The Silver Wolf Rises

For three days, the healers purged the poison from my blood one bitter cup at a time.

I shook. I burned. I dreamed of a voice telling me to stay small, stay quiet, stay grateful, and every time I woke, my father was there, or Ronan was, posted outside my door like the palace itself might steal me again.

On the fourth night, the moon rose full over the palace gardens, and the thing inside my chest stopped pushing at the door.

It broke it down.

Pain took me off the bed and onto the stone floor, clean and white-hot, nothing like sickness. It was the opposite of sickness. It was every year of wolfsbane unraveling at once, every locked door in my body flying open in the dark.

"Sera!" Ronan came through the door at a run, sword half drawn, and stopped dead.

My hands were changing on the flagstones. My nails lengthened into claws. Silver fire ran under my skin in bright veins, and my shoulder, my crescent mark, blazed like a small moon.

"Don't fight it," Ronan said, low and urgent, dropping to one knee. "Let her come. She has waited long enough. Let her come."

I screamed, and the scream became a howl.

The world folded. Then it opened, wider and sharper than it had ever been. I could smell the rain coming an hour before it fell. I could hear the guards change watch on the far wall, the fountain in the lower court, my father's heartbeat behind the wall where he had been sleeping and was sleeping no longer.

I stood in the wreckage of my nightdress on four legs that ended in silver-white paws.

She was huge. I knew it the way you know your own hands. My wolf stood taller than any wolf in Blackthorn's guard, her coat white as fresh snow shot through with silver, and when she lifted her head, the crescent on her shoulder shone through her fur like a brand of light.

Not a wolf at all, some deep memory in my blood whispered. A Lycan. A royal Lycan, the kind the packs had not seen born in a hundred years.

Ronan was on both knees. Behind him the doorway filled with royal guards, and one by one, without a word being spoken, they knelt too, heads bowed, fists to the stone.

"Your Highness," Ronan breathed, and my wolf preened.

I shifted back in a rush of heat and light, gasping, human again and shaking, and Ronan had his cloak off and around my shoulders before I had even found my voice.

"Twenty-two years," I managed. "She was in there for twenty-two years."

"She was never gone," he said. "Only locked. There is a difference." Something in his face made me think he understood locked things.

My father arrived at a run in his dressing robe, took in the kneeling guards, the silver hairs scattered on the flagstones, and laughed out loud like a young man before he crushed me into his chest.

Training began at dawn, because I demanded it, and because Ronan, when I fixed him with a look over breakfast, had the sense not to argue with a princess on the first day of her life.

"You have a Lycan's strength and a child's instincts," he said in the practice yard, circling me with a training staff. "You telegraph every strike. Your wolf is fast, but you think like prey. That ends today."

"I was never prey," I snapped, and lunged.

He was not there. The staff cracked across my ribs, not hard, but hard enough to teach. I hit the dirt with the breath knocked out of me and his shadow over me, and he offered a hand I refused.

"Again," I said, and got up.

We trained until the sun stood straight overhead, until my arms trembled and my wolf paced beneath my skin, learning the shape of my anger and liking it. Ronan never once went easy on me, and I was grateful in a way I could not explain. Blackthorn had handled me like glass waiting to drop. He handled me like a blade he was sharpening.

"Enough," he said at last. "Water. Then we—" He stopped.

I felt it too.

It started in my chest, where the broken seal had been, a warmth that was not warmth. It moved when he moved. The air between us went thin and bright, and my wolf, my huge silver wolf who answered to no one, went utterly, stupidly still.

No, I thought. No. Not again. Not this.

Ronan went pale. He took one step toward me like something had hold of his ribs and pulled, and I saw his own wolf rise in his eyes, gold swallowing the grey.

"Mate," he said, very quietly, like a man saying the name of a storm.

The bond snapped taut between us, bright as a wire of light, and for one whole second it was the most beautiful thing I had ever felt. Being seen. Being wanted by the Moon herself, not chosen out of duty and discarded out of shame.

Then I remembered a dais. And a crowd. And a man I had loved saying I reject you while my stepsister smiled.

I tore my eyes away and stepped back, and the bond screamed in my chest like a cut cord.

"No." My voice shook, but it held. "I will never be owned by a bond again. Not by you. Not by anyone. If I am ever chosen, Commander, it will be by a man, with words, who can also be refused. Do you understand me?"

Pain moved across his face, and then, slowly, discipline swallowed it. He bowed, deep and exact, a soldier accepting an order from his sovereign.

"Understood, Your Highness," Ronan said. "Then I will earn the words. However long it takes."

Three territories away, in a pack house still smelling of the feast for an heir, Damien Thorne broke the royal seal on a scroll delivered by a crown rider at dusk.

He read it twice.

By order of Aldric Vale, Lycan King: every pack is summoned to the Royal Mating Ball in seven days, where His Majesty will present before all territories his daughter, the Crown Princess Seraphina Vale, stolen twenty years ago and now returned to the Crescent Throne.

The words meant nothing to him. A lost princess. Court politics. Nothing to do with Blackthorn, nothing to do with him.

So he could not explain why his chest seized as he read it. Why the dead place behind his ribs, the place where a mate bond had withered the night he spoke his rejection, suddenly ached like a wound in cold weather.

"Damien?" Vivienne's hand slid over his shoulder, soft and claiming, her belly round beneath her dress. "What is it? You have gone all—"

She read the name over his shoulder. Seraphina Vale.

Vivienne went white to the lips.

Because Vivienne, who had measured wolfsbane into a wolfless girl's tea for ten long years, knew exactly who the Crown Princess could be.