Chapter 2: The Inn at Black Hollow

The door opened onto hell.

Kael had seen battlefields. He'd walked through the aftermath of border raids where entire villages had been put to the torch. He'd stood in the throne room while his father passed sentence on traitors, had watched men hang for crimes against the crown. Violence was not new to him. Death was not new to him.

But this—this was different.

The basement had been carved from the earth itself, walls of raw stone weeping moisture that made the torchlight dance in nauseating patterns. The ceiling was too low, forcing even men of average height to hunch. Kael had to duck his head, and the oppressive weight of the space pressed down on him like a physical thing.

The smell was worse down here. *Much* worse. Beneath the expected rot and filth lay something metallic and sharp—fresh blood, old blood, fear-sweat, and the acrid tang of silver. His wolf recoiled from that last scent, hackles raised in instinctive warning.

Silver. The wolf-killer. The chains that bound their kind.

Kael moved through the corridor with predatory silence, his enhanced hearing picking up sounds that made his lip curl in disgust. Rough voices negotiating prices. The rattle of chains. Whimpering—human and not-quite-human both. His fingers itched to reach for his sword, but he kept them loose at his sides. *Control*. He needed to see the full scope of what was happening here before he acted.

The corridor branched. To the left, he could hear multiple voices—the auction, most likely. To the right, cells. He could feel them somehow, feel the despair radiating from behind locked doors like heat from a furnace.

*The target is at the auction,* logic insisted. *That's where you need to be.*

But his wolf pulled him right, toward the cells, toward the suffering. Toward *her*.

Because he knew, even without understanding how, that she was there. In the dark. In pain. Waiting.

*Not waiting,* his wolf corrected. *Dying.*

The word sent ice through his veins. He turned right.

The first cell he passed held a man—human, by the scent—curled in a corner on filthy straw. His eyes reflected the torchlight like an animal's, empty of hope. He didn't even look up as Kael passed. The second cell was empty but reeked of old death. Something had died there, and not recently enough for the corpse to have been removed.

*What is this place?*

The intelligence report had called it a waystation for illegal trade. Stolen goods, black market weapons, the occasional runaway seeking passage to the southern territories. Unsavory but not worth the Crown's direct attention. Certainly nothing that warranted the Crown Prince's personal involvement.

But the report had been wrong. Or incomplete. Or deliberately falsified.

Because this wasn't a waystation. This was a *market*. For flesh.

The third cell held two women, human, clinging to each other in the darkness. One of them saw Kael and scrambled backward with a cry of terror. He kept walking. He wasn't here for them. He couldn't be here for them, not tonight, not when his entire world was narrowing to a single point of focus that pulled him forward like a fish on a line.

The corridor opened into a wider chamber, and Kael stopped in the shadows to assess.

This was the heart of the operation. The walls were lined with cages—some empty, some not. In the center of the space, a raised platform served as a stage, currently unoccupied but clearly prepared for display. Around it, men in expensive clothing stood in clusters, drinking wine from crystal glasses that looked obscenely out of place in this pit. *Buyers*, Kael realized. Wealthy merchants, minor nobles from the outer territories, perhaps even a few faces he vaguely recognized from court functions.

The kind of men who smiled in the palace and did business in the dark.

"Gentlemen!" A voice boomed across the chamber—the man called Grayson, presumably. He was tall and well-dressed, his clothes marking him as someone who profited handsomely from his trade. His smile was wide and empty of anything resembling humanity. "Thank you for your patience. I know you're eager to see tonight's *special* offering, but first, we have several quality items to move."

*Items*. He called them *items*.

Kael's wolf snarled, and he had to press his back against the cold stone wall to keep himself from shifting right there. His vision hazed red at the edges. The careful control he'd maintained for years—the discipline that made him the perfect soldier, the ideal heir—cracked like river ice in spring.

