Chapter 2

(The Daughter They Chose to Sacrifice)

The pup in my lap wouldn't stop shaking. He was the smallest of the litter we'd found near the eastern wall three days ago, half-starved, one ear torn from something that had tried to make a meal of him before the border patrol found him first. I'd been coming to the kennel every morning since, sitting on the cold stone floor with a bottle of warmed goat's milk, waiting for his trembling to slow.

It hadn't, not yet. But it would. Everything did, eventually, if you were patient enough to wait it out.

"There," I murmured, running my thumb along his spine. "You're safe here."

I almost believed it myself.

The estate ledgers sat open beside me on the bench, columns of grain shipments and border taxes I'd been meaning to review since breakfast. My aunt liked to remind me that noblewomen didn't dirty their hands with kennel work or account books, that there were servants for such things, that a lady of House Clifton ought to be seen at needlework or in the receiving room charming whichever lord my father wanted charmed that week.

I preferred the kennel. The pups never wanted anything from me except warmth.

Footsteps came fast down the stone corridor, too fast, skirts snapping against the floor in a way that meant someone was running and trying not to look like it.

"My Lady." Bess appeared in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, chest heaving. Her face had gone the color of old parchment. "Everyone has been summoned to the Great Hall. Immediately."

I set the pup down gently in his nest of straw. "What's happened?"

"I don't know." Her eyes wouldn't hold mine. "Please, my lady. Now."

That was when I understood something was wrong. Bess always knew everything before anyone else did, servants' gossip traveling faster than any messenger, and for her to know nothing at all meant this had come from somewhere far above the usual channels.

I left the ledgers open on the bench and did not look back at the pup, though some part of me wished I had.

The fortress felt different by the time I reached the main corridor. Wrong, in a way I couldn't yet name.

Two guards stood at their posts with their jaws set too tight, eyes fixed straight ahead like men trying very hard not to be caught listening to their own thoughts. A cousin of mine hurried past without her usual greeting, gaze sliding away from me the moment our eyes might have met. Even the air smelled different, charged, the way it did before a storm broke over the northern ridge.

Whatever had happened, everyone already knew. Everyone but me.

By the time I reached the Great Hall doors, my hands had gone cold despite the warmth of the corridor, and I made myself breathe slowly before I pushed them open.

The room was full.

My father stood at the head of the long table, spine rigid, hands clasped behind his back in the posture he used when he wanted to look unbothered and never quite managed it. Khanna stood near the hearth, arms crossed, watching the door. Senior advisors lined the walls. Elders I'd known my whole life sat with their mouths pressed into thin lines, refusing to look at each other.

And in the center of it all, in the crimson and gold of the royal household, stood a man I didn't recognize.

He wasn't loud. He wasn't threatening in any way I could point to. But something in the way he stood, feet planted, hands loose at his sides, told me he didn't need to raise his voice to be obeyed. A sealed scroll rested on the table before him, the royal crest pressed into black wax.

Nobody spoke as I entered.

"My daughter," my father said, and gestured for me to come stand beside him.

I did, though every instinct told me not to.

I wasn't watching the messenger anymore. I was watching my father instead, the way his jaw had already set before a single word of the decree had been read. The summons alone hadn't surprised him. Only its terms would.

"By order of Alpha King Alkane Viktor," the man said, breaking the seal, "Supreme Alpha of the Royal Pack and ruler of this kingdom."

His voice carried without effort, the practiced cadence of someone who had read decrees before and would read them again long after this one stopped mattering to anyone but us.

He read through the opening formalities, the language of law that stripped meaning from everything it touched, and I felt my father's hand tighten slightly against the back of the chair he was gripping. Around the room, faces had already begun to change, understanding arriving before the words did.

"House Clifton shall surrender its eldest daughter, Lady Mara Clifton, in marriage to His Majesty."

The room went very still.

I heard my own name and somehow didn't recognize it, the way a word stops meaning anything if you stare at it too long. Marriage. To the Alpha King. A man I had never met, never spoken to, never once thought of as anything more than a name spoken in council reports my father read at breakfast.

The messenger did not pause for the room to absorb it. He simply continued, and the second blow landed before the first had even finished falling.

"Blackstone Fortress shall become Crown territory as part of the royal bride-price, effective immediately upon the signing of this decree."

That was when the room broke.

Blackstone wasn't merely our strongest fortress. It guarded the only mountain pass between the northern packs and the capital, the reason every king before this one had needed my father's goodwill more than my father had ever needed his. Losing it wasn't losing land.

It was losing the only leverage that had ever made House Clifton matter.

An elder near the back made a sound like he'd been struck, one hand flying to his chest as he sank into the nearest chair. A general began shouting about treason and war in the same breath, as though both were equally reasonable responses. One commander's hand drifted toward the sword at his hip, fingers curling around the hilt as his voice rose above the others.

The royal messenger didn't move. He simply looked at the man.

That was all. No threat, no word, nothing but a level, patient gaze that seemed to weigh exactly how far the commander intended to take this. The commander's fingers loosened, then fell away from the hilt entirely, and he found somewhere else to direct his anger.

I understood, in that small unremarkable moment, exactly why a king like the one described in that decree would trust this particular man to deliver it.

Voices piled on top of voices, my father's advisors arguing with each other, with the messenger, with the air itself, none of it changing a single word already sealed in wax and law.

I stood in the middle of it and felt strangely far away, as though I were watching all of this happen to someone who merely wore my face.

My hands had found each other, fingers laced tight enough to ache. That was the only thing that felt real.

"If I refuse?"