Chapter 4

The first month after the Rejection, Ophelia was pregnant. Every wolf in the pack said it was a blessing from the Moon Goddess.

By the third week of her pregnancy, she started showing symptoms — a poison only the oldest Alpha bloodlines carried. Slow. The fetus would not survive. There was one antidote: Elf tears.

Every three days, the guards dragged me out of the dungeon and into Ophelia's bedroom. I knelt at the side of her bed. An old maid gripped my jaw and tilted my face under a small crystal vial. Elf tears are precious. So they used the cold-iron whip.

The whip came down on my back, across the stump where my light-wing had been broken. The wound never healed — the iron was still burning inside it. Every lash earned them a single tear that fell into the vial. Ten drops were enough for one dose. Thirty lashes left my back swimming in blood.

The maid carried the vial to Ophelia's lips. Half-conscious, Ophelia would still part her mouth and swallow each drop. Then she would open her eyes, look at me, and give me a sweet, sweet smile.

"Thank you, Elara."

In her fourth month, the fetus started thrashing. It cried at night. She couldn't sleep. Damien brought me into a small room outside the birthing chamber and said, "Sing."

Elves have two kinds of songs. One is the Lullaby — the song of soothing. Each time you sing it, your throat goes hoarse for three to five days. The other has been lost to my people for generations.

I only ever heard one line of it, the night my mother lay dying. That kind of song doesn't carry a sound — it carries a life. The singer dies. The one being sung to lives.

Our race calls it the Soul-Binding Lullaby. I had remembered that one line my whole life.

I sang the Lullaby. The first time, I lost my voice for five days. The second time, I coughed up the first mouthful of blood. By the eighth, my vocal cords were starting to die.

Each time I finished, Damien would come in from outside, force the most expensive Fae Restorative down my throat, and walk out without a word.

Once, I coughed blood until I blacked out. When I came to, someone was sitting at my bedside. It was him. His finger was wiping a dried smear of blood from the corner of my mouth — gently, the way he had wiped my lip the first time he ever stole a kiss from me at fifteen.

"Elara," he said, "tell me where Sera is. I swear it on the name of the Alpha King — say the word, and I'll send you back to the forest tonight."

I closed my eyes. I shook my head.

He was quiet for a long time. Then he leaned down and pressed his forehead against mine, just for a moment. It was burning hot. An Alpha's body temperature spikes when he's in real pain — and the small amount of my blood inside him was burning too.

A second later he stood up, and on his way out he left me one line:

"You have three months left. If you still won't tell me before then — I'll make you wish you'd died three months earlier."

But that night, when the guards changed shifts, someone left a bowl of hot soup outside my cell.

Not the cold gruel they served in the dungeon. Real soup, still steaming, with several of the herbs an elf's body actually needs — the kind you have to ask an elf to learn the names of.

The guard said he didn't know who had brought it.

I stared at the bowl and didn't move. But I memorized how warm it was. I held that warmth in my mind for a long time.