A door opened on the far side of the chamber, and two men dragged out a struggling boy. Couldn't be more than sixteen, thin and terrified, with the pointed ears and silver eyes of fae blood. Half-fae, probably, born to a human mother and worth less than nothing in both worlds.

"Fresh from the border territories," Grayson announced. "Untrained but docile. Good for household labor or... other uses. Shall we start the bidding at twenty gold?"

The buyers began calling out numbers. The boy was sold within minutes for thirty-five gold to a merchant in purple silk who looked at his purchase the way a man might look at a piece of furniture.

Kael forced himself to watch. Forced himself to memorize faces, details, anything that might be useful later. Because there *would* be a later. This place would burn, these men would answer for their crimes, but first—

*First, we find her.*

Two more slaves were brought out and sold. A woman with shifter blood who'd been suppressed with silver for so long she could barely stand. A man whose tongue had been cut out to ensure his silence. The parade of horrors continued while the buyers sipped their wine and discussed quality like they were purchasing livestock.

And then Grayson raised his hands for silence, and his smile widened into something truly terrible.

"And now, gentlemen, the item you've all been waiting for. Tonight we have something *truly* exceptional. A prize that has been years in the making."

Kael's wolf surged forward, and this time he couldn't push it back. His canines lengthened. His nails sharpened to claws. The air around him began to shimmer with the heat of an incomplete shift.

*Control,* he commanded himself desperately. *Wait. See.*

"She comes from a bloodline you all know," Grayson continued, pacing the platform like a showman. "A bloodline that was supposed to be *extinct*. But as you can see, rumors of total eradication were... premature."

Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Interest sharp as broken glass.

"She's latent, yes," Grayson acknowledged with a dismissive wave. "Her wolf never emerged, poor thing. But her *blood*—ah, her blood is pure. Ancient. The kind of lineage that could legitimize a claim, start a movement, topple a throne if placed in the right hands."

Or the wrong ones, Kael thought coldly. His father had been right to worry. A living remnant of a purged bloodline, no matter how powerless, was a symbol. Symbols could be more dangerous than armies.

"So without further delay," Grayson said, gesturing to the door, "I present to you the last of the Vale line."

*Vale.*

The name hit Kael like a physical blow. His father had never spoken it aloud, had only written it on the single sheet of intelligence that Kael had been required to memorize and burn. A name erased from history, struck from records, forbidden to be uttered within the palace walls.

A name his wolf recognized with a howl of recognition that shook Kael to his foundations.

The door opened, and two guards emerged, dragging something between them.

Not something. *Someone*.

Kael's breath stopped.

She was small—fragile in a way that had nothing to do with size and everything to do with how thoroughly she'd been broken. Her dark hair hung in matted tangles around a face that might have been beautiful if it wasn't bruised and hollow with starvation. She wore rags that had once been clothing, torn and filthy, barely covering the worst of the damage done to her body.

But it was her eyes that destroyed him.

They were the color of storm clouds, grey with hints of silver, and they burned with a defiance that should have been impossible. She'd been beaten, starved, chained, sold—and still, *still*, there was fire in her gaze as she was hauled onto that platform.

*Mate,* his wolf whispered with absolute certainty. *MATE.*

And Kael Dravenhart, Crown Prince of Virelion, heir to the throne, trained weapon of his father's will, felt his entire world shatter and reform around the broken girl on the platform.

She lifted her head, and even from across the chamber, even through the crowd of predators between them, their eyes met.

Recognition flared. Not gentle—nothing about this moment was gentle—but *absolute*.

She saw him. Truly *saw* him in a way no one ever had, past the crown prince mask, past the cold soldier, straight down to the wolf that was even now howling for her blood, her bones, her *soul*.

And in her eyes, just for a heartbeat, he saw the same recognition reflected back.

Then Grayson stepped forward with a golden collar in his hands, and the moment shattered.

"Now," the slaver said, fastening the collar around her throat while she struggled weakly against the guards, "let the bidding begin."