Chapter 2: The Monster’s Empire

The wagon smelled like fear before anyone said a single word.

There were six of us packed into the back, wrists bound with rope that had already rubbed my skin raw, our knees pressed together because there wasn’t room for anything else. Six women, six kingdoms, six sets of eyes that wouldn’t quite meet each other. Nobody wanted to be the first to admit how frightened they were. I understood that. I was doing the same thing.

Outside, the road had changed hours ago. The soft green hills of Elaria had given way to something darker, taller trees, colder air, mountains in the distance that didn’t look like they belonged to any kingdom I’d ever heard described in a storybook. Every mile felt like it was pulling me further from anything familiar, and I found myself memorizing small, useless things the color of the sky, the shape of a bird overhead as if I needed proof, later, that another world had existed before this one.

It was the woman across from me who broke the silence first. Older than me, maybe thirty, with a burn scar along her jaw and a voice that shook even when she whispered.

“Whatever you do,”

She said,

“Don’t let the prince look at you.”

Nobody asked her what she meant. Somehow we all already knew who she meant.

“My cousin served in the Veyron court for two years,”

She went on, staring at the floor of the wagon like she could see something there the rest of us couldn’t.

“She said the guards watch for it. The moment his eyes settle on a woman and stay there. That’s when you disappear.”

“Disappear,”

Someone repeated. A girl, younger than me, hugging her knees to her chest.

“He uses them,”

The burned woman said.

“And when he’s finished, they’re never seen again.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

This came from a thin woman near the back, her voice flat, resigned, as she’d already stopped caring what happened to her.

“I heard he doesn’t touch women at all. That he isn’t that whatever’s inside him isn’t fully a man anymore. That the wolf took over so long ago there’s nothing human left to want anything.”

“He isn’t human,”

The younger girl whispered.

“That’s what my mother always said. Not really. Not anymore.”

“I heard he keeps a room full of teeth,”

Someone else offered, and I couldn’t tell if she believed it or just wanted something to say.

“Trophies. From the ones who displeased him.”

I didn’t add anything to the stories. I’d heard versions of all of them growing up the Monster of Veyron, the Beast Prince, half a dozen names that all meant the same terrible thing. I’d repeated them myself once, as a joke, the way you tell a ghost story you don’t actually believe, back when Lily and I still spoke to each other like sisters and monsters only existed to make each other shriek and laugh.

I believed it now.

My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my knees so no one would see, and I made myself breathe slowly, in and out, the way I’d learned to breathe through three years of watching my mother suffer without letting anyone see me break first.

I will not cry, I told myself. Whatever happens when we arrive. I will not let the first thing they see be my tears.

The burned woman was watching me.

“You’re quiet,”

She said.

“I’m thinking.”

“About what?”

About my mother’s hand growing thinner every week. About Lily’s face in the doorway, smiling like she’d won a prize. About a promise my father made that I already didn’t trust, even as I clung to it. I didn’t say any of that.

“About surviving,”

I said instead, and that, at least, was true.

I didn’t know yet that somewhere ahead of us, in a stone chamber lit by torchlight, the man they were all so afraid of was about to feel something that would frighten him more than anything in his life though it would take him far longer than me to admit it.

I wasn’t there for what happened in that war chamber. I want to be honest about that, because everything about this story only means something if you know which parts I saw with my own eyes and which parts I only learned much later, pieced together from things Lucas told me, things his guards let slip, things I had to drag out of people who didn’t want to talk about him at all. But I’ve turned this particular scene over in my mind so many times since that it feels almost like a memory of my own.

He was sitting when the prisoner was brought in. That much I know for certain, because it was always how he received people sitting, unmoving, making them stand while he decided what to do with them.

The man on his knees had been given a chance, once already, to repay what he owed. A debt of grain, of gold, of loyalty broken somewhere along a border that mattered more to Lucas than it should have to anyone.

“You had six months,”

Lucas said. Not loud. He was never loud.

“I gave you six months to make this right.”

“My lord, I tried, the harvest failed, there was nothing I could”

“You sold what you were given to a merchant in the eastern territories instead of repaying the crown.”

Lucas didn’t raise his voice even then.

“That isn’t failure. That’s theft.”

The man began to beg. Lucas let him. He always let them finish, before deciding not out of mercy, but because he wanted to hear exactly how far a person would go to save himself. It told him something about what kind of man he was dealing with, and Lucas Draven never forgot what a man was, once he’d seen it clearly.

When it was over, he gave a single order, and two guards took the man away. What happened after that, I never asked, and no one ever offered to tell me. Some things I decided I didn’t need to know, then or now.

Damon came in not long after, still laughing at something from the corridor outside, dragging that easy, careless charm of his into a room that had just gone very cold.

“You’re in a mood,”

Damon said, dropping into the chair across from his brother without waiting to be invited.

“Let me guess. Another debtor. Another lesson in consequences.”

He said the word lesson as if it amused him.

“You know, brother, the human slaves arrive today. The tribute shipment. I hear one of the kingdoms is even sending actual royalty this time.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should. It’s the most interesting thing to happen in this palace in months.”

Damon leaned forward, grinning.

“Let me choose one for you. I have a good eye.”

Lucas didn’t even look up from the papers in front of him.

“I don’t want a human, Damon.”

“You say that every time.”

“Because it’s true every time.”

Damon laughed and kept talking about how their father would be pleased to see him take an interest in anything besides ledgers and executions — but Lucas had already stopped listening.

Because something inside him had gone very still.

It started as a pressure behind his ribs, faint at first, like a held breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. Then it sharpened into a pull, low and unfamiliar, dragging his attention somewhere south of the palace, toward the road, toward the gates, toward something he couldn’t name and had never once felt in his entire life.

Ragnar.

His wolf hadn’t spoken to him like that in years. Hadn’t needed to. Ragnar was usually quiet, contained, obedient to the same discipline Lucas had spent his whole life building around both of them.

Now the wolf was awake, alert, straining against something Lucas couldn’t see.

Mate.

One word. Nothing else. But it hit Lucas harder than anything the debtor in his war chamber could have said, harder than any threat, any betrayal, any battle he’d ever walked away from.

He sat very still, his hand frozen over the papers on his desk, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, Lucas Draven had absolutely no idea what to do.

“Brother?”

Damon was watching him now, all the humor gone out of his face.

“You’ve gone pale. What is it?”

Lucas didn’t answer.

He didn’t know who she was.

He only knew, with a certainty that terrified him more than anything he’d ever faced in the arena, that she was already here.