Chapter 4: The Prince’s Choice

I don’t remember being carried out of the arena.

I remember waking up somewhere quieter, my shoulder wrapped tight enough to ache, and I remember the fear that came rushing back the second I understood where I was not a cell, not a healer’s room, but somewhere close to the throne, close to him.

They dressed my wound, gave me barely enough time to stop shaking, and then two guards walked me down a corridor lined with black stone and silver banners, straight toward a set of doors taller than any I’d ever seen in my father’s palace.

The throne room was full when they brought me in. Nobles, guards, court officials, all of them turning to look at me the moment I crossed the threshold, and I understood immediately that whatever had happened in that arena had already become the only thing anyone in this palace wanted to talk about.

Lucas stood near the base of the throne, not seated, still in the black and silver of the court now instead of fur and blood, and if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I would never have believed the massive creature from the arena and this man were the same being. He looked composed. Contained. Every part of him arranged into something cold and unreadable.

Except his eyes.

They found me the moment I stepped into the room, and they didn’t move again.

I heard the whispers start almost immediately. I didn’t need to understand every word to understand their shape surprise, confusion, something that sounded almost like alarm. An older man near the throne the emperor, I would learn later, leaned forward slightly, watching his son with an expression I couldn’t read at all.

“Bring her closer,”

Lucas said.

The guards did. I made myself walk, made myself keep my chin up even though every instinct in my body wanted to shrink into the floor and disappear. My father’s voice was in my head the whole way, low and cold, the same voice that had sent me here in the first place: You’ll go in her place. You’ll be Lily. Do you understand what happens if anyone learns the truth?

I understood.

I stopped in front of Lucas, close enough now to see the scar cutting faintly through one eyebrow, close enough to feel the weight of his attention like something physical pressing against my skin.

“Who are you?”

He asked.

Two words. Quiet. But the entire room seemed to hold its breath around them.

I thought about lying about everything. I thought about the truth splitting out of me right there in front of the throne, in front of the whispering court, in front of the man who had just torn a beast apart to save my life. I thought about my mother, thin and dying in a bed a thousand miles away, and the promise that depended entirely on me being someone I wasn’t.

“Princess Lily,”

I said.

“Of Elaria.”

The words tasted like poison in my mouth.

Lucas didn’t answer right away. He studied me instead, and I felt that gaze move over my face like he was searching for something specific, something that didn’t match whatever he already knew or suspected. I made myself hold still under it. I’d had three years of practice holding still while people who could destroy me decided what they wanted to do with what they saw.

“Lily,”

He repeated, testing the name like it didn’t sit right in his mouth either.

“Yes.”

“You don’t smell like a woman who’s spent her life inside a palace.”

My stomach dropped. I didn’t know what that meant, not fully, but I understood enough to know it was dangerous that whatever his senses were telling him, they were telling him something closer to true than the lie I’d just handed him.

“I don’t know what you mean,”

I said.

He was quiet for another moment, and I watched something move behind his expression, something that looked almost like frustration directed at himself rather than at me. Later I would understand what that moment actually was Ragnar, clawing at the inside of his own mind, screaming one single fact louder than anything Lucas’s suspicion could argue with. Mate. Mate. Mate. It didn’t matter what name came out of my mouth. It didn’t matter what the court thought they were watching. Some truths didn’t need confirmation from words.

“Have you been promised to anyone?”

He asked instead.

“A husband. A betrothal. Anything that would make a claim on you illegal under Veyron law.”

“No,”

I said, because it was the truth, at least.

“Say it again.”

“No. There’s no one.”

Something in his shoulders eased, very slightly, like a held breath finally released.

“Then I claim her,”

Lucas said, and his voice carried through the entire chamber without him needing to raise it at all.

“As my chosen. Under the terms of the tribute agreement.”

The room erupted.

I heard Damon before I saw him, pushing forward from somewhere near the side of the throne, his easy charm completely gone, replaced by something sharper.

“You can’t be serious,”

Damon said,

Loud enough that half the court turned to look at him instead.

“You never choose one. You’ve never once claimed a tribute woman in your life, and now.”

He gestured at me like I was a puzzle he couldn’t solve.

“Her? You didn’t even let me offer my recommendations.”

“This isn’t a discussion, Damon.”

“Clearly.”

Damon’s eyes moved to me, narrowing, calculating something I didn’t understand yet and wouldn’t for a long time. Whatever it was, it didn’t look like simple jealousy over a brother’s whim. It looked personal.

The emperor hadn’t spoken through any of it. I noticed that, even through my own fear, the old man’s silence, the way he watched his son with an intensity that made the whispers around him die down without a single word. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it locked behind a face carved from the same cold stone as everything else in this palace.

“Bring her to my chambers,”

Lucas said, already turning away from the throne, from Damon, from the murmuring court, like the matter had been settled the moment he spoke it into existence.

I wanted to argue. I wanted to scream that I wasn’t a possession to be claimed and delivered like a piece of furniture, that whatever his wolf thought it recognized in me, I hadn’t agreed to any of this. But I’d learned a long time ago that arguing with men who held every piece of power in a room only cost you what little dignity you had left, and I still had a mother somewhere far away whose life depended on me staying alive long enough to matter.

So I said nothing.

The guards walked me through corridors I couldn’t have found my way back through if my life depended on it, past doors and torches and silver banners, until finally we stopped in front of one final door, heavier than the rest, and it swung open into a room that smelled like him, cedar and smoke and something underneath that I didn’t have a word for yet.

The door closed behind us with a sound that felt final.

I backed away instinctively, putting distance between myself and the enormous, terrifying, impossible man now standing across the room from me, the same man who an hour ago had been something else entirely, something with fur and claws and gold eyes that had looked at me like I was the only thing in the world worth seeing.

Lucas watched me retreat. He didn’t follow. He just stood there, still, controlled, and when he finally spoke, his voice was quiet enough that I almost missed it.

“You don’t know what you’ve done,”

He said,

“By coming here.”