Chapter 5

Freya — the same morning

I wore the plainest dress I owned, and no one looked at me twice.

The corridors were packed with alphas — married and unmarried, old and young. Every one of them wanted an audience with the lycan court.

A beta in gray gloves handed me his alpha's card with a half-bow. To every alpha in that corridor I was a clerk taking names for the Princess.

I added it to the stack. Fifteen since morning. Each one a name, a pack, a territory — and a man who'd gone past me without slowing.

That was the point. You learn more about an alpha in the four seconds he decides a woman is nobody than in an hour of him courting a princess.

My two guards waited out of sight at the head of the corridor. A plain woman with an escort is not a plain woman.

I left the great hall a little after eleven for the receiving room they'd given me. I laid the cards in a row along the table and unfolded the list my grandfather had given me.

One name sat near the top, circled in his ink.

Theodore Lockhart.

Youngest alpha to lead an established pack, and still without a luna. My grandfather had written two words in the margin: *worth meeting*.

I'd been watching for his card all morning. It hadn't come.

What had come was a bundle of white peonies, still damp at the stems, with a note tucked into the paper. No crest. No stamp.

I don't intend to join the Selection. I do hope the Princess finds the right husband, and not just a useful one. — T. Lockhart

The others had all sent cards — linen stock, pack crest stamped in gold. Every one a bid wearing the clothes of a courtesy.

He had sent wet flowers and two lines that asked me for nothing. He didn't know my name or my face; nobody outside the border did. He had written past the title anyway, to whoever had to live with the choice.

I put the peonies in the water jug. The stems were cold, and the cold stayed on my hands after I let go. Water sat in the crease of one petal, and I put my thumb in it before I decided to.

Then I set the note down square across his name on the list.

The door hit the wall.

The force sent a card off the table's edge.

Something behind my ribs pulled — a blunt hand closing around a place I'd stopped checking on years ago. The room tilted half an inch and set itself back down.

Kade Voss stood in the doorframe.

Six years came back at me in about two seconds, and not in order. His thumb with sugar on it, from the cake he'd torn out of the napkin on my birthday. The way a whole square goes quiet in the half second before it decides to laugh at you.

I put every piece of it back where I keep it.

Down the corridor behind him, one of the King's men came around the corner at a run and stopped when he saw me see him.

Fetch my grandfather and my grandfather would solve it, and I would go on being a thing other people solved. I lifted two fingers off the tabletop. He went back.

He was broader than the boy I remembered. He'd picked up the one habit that came with a title: he came through a door as though the room had been holding itself shut for him.

He crossed the threshold before his brain caught up. Three steps in, he stopped.

"Freya," he said.

He said it the way he'd said it on the porch.

"Kade." My voice came out flat. "How did you get into this room?"

He didn't answer. He was looking at me the way I'd once watched men look at horses at auction. Just the way he looked at things.

"Celeste said you ran off with some man six years ago," he said.

"Did she."

"Is that what this is?" One flat gesture at the room, the cards, the peonies. "Looking for another one."

I could have told him his pack meant to kill me and my child that night, and that he'd spoken the rejection into the dark while they came down the hill after me.

I didn't want him to know.

Noah was mine. Whatever Kade had been six years ago, he had nothing to do with my son now, and I intended to keep it that way.

"Why are you here, Kade?"

"The lycan court. The Selection."

"Then go find them. This room isn't part of it."

"You are." He stepped closer. "You're my beta's daughter, Freya. You left without release. That's desertion." His voice dropped. "You know the penalty."

He said it the way my father used to say things, in the plain certainty that the rules he carried were the only rules there were.

"I don't owe your pack anything."

His jaw set. He reached for my wrist.

I caught his hand and pushed it off in one clean motion.

Eighteen years in that house, and I had never once put my hands on anyone. It turned out to be easy.

He smelled the same. Cedar and something cold underneath. I hated that I knew that.

"You're different," he said.

"I am. And I'm not going anywhere with you."

"You don't have a say in this. You're pack. I'm taking you back."

The door crashed open again.

Smaller this time. The bang, the running feet, the voice at full volume.

"What do you want to do to my MOMMY?"

Five years old and forty pounds of fury, both arms flung wide as though he could fill the doorframe. He'd come straight off the riding ring behind the hotel and left a track of it across the marble.

The servant stumbled in behind him.

"Young prince — ! Forgive me, he heard raised voices and I couldn't hold him!"

Noah planted himself between me and Kade, fists balled.

"Go away," he said. "You don't touch my mommy."

Kade went still. His eyes went over my son and stopped at each thing in turn. The black hair. The blue under the lashes. The jaw already sharpening toward a line that had never come from me.

And last of all the feet. Chin up, weight forward, planted. The boy had put himself down in the same stance the man used coming through that door. Nobody had taught either of them to stand that way.

I put my hand on Noah's shoulder and drew him back against my legs.

Kade's head came up. Not at me. At the servant still bowing in the doorway.

"Prince?"