MasukTEN YEARS AGOELLARIA. Arren stood over me completely bare, and for a long moment I could only stare.I had never seen a man like this. The sight of him made my pulse race and my mouth go dry at the same time.He must have read something in my expression because he didn’t climb onto the bed right away. He stayed standing, giving me time, and when he finally spoke his voice was quieter than before.“We can still stop,” he said. “Nothing has to happen that you don’t want.”I shook my head. The movement felt unsteady. “I don’t want to stop.”He studied me for another second, then nodded once and moved onto the bed. The mattress dipped under his weight as he settled between my thighs. His hands came to rest on either side of my head, bracing himself above me without pressing down. The heat of his body radiated against my bare skin. I could feel the hard length of him resting against my inner thigh, and the simple contact made my breath catch.“Look at me,” he said.I did.His grey-blue e
TEN YEARS AGOELLARIAThe silence after my nod stretched longer than I expected.Arren didn’t move toward me. He stayed where he was near the wall, studying my face with that same direct attention he’d given me in the boardroom the day he offered the contract. The weight of it made my pulse climb higher.“I need you to be certain,” he said. His voice was quiet but firm. “I have no intention of pressuring you into anything you don’t want simply because you think you have some duty to fill tonight. The ceremony is over. The vows are done. Nothing about this arrangement requires you to share a bed with me.”I swallowed. The honesty in his tone settled something and unsettled something else at the same time. My fingers twisted together in front of me.“Do you… not want to sleep with me?” I asked. The question came out smaller than I meant it to, nervous around the edges.Arren’s gaze sharpened. He studied me for a long moment, then closed the distance between us with slow, deliberate step
ELLARIA. By the time the vows were done I was fully and formally named Luna of the Eastern Sector in front of several hundred people.I sat with that through the entire reception.The hall had transformed from ceremony to celebration the way that only significant amounts of money and staff could manage. Food on every table. Drinks appearing in glasses that kept emptying. The dance floor packed from the first song and the music loud enough that you felt it in your chest before your ears caught up.Arren and I sat at the center of all of it.Guest after guest came to offer congratulations. Alpha families and council members and people whose names I tried to hold onto and lost immediately. I smiled and said the right things and let Arren handle the political dimensions of each conversation because he knew these people and I didn't and we both understood that without having to say it.His hand was in mine the entire time.He kept me close. Not as a performance. Just consistently. His bod
ELLARIA.The dress weighed more than I expected.Heavy white fabric that pooled at my feet and required two people to arrange every time I moved. The tailors had been at it since before sunrise, adjusting things I couldn't see and conferring in low voices about things I didn't understand. I stood in the middle of it all and focused on breathing at a normal rate.Some of the women I used to work with were here.That was the strangest part. Women I'd cleaned corridors beside and eaten breakfast with in the staff kitchen were now pinning fabric and handing things to the tailors and not quite meeting my eyes. I didn't blame them. I didn't know how to meet their eyes either.Mirela was the exception.Arren had introduced me to his cousin a week ago. She'd looked me over once and then pulled me into a hug I wasn't prepared for and said she was so glad someone was finally making him do this. I'd liked her immediately in the way you liked people who didn't leave you any choice.She was still
ELLARIA.I stood there and heard the words land and my brain did absolutely nothing useful with them.I want you to be my wife.He was still looking at me. Waiting. Like he'd said something reasonable. Like he'd asked me to pass him a document or confirm a time and was simply waiting for the practical response."I'm sorry," I said. "Could you say that again.""You heard me," he said.I had heard him. That was the problem. I'd heard him perfectly clearly and my brain was refusing to process it because processing it meant accepting that I was standing in a palace boardroom being asked to marry the heir to the eastern sector by the heir to the eastern sector and that was not something that happened to maids from refugee camps who still didn't know where their mothers were."I'm a maid," I said."I'm aware.""You're a prince.""Also aware."I looked at him. He looked back at me with the patience of someone who had anticipated this part and was prepared to wait it out."Why?" I said.He le
TEN YEARS AGOELLARIA. The palace didn't know what to do with itself. That was the only way to describe it. The king was dead and every corridor and every staircase and every room I moved through in the days that followed had the particular unsettled energy of a place that had been running on a specific rhythm for a long time and had just had that rhythm pulled out from under it. The maids felt it more than most. We were everywhere and invisible at the same time which meant we heard everything. "They're saying the succession has to happen quickly," Mara said. She was working the other end of the upper corridor from me, polishing the same stretch of floor she'd been polishing for twenty minutes without making any progress because she kept stopping to talk. "The council won't wait. They can't." "He's not married," said Deli from the linen cupboard. Her head appeared around the door. "That's the issue isn't it. They can't properly install him without a formal union." "That's not s
ELLARIA.He told me to stop making a fuss and walked away.Katerina at his side and the little boy trotting along between them, and the three of them moved down their path together like a unit, like something complete, like something that had existed long before I came into the picture and would ex
ARREN.Kade came in and dropped into the chair across from my desk with the energy of a man who'd aged five years in the last two hours."Katerina's taken the boy in," he said. "He's down for the night.""Good."He looked like he had more to say about the evening's events. After something like the
ELLARIA.He was standing on the front porch with his back to me, one hand pressed against his ear, his voice so soft I almost didn't recognize it."Hey, hey. Calm down. Tell me what's wrong."I stood frozen in the doorway, watching him speak to another woman in a voice he had never once used with m
ELLARIA.My Alpha forced me to sign a marriage contract: no love, no children.He didn’t know I had fallen in love with him at first sight. And now, with only three months left until our contract expired, I was pregnant.***“Luna! You’re having twins!” the doctor exclaimed.The two tiny, beating h







