THE WOLF’S PRINCESS

My mother’s hand was so thin I was afraid to hold it too tight.

I did anyway.

“Please,”

I said.

“Just breathe. Just keep breathing.”

She didn’t answer. She hadn’t answered in almost an hour, not really just small sounds, small movements, the kind you learn to read when someone you love is dying slowly instead of all at once. I’d gotten good at reading them. Three years of practice will do that to you.

The healer had left an hour ago. He didn’t say the words out loud, but I saw them on his face before he closed the door behind him. I’d seen that face before, on other healers, in other rooms. It always meant the same thing.

Not enough money. Not enough medicine. Not enough time.

I heard my father’s footsteps before I saw him. Heavy. Unhurried. He never rushed for her.

“Father.”

I stood so fast my knees cracked against the bed frame.

“The healer says if we don’t get the new treatment by tomorrow.”

“I know what the healer says.”

He didn’t look at my mother. He never looked at my mother anymore.

“There’s no more money for it, Samantha.”

“There’s always money for the wine cellar. For Lily’s dresses. For,”

“Watch yourself.”

I watched myself. I’d learned to do that too.

“Please,”

I said instead, and I hated how small my voice sounded, how much it sounded like begging, because it was.

“She’s your wife.”

“She was my wife.”

He straightened his sleeve, an idle little motion, like we were discussing the weather instead of a woman’s life.

“I have a kingdom to run. I can’t keep pouring gold into a body that isn’t going to recover.”

Something in my chest went very cold and very still.

That was when the door opened again, and Lily walked in wearing my mother’s sapphire gown.

I knew that gown. I’d watched my mother wear it when I was small, back before the sickness, back when she still laughed at dinner and braided my hair by the fire. She’d shown it to me once, folded in cedar, and told me it would be mine someday.

Lily twirled once at the doorway like she wanted us to admire her.

“Doesn’t it fit beautifully?”

She said.

Nobody answered her. My mother’s eyes were closed. I don’t think she even knew Lily was in the room, and for once I was grateful for that.

“Why is she wearing that,”

I said. Not really a question. More like a fact I needed my father to deny.

He didn’t deny it.

“Sit down, Samantha,”

He said.

“Both of you. There’s something we need to discuss as a family.”

As a family. As if we’d ever been one.

I didn’t sit. I stayed by the bed, my mother’s hand still in mine, and I watched my father pace to the window like a man rehearsing a speech he didn’t want to give.

“The Veyron Empire has called in Elaria’s debt,”

He said.

The words didn’t mean anything to me at first. Debts got called in. Taxes got raised. That was politics, that was distant, that had nothing to do with the room I was standing in.

Then he kept talking.

“The full amount. All at once. We don’t have it we’ve never had it, not really, we’ve been paying interest on interest for a decade and they know that. So the terms have changed.”

He stopped pacing. He looked at Lily, and something passed over his face that I didn’t understand yet. “They’ve agreed to forgive the debt in exchange for a woman. A royal woman. Sent to the Empire as tribute.”

The room went very quiet.

I knew the stories. Everyone in Elaria knew the stories. You heard them as a child, half warning and half nursery rhyme the Veyron Empire, the wolves who ruled it, and above all of them, the Crown Prince.

They called him the Monster of Veyron.

They said he’d killed his own guards for speaking out of turn. They said his eyes went black before he shifted, that he’d torn a man apart in the arena and smiled while he did it. Mothers used his name to make children behave. I’d used his name myself, once, half-joking, to tease Lily when we were younger and still spoke to each other like sisters.

I never thought I’d hear it in a sentence with the word tribute.

“The original terms specified the Crown Princess,” my father said.

And there it was.

Lily. Lily, standing in my mother’s dress, was the Crown Princess. Publicly. Legally. In every record and every proclamation, in front of every noble in Elaria, that title had been hers for three years ever since my father decided that a broken elder daughter locked away with a dying woman made a poor face for his kingdom, and a beautiful, biddable younger one made a much better one.

Lily’s face crumpled instantly. Tears, right on cue.

“Father, please, I can’t.”

Her voice cracked exactly where it needed to.

“You can’t send me there. To him. Please, I’ll do anything else, I’ll marry anyone else, just not”

My mother’s fingers twitched in my hand.

