Chapter 3

Six years later.

I sat at the dressing table and worked a comb through my hair, and the woman in the glass did it back at me.

Nothing about her was the girl from six years ago. Taller. Stronger. Hair that took the light instead of hanging there. And eyes that had stopped asking permission.

Too much had happened in six years. Most days I still couldn't believe any of it was real.

Running feet came up the corridor, fast, and hit the door without slowing. I didn't need to turn around. I would have known that run anywhere. It belonged to my five-year-old son.

He hit my legs hard enough to rock me sideways. He'd brought half the hedge with him — green in both knees. He'd been crying a while before he got here.

I got down on the floor. "Noah."

"Why don't I have a daddy? Everybody's got one." He rubbed his nose across my sleeve. "Is that why nobody likes me? Are you gonna stop wanting me too?"

I took his face in both hands. He had his father's eyes. I'd stopped flinching at that around his second birthday.

"You are mine. That's the whole list. Say it back."

"I'm yours." A hiccup. "That's the whole list."

"Good." I thumbed the wet off his chin. "Now tell me who said all that to you."

"The ladies. By the roses. They weren't talking to me. They were just talking."

I knew what it was to be discussed through a wall. My son was not going to learn that sound at five.

"Show me," I said.

They were still at it when we came around the hedge — Noah's hand in mine, my guards behind. Shears open in one hand.

"—twenty-four years old. Every lycan alive shifts at twenty, and she still can't. Half werewolf on her father's side, and the King means to hand her the kingdom."

"It's the boy I can't stomach." The shears clicked shut. "They say prince, and my mouth won't shape the word."

Noah's hand tightened in mine.

"Don't stop on my account," I said.

The shears hit the gravel. Then both of them were on their knees.

"Finish it," I said.

Nobody did.

"He is my son. Nobody who didn't carry him gets a vote on what he's called."

"Your Highness, please—" She pressed her forehead to the path. "I have children of my own."

"So do I. Mine was standing behind that hedge. Collect your wages from the steward."

The guards carried them off, still saying my title.

The royal beta was waiting at the mouth of the path, phone still in his hand.

"Your Highness. The King would like to see you."

The King's study smelled of pipe smoke and the hunting dogs he wasn't supposed to let indoors. My grandfather poured the tea himself. Three sugars, no question.

"Sit."

I sat. "Grandpa, I can't be what you told them I'll be."

The man who found me at the bottom of that slope was not one of my father's trackers. They came down behind him, and he turned his head, and they broke and ran without me.

He was my mother's father.

He'd spent eighteen years looking for her — a girl who hid what she was and ran off with a werewolf beta. Nobody had told her the beta already had a wife. Not a mistress. A girl who had been lied to.

He followed her to my father's valley and found a grave with the wrong name on it.

The rogue nobody in that house would name was the Lycan King's only child. That made me his granddaughter. Every alpha in that valley, my father included, would have gone to his knees in front of him.

He named me his heir in front of his whole court. It took me a year to believe him.

"I got half of what a lycan gets, and I still can't shift," I said. "Your lords will never take an heir who can't. They count my birthdays out loud."

I made myself say the rest. "An hour ago the gardeners were counting them too. And talking about my son."

My grandfather set down his cup. "I've sent for a doctor. She's already here. She'll examine you properly and find out where the fault is."

The doctor was a small woman with cropped white hair and hands that smelled of iron and juniper. She didn't bow. She took my wrist without asking.

"Open your collar."

The Ulric birthmark sat high on my left shoulder, a pale crescent with one horn gone dark, the edge of it blurred like ink dropped in water.

She put two fingers on the dark part. "You were rejected," she said. "Not face to face."

"No. He was miles away."

"And you were pregnant at the time."

"Yes," I said.

"You were pregnant. That's why it did this much damage." She took her hand back. "A rejection takes its price out of a body. That night you were two bodies, and it took the whole price out of yours. It never touched the pup."

"Your gifts woke on time. Your wolf didn't. She's not gone, she's underneath. A bond torn at that distance never closes, and she can't come up through an open wound."

"So there's no fixing it." My voice came out level.

"You take a new bond and lay it over the old one." She held up a finger. "A bond seals a bond. The old wound closes under it — slowly — and when it does, your wolf can come up. She's been down there six years."

I didn't answer for a while.

"So I need a chosen mate."

In six years I had never once let myself think about another man. Not because any part of me was still Kade's. Because I didn't know whether I could sit across a table from one of them and believe a single word he said.

But it wasn't only my life anymore. My grandfather had handed a kingdom to a girl who couldn't shift and never once asked me to earn it. Noah needed a father the way he needed shoes.

Maybe it was time I walked out of that night.

The last time I handed myself to a man, it was because he asked for me, and it cost me my wolf. This time I would be the one asking. I told myself that was the whole difference.

I looked at my grandfather. "If that's the only way, I'll try." Then the harder half. "I don't know how to find a man like that."

My grandfather stood and pulled the bell rope again, hard.

"Send word tonight. Every lycan house inside the border. Every werewolf pack outside it. Every alpha with a name worth saying." He was already at the window. "Tell them the Princess of the Lycans is choosing a husband, and they may come and be looked at."

"Where?"

"The border. I won't make one side travel further than the other, and I won't have you judged on ground that belongs to anybody's family."