, the mass of bodies adding to the humidity.

“He hasn’t so far,” she says. “And the prince is already 22.”

“I hear the prince is the one refusing to entertain potential suitors,” the woman in plum says. “Still feels guilty about his mother and what not.” She shrugs. “He’ll get over that when the right woman comes around.”

The woman in blue raises a brow, grinning wickedly. “Oh? And are you intending to be that woman?”

“You’re terrible!” the woman in plum giggles, too loudly. “And anyway”—she narrows her eyes in delight— “I’d take the Ward of the North over the Cursed Prince any day.”

“You’d take him to bed, more like.”

The first time I overheard another human lusting after the royals, I was shocked. Handsome or not, they were werewolves.

Now at eighteen, I’ve heard enough to be familiar with this sort of daydreaming. It seems especially popular among young women, particularly the daughters of wealthy merchants and artisans.

I duck my chin to hide my eyes roll as their conversation soon urns into an argument over which of the two is more attractive.

Their terrible taste in men—and weremen, no less—only solidifies my resolve to relieve them of their coin pouches. If they can afford such fantasies, they can afford to chip in for Luca’s dinner.

Satisfied that they’re sufficiently distracted, I allow their voices to dim into white noise and check the small, sharp blade tucked up my sleeve. It should slice through their pouch strings without a snag.

Tucking my chin, I step forward—

A scream tears through the square behind me. I reflexively stumble back and turn like a startled rabbit.

A wave of black has descended on someone in the middle of the crowd.

The guards may be in human form, but that wolf strength lives in their bones; they don’t have to shapeshift to access it.

As they jostle for control, I glimpse their captive and freeze.

Even though I know that Luca is at his apprenticeship at the baker’s, and therefore can’t be the boy in the guards’ grasp, the boy’s terrified face reminds me so much of Luca’s after he wakes from a nightmare that my heart crumples like tin.

I close my eyes and breathe away the fear.

It’s not my little brother.

As I peer closer, I realize that I do know this boy. Kind of. I met him just the other day, when he tried to hand me a rebel pamphlet. I separated myself from him as quickly as I could—it’s suicide to be seen cavorting with known rebels, as I well know—but not before he gave me his name.

Ollie.

From how swift the guards reacted just now, I assume he wasn’t as lucky with his pamphleting this time around.

“I didn’t know!” Ollie screams. “I swear, I didn’t know what the pages said! I can’t even read!”

Electricity seems to arc through the crowd, but no one moves. It doesn’t matter whether Ollie is telling the truth. When it comes to rebellion, the monarchy is cruel as a public stoning.

“Please!” Ollie screams. Please! I—”

He goes silent with a resounding smack.

The crowd parts to make way for the guards, and a cold shiver runs down my spine as they drag Ollie past me.

Looking at his prone body, I can’t help but of another prone body: my father’s. The one that hung from the walls of Mooncrest Castle for almost a month, until it began to give off a stench even the monsters couldn’t stand.

I shake the memory out of my head and breath out a long sigh. The heaviness in the air and in my shoulders is too much. I rattled my near-empty coin pouch.

It’ll have to do for the day.

I pulled my cloak tighter and headed home, hoping that at least the familiar walls of the shack that Luca and I call a home would be a reprieve from the tension.

It wasn’t.

Sitting at our haphazard kitchen table—the only table that fit in our tiny shack—and counting out the day's meager take, the desolation of our situation had never been more apparent.

The first chill of fall will be setting in any day now; food will be tighter come winter. Luca is growing like a weed, and even though I fork over half my dinner each night, I can still see the outline of every one of his ribs.

The only comfort is Luca’s apprenticeship, which he began last summer thanks to a kind baker sympathetic enough to take an apprentice from the slums.

Luca may not earn any wages yet, but he’s allowed to take home any loaves of bread that fall on the ground. Some weeks, that’s what we live off.

The moment Luca walks through the door half an hour later, a smile eating up his face, I expect him to present one of those loaves.

Instead, bouncing on the balls of his feet, he drops a pouch onto the table.

It clanks against the wood, a trove of riches compared to my sad little haul.

“What—?” I start, but he’s already racing away with an explanation.

“There is no way he noticed me,” he says confidently. “That merchant. Rich good-for-nothing.”

For a moment, I can’t speak. Then—

“Are you insane?” I hiss.

Our father’s face flashes into my mind, the way he squeezed me in his arms that fateful morning ten years ago.

Luca was too young to remember the execution, but that doesn’t excuse this recklessness. He knows what Mooncrest’s guards are capable of.

Shock cuts across Luca’s glee, followed by anger.

“He deserved it, Astrid! With what he was doing to that poor girl. You’d’ve done worse than snatch his coin if you were there.”

“Not if I had the opportunity you did, I wouldn’t’ve!” I half-shout, anger and fear spilling out of me. “Not on the day of a royal wedding, I wouldn’t’ve! A merchant? He’ll definitely have pull with the guards! Just wait until he realizes he’s been robbed.”

“You worry too much,” Luca argues. “That man has more than enough.”

He looks down at the handful of coins I brought in, at the velvet pouch beside them.

“And even with my apprenticeship, we need this. You know we do.”

He’s right, of course. But I need him to stay safe.

“Luca,” I say, sighing, “the whole point of me going down this route is so you don’t have to follow in my—”

“Wait,” he cuts in, his eyes widening. “Do you hear that?”

I don’t—until I do.

Heavy boots striking the cobblestones and cruel, growling laughter. I know those sounds. I’ve heard them before, on the day our father was taken away.

They are Mooncastle guards. They are right outside our shack now.

And this time, my brother is their prey.