I looked down. Her eyes were open now. Barely. Fixed on my father with a hatred I hadn’t seen in her in years not since before the sickness took most of what she had left to hate with.

“Adrian.”

Her voice was a thread of sound.

“Don’t you dare.”

He didn’t even look at her.

“Shut up, Marielle. This doesn’t concern you.”

“She’s your daughter”

“She’s not going.”

He said it flatly, like a decision already made, already signed, already sealed. “Lily stays. Lily has a role to play in this kingdom’s future that a werewolf’s bed would ruin.”

I still didn’t understand. I want to be honest about that I stood there for three, four, five full seconds not understanding, because some part of me refused to let the pieces finish arranging themselves.

Then my father turned and looked at me for the first time since he’d walked into the room.

Really looked at me.

And I understood everything.

“No,”

I said, before he’d said a single word.

“No.”

“Samantha”

“I am not Lily. I don’t have her title. I’m not even acknowledged as”

“You’re still my daughter. Still royal blood. The Empire won’t know the difference, and they won’t care, as long as a princess of Elaria arrives wearing the crown’s colors.”

He said it so simply. Like he’d solved a puzzle instead of ended a life.

“You’ll go in her place.”

My mother tried to sit up. She barely managed to lift her head off the pillow before the effort broke something in her chest and she started coughing, deep and wet, the kind of cough that left blood on the cloth these days. I grabbed the cloth from the table without thinking, pressed it to her mouth, my hands shaking harder than hers.

“You will not do this,”

she said, when she could speak again. Barely a whisper, but I’d never heard anything so fierce come out of something so frail.

“I will not let you sacrifice her to save your treaty.”

“Marielle.”

My father’s voice went low. Almost gentle, which was somehow worse.

“Think very carefully before you say anything else. The healer’s fees, the treatments, the medicine that’s kept you alive this long all of it stops the moment I decide it isn’t worth the cost anymore. I’ve been generous. I don’t have to keep being generous.”

The room went silent in a different way now. A worse way.

He wasn’t asking me to volunteer.

He was telling me what would happen to her if I didn’t.

I looked at my mother’s face. At the hollows under her eyes, the gray in skin that used to be warm and brown like mine. Three years of watching her disappear one week at a time, three years of fighting for every coin of medicine, three years of promising her promising myself that she would get better, that I would find a way.

And now the way was standing right in front of me, wearing a crown that wasn’t hers, dressed in my mother’s sapphire gown, crying tears that didn’t reach her eyes.

“Samantha, don’t,”

my mother whispered.

“Don’t you dare do this for me.”

But she already knew. I could see it in her face. She knew I would.

I looked at my father.

“If I go,”

I said,

“you’ll keep paying for her treatment. All of it. Every healer, every medicine, for as long as she lives.”

“You have my word.”

I almost laughed. His word. I should have laughed. Instead I just nodded, because there was nothing else left to do, and some small, stupid, hopeful part of me still believed a king’s word meant something when it came to the people he was supposed to protect.

“You’ll save her,”

I said again, quieter. Not a question anymore. A thing I needed to hear a second time so I could carry it with me.

“I promise,”

my father said.

I believed him.

I want you to understand that. Whatever I became after that night, whatever I learned to be in that moment, kneeling by my mother’s bed with my whole future collapsing in on itself, I believed him.

I didn’t know he’d already decided, weeks before that conversation, that a sick woman with no political use left in her was not worth the gold it would take to keep her breathing.

I didn’t know that promise had been broken before he ever made it.

The guards came for me before dawn.

I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye to my mother. They said there wasn’t time, that the Veyron envoy was waiting, that Elaria couldn’t afford to look as though it was hesitating. I only got one look back before they pulled me through the doorway one last glimpse of my mother’s room, the candle burned low, her chest rising and falling in that shallow, fragile rhythm I’d memorized like a prayer.

And Lily, standing in the hall outside, still in the sapphire gown she’d never taken off.

She wasn’t crying anymore.

She smiled at me. Not sadly. Not with guilt, or grief, or even relief.

Victoriously.

Like she’d won something.

The guards’ hands closed around my arms, and as they dragged me toward the carriage that would carry me out of the only life I’d ever known, one thought settled into my chest like a stone dropping into still water.

My sister had never once considered thanking me.

She’d been waiting for this.