The Alpha’s Weak Mate

“I won’t marry him.”

The words rang through the throne room and died against the black marble walls. No one gasped. No one even looked surprised, and that was the worst part. In the Dracana court, nothing I said had ever been worth a reaction.

The whole court had come to watch me be told. I understood that now. Courtiers in black velvet lined both sides of the long hall, their pale faces turned toward the dais with the lazy interest of people watching a hunt whose ending they already knew. Near the pillars, a human servant carrying a tray of goblets had frozen mid-step, her eyes fixed on the floor, trying to make herself small enough to vanish. She was the only person in the room who looked as uncomfortable as I felt.

My father sat above us on the obsidian throne, one pale hand curled around the armrest. King Aemon of the Dracana Clan, ruler of the vampires for centuries, took pride in being the most powerful vampire alive. He never let anyone forget it, least of all me.

“You will, Lysandra.” His voice cracked like a whip. “The date has already been set.”

Already been set. Of course it had. Decisions about my life were made in rooms I wasn’t invited to and delivered to me like the weather.

A scroll lay across the arm of his throne, tied with black ribbon and sealed in wax the color of old blood. I didn’t need to read it. I could guess every line.

To my left, my stepmother stood with my two younger half-sisters, a row of silk and smugness. Amena studied her nails. Jasmine’s mouth curved, but she kept the laughter behind her teeth. Today, that counted as kindness, and I had learned to take what small mercies this palace offered.

If it had been Amena or Jasmine standing here, I knew he would have found another way. Their shadow magic had come early, bright and obedient, and he polished them like jewels. Mine had never come at all.

I was twenty. A few months past my birthday, and I still had no magic, no strength worth mentioning, nothing that made a king proud. Even my hair marked me out. Vampires of our line were born with hair as white as frost, and a rare few with copper. No one had been born with black hair in centuries. Mine fell down my back like spilled ink, a reminder to every courtier that I didn’t fit and couldn’t be explained. When no magic came, they stopped being curious and started ignoring me.

“The Alpha’s council has agreed to terms,” my father said, as though I had asked. He didn’t glance at the scroll. He had read it enough times to know it by heart. “A marriage between our houses. A daughter of my blood for their alpha, and in return, the borders hold. No raids. No burned villages. No more funerals.”

He turned his head toward the councilor at the foot of the dais. “How many funerals this year?”

“Forty-one, Majesty.”

“Forty-one.” His gaze came back to me, flat and unmoved. “Forty-one families who buried their children because wolves crossed the border in the night. Shall I read you their names, Lysandra?”

I didn’t want him to. That was the point. He was good at this: at taking a cruel thing and dressing it in duty until refusing looked like selfishness. The worst part was that I believed him. I knew those villages. I had seen the smoke from my window.

But I also knew he hadn’t answered the question I’d really asked.

“At least tell me why.” I kept my voice steady, though my hands shook in my skirts. “I’m not the strongest daughter. I’m not the favorite. So why am I the one being sent away? Or have you finally found a way to be rid of me?”

The laugh that followed was mine, and it was a bitter sound.

My father’s eyes met mine, cold and level. “Because you are the only one of my children I can afford to lose. You leave in three days.”

The room went silent. Even Jasmine stopped smirking.

I searched the hall for a single face that might speak for me: the councilor, a lord, one guard whose gaze held a flicker of discomfort. They looked at the floor. They looked at the ceiling. They looked at anything but the princess with no magic, no mother, and no one willing to speak up for her.

My stepmother recovered first. “Peace is a great honor, Lysandra,” she said, smoothing her skirts. “Perhaps the first useful thing you will ever do for this family.”

It hurt, as it always did. But my father didn’t look away, and neither did I. It was the first time in twenty years I hadn’t been the one to lower my eyes.

* * *

The throne room doors boomed shut behind me. I didn’t remember walking out. My legs had simply carried me away, the way they always did when my pride couldn’t.

Guards in black and silver lined the corridor, and they straightened as I passed, but not for me. They straightened for the Dracana name, and gave it up the moment their eyes reached my face and slid away to the far wall, as if I were a draft they had decided not to feel.

I was twenty years old, a princess of the oldest royal line in the vampire kingdom, and I could cross my father’s palace without a single person remembering to bow.

“Lysandra.”

I stopped. I knew that voice, sweet as honey and sharpened like glass.

Jasmine swept up beside me in pale blue silk, Amena a step behind. They were seventeen and eighteen, with hair as white as fresh snow and our father’s sharp cheekbones. Anyone could look at them and see a king’s daughters. When they looked at me, they saw a question no one wanted answered.

