Chapter Three

Irabella~

I didn't cry, but I didn't sleep either.

I packed one bag. Two shirts, a pair of boots, the small folding knife I'd hidden under my mattress since I was fifteen. I didn't know what exile looked like. Nobody in my family had ever survived it long enough to describe it.

At dawn, the same two guards from the night before opened my door without knocking.

"Time," one of them said.

I walked between them down the stairs, out the front door, across the frost-covered lawn. Nobody came to say goodbye. I didn't expect them to.

We made it as far as the old stone marker at the edge of pack land, the one carved with our family crest, worn smooth from a hundred years of weather. My hand was actually touching it when I heard the horn.

Three short blasts. Then a fourth, long and low.

The guards froze.

"That's the treaty horn," the older one said.

I didn't know what that meant. I found out fast. Behind us, someone was running, boots slapping against frozen ground, and it wasn't until he got close that I recognized one of my father's betas, red-faced, out of breath, screaming my name like it was an order.

"Irabella! Turn her around, bring her back, the king wants — bring her back NOW —"

They didn't ask. They just grabbed my arms again and marched me back the way I came, faster this time, my boots barely touching the ground between steps.

The house was chaos when we reached it.

Servants running. My mother in the foyer, still in her nightgown, screaming at someone I couldn't see. My father stood by the window with a scroll in his hand, and his face had gone the color of old paper.

Isabella was on the floor.

Not hurt. Not this time. She'd folded herself into the corner of the room, knees to her chest, and she was rocking, actually rocking, back and forth, making a sound that wasn't quite crying and wasn't quite screaming.

"What's happening," I said.

Nobody answered me. My mother snatched the scroll out of my father's hand and read it again, like the words might rearrange themselves into something survivable.

"Someone tell me what's happening," I said again, louder.

My father turned. There was something in his face I'd never seen directed at me before. Not anger. Fear.

"The Lycan King," he said. "He's called in the treaty."

I knew the story the way everyone in the pack knew it, the way you know a scar is there without remembering how you got it. A hundred years ago, our founding Alpha and the king across the border went to war over land, over pride, over something nobody alive could name anymore, and it ended with a treaty nobody wanted and everybody signed. Every generation, our line sends a daughter north. A bride. A peace offering with a heartbeat.

The last three never came home.

"He's asking for tribute," my father said. "Now. This year."

"So send someone else's daughter," I said. "There's other lines. Other packs bound to the treaty —"

"He asked for her by name." My mother's voice cracked down the middle. She was still staring at the scroll like it had personally betrayed her. "Isabella. He asked for Isabella."

The room went very quiet.

Isabella made a sound like something breaking.

"No." Her voice came out thin, breaking apart on the word. She sank down onto the arm of the nearest chair like her legs had stopped working, one hand pressed over her mouth. "No, no, I can't — you said I was safe, you said the treaty didn't apply to me because I wasn't even born yet —"

"The scroll uses the eldest daughter's name at the time of the summons," my father said, like he was reading it off a legal document instead of watching his favorite child come apart in front of him. "It was drafted before you were born. It still has Irabella's — "

He stopped himself.

Too late.

I felt it land in the room like a dropped glass.

My mother's eyes moved to me. Then back to Isabella, who had gone still, who had stopped crying entirely, watching our mother's face with the kind of focus I'd never seen her use for anything else in her life.

"He asked for the eldest," my mother said slowly, not denying what my father had almost let slip. "And as far as anyone outside this house has ever known, that's Isabella. It's been Isabella for years."

Nobody said anything.

I understood before they finished explaining it to me, but I let them say it out loud anyway. I wanted to hear exactly how they'd justify it.

"Isabella can't go," my mother said, turning to me now, her voice suddenly gentle in a way that made my skin crawl. "You understand that. She's fragile. She's been through so much already, the fall, losing her mate the same week — sweetheart, if he sent her north, she wouldn't survive the journey, let alone whatever's waiting at the end of it."

"I'm her mate," I said. "I lost my mate. Not her."

Nobody acknowledged that I'd spoken.

"You're strong," my mother said, still to me, still in that same soft, terrible voice. "You've always been strong. You won't die easily, not the way she would. He'd have to actually work for it."

Behind her, Isabella had folded herself into the corner of the room, knees pulled to her chest, crying quietly into her own sleeve. She didn't argue with either of them. She didn't have to. She just made herself smaller and softer and more breakable, and let our parents finish the sentence for her.

I dropped to my knees in front of them.

I don't remember deciding to do it. One second I was standing, and the next the floor was under my knees and I was looking up at both of them like I was seven years old again.

"Please," I said. "Mother. Father. Don't do this to me. I'm still your daughter too. I already gave up my mate for her. I'll leave the pack, I'll take the exile, I'll do anything else — just not this."

My mother slapped me.

Hard enough that my ears rang. Hard enough that I tasted copper where my teeth caught the inside of my cheek.

"You are really that ungrateful?" she said. Every trace of softness was gone from her voice now. "We are asking you to do one thing. One. After everything this family has given you, and you can't even do this one sacrifice."

I stayed on my knees. There didn't seem to be any point in getting up.

"Listen to me carefully," she said, crouching down until we were eye level, close enough that I could see the fine lines around her eyes, the ones she never let anyone see in front of Isabella. "You will go as the Lycan King's bride. You will take Isabella's name, her mannerisms, her story, all of it. If he asks you anything about yourself, you answer as her. Not once do you slip. That is final."

"And in exchange," she said, straightening up, already turning toward Isabella like the hard part was over, "Isabella takes what's left of you here. Your room. Whatever standing you had left in this pack. Whatever was still yours to lose, it's hers now. That's the trade. You take her place up north. She takes the rest of your life down here."

My father didn't argue. Behind our mother, Isabella lifted her head just enough to watch me over the top of her knees, her face still wet, still perfectly, carefully broken.

She didn't look away this time.

I packed the same bag. Different name.

Nobody helped me pack it. My mother handed me a set of Isabella's dresses instead, the ones with her initials sewn into the collar, and told me to burn my own clothes before I left so there was nothing left in the house that said Irabella.

I didn't burn them. I buried the bag with my real name stitched into the lining under the floorboard in my closet instead, next to the folding knife I wasn't supposed to have. If I came back, I wanted something waiting for me that still knew who I was.

The night before I left, one of the house servants, a woman named Petra who'd worked for us since before I was born, found me in the kitchen. She didn't say anything about the treaty, or the name, or any of it. She just pressed a small cloth bundle into my hands and closed my fingers around it.

"Dried yarrow," she said. "For bleeding. And willow bark, for pain. Keep it hidden."

"Why would I need either of those."

She looked at me for a long moment, like she was deciding how much to say.

"Because you're not the first bride sent north," she said, "and you won't be the first one they had to patch up before the wedding." Then she left the kitchen without another word.

Two days later, a carriage with no crest on it left before sunrise, and I sat inside it in a dress that wasn't mine, answering to a name that wasn't mine, crossing into land our family had feared for a hundred years.

The border wasn't marked with a stone. It was marked with a gate, black iron, twice the height of a man, standing open in the middle of nowhere like it had been waiting.

Guards flanked it. Northern soldiers, silent, watching the carriage the way you'd watch something you already knew wouldn't survive the week.

And past them, further down the road, two more guards were carrying something between them. Long. Wrapped in white cloth. Heavy enough that both men strained under the weight.

I didn't need anyone to tell me what it was.

Nobody had bothered to hide it from the road.