“You should be grateful,” Jasmine said, pressing a hand to her chest. “A husband! Most girls would be thrilled.”

“Most girls aren’t being handed to the Beast of the Shadow Pack.” Amena’s smile came slowly, as if she were savoring it. “I heard he snapped an envoy’s neck last winter for speaking out of turn. In front of his entire pack.”

“Then he’ll fit right in with this family,” I said, and kept walking.

It was a good line. It would have been better if my voice hadn’t cracked on the last word.

Their laughter followed me down the hall, thinner than they meant it to be. I walked faster, but I didn’t run. Running would have been a gift to them.

* * *

My rooms were in the east wing, the oldest and coldest part of the palace, where the stone sweated in winter and the servants’ stairs ran right outside my door. I had asked for different rooms once, when I was twelve. My stepmother told me the east wing suited me. I never asked again.

A tray waited on the floor outside my door. The goblet of blood on it had gone cold and tacky. Someone had remembered to bring it, at least. Someone had also decided I wasn’t worth the trouble of knocking.

Inside, the room was small and bare: a narrow bed, a single window, a dresser with a cracked mirror. On the dresser lay my mother’s silver hair comb, the only thing of hers I’d been allowed to keep.

She had died when I was two. My father remarried within the year, and by the time I turned four, the palace had two new daughters with white hair and early gifts. I was quietly moved to the edge of the family portrait. Then out of it altogether.

I had no memory of her. Only the comb, cool and smooth in my palm, and a silence in the palace where her name should have been.

I looked at the girl in the cracked mirror: pale, black-haired, a princess in title alone. Weak. That was the word everyone used, so often that I’d stopped hearing it as an insult and started hearing it as my name.

I crossed to the window and pressed my forehead against the cold glass. Past the palace walls, past the farmland and the last watchtower, a black line of pines marked the border. Beyond it lay Shadow Pack territory, home of the wolves who had been killing my people for centuries over an oath no one living could remember being made. Somewhere in those trees waited a man whose name made grown vampires lower their voices.

In three days, he would be my husband.

I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands knotted in my lap and realized they were shaking. Not from fear. From rage, which surprised me, because I’d always been so good at swallowing it.

A soft knock at the door made me flinch. Not the heavy thud of a guard or the impatient rap of a page. Two taps and a pause, a knock I’d known since I was small.

“It’s me, child.”

Hesper stood in the corridor, a human woman of sixty or so with iron-gray hair pinned beneath a plain cap and a battered trunk dragging at one arm. She had served in the palace longer than I’d been alive, and she was the only person in it who had ever knocked on my door.

“Nobody was going to bring you one,” she said, and hauled the trunk over the threshold before I could take it from her. From her apron she drew a goblet, still warm from the kitchens. “And that tray was a disgrace. Drink.”

“Hesper—”

“Don’t you ‘Hesper’ me. Drink.”

I drank. It was the first kind thing anyone had done for me all day, and my eyes stung in a way I refused to acknowledge.

Humans served in every corner of the palace, bound by laws that were supposed to protect them and ignored whenever it was convenient. They lowered their eyes around every vampire. Around me, most of them lowered them with something that looked uncomfortably like pity. Hesper had never once looked at the floor.

“I held you the day your mother died,” she said abruptly, staring at the comb on the dresser. “You were two and wouldn’t stop screaming. I thought, this one has lungs. She’ll need them in this place.”

A watery laugh escaped me. “I’ve never used them.”

“There’s time.” She lowered herself onto the trunk with a small groan. “They’ll tell you terrible things about the wolves, you know. They always do. Half of it is true, I’d wager, and the other half is what the people telling it would do in the wolves’ place.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“It wasn’t meant to be. It was meant to be useful.” She patted the lid of the trunk. “Pack the warm things. And the plain gowns, not the ones your stepmother’s seamstress made you. You’ll want to move in what you wear.”

It took me less than ten minutes to pack everything I owned that was worth taking: three plain gowns, a heavy traveling cloak Hesper produced from nowhere, a book of old poems, my mother’s comb. When I finished, the trunk was only half full. Hesper looked at it for a long moment and said nothing, and I was grateful.

Hesper left with a squeeze of my hand and a mutter about foolish kings. I shut the door behind her, pressed my back against it, and breathed.

Three days. Everyone in this palace expected the wolves to break me. But I had spent twenty years being called weak, and I was still here.