Chapter Four

By the third day, I tried the front door.

I told myself I only wanted air. That was true, the way most lies are. Two days of the green room and the window seat and the quiet footsteps outside my door had worn something thin in me, and I wanted to stand in the open, in daylight, and feel like a guest instead of a parcel someone had forgotten to unpack.

The door opened easily. That was the surprise. I stepped onto the wide front steps, into pale sunlight, and drew a breath of cold pine air.

Then I heard the growl.

It rolled across the garden from the tree line, low and patient. Another answered it, and another. I looked up. Beyond the low stone wall, a crowd had gathered at the edge of the lawn: thirty, forty of them, men and women and a few in fur, standing shoulder to shoulder in perfect silence. They didn’t shout. That was worse. They only watched me, with the flat hatred of people who had buried someone, and I knew without being told that every one of them had a name for what I was.

A woman near the front spat into the grass.

“Inside,” Bryn said behind me. Her hand closed around my elbow, firm but not rough, and she steered me back through the door and shut it. Her heart was pounding. I could hear it. “Not yet. Please.”

“I only wanted—”

“I know what you wanted.” She leaned against the door, breathing hard. “I’d have wanted it too. But they’ve been out there since dawn. They’ve been taking turns since the night you crossed the border. If you walk out that door, someone will do something stupid, and then the Alpha will have to answer for it, and then the peace is finished. So. Inside.”

No one had ever called it a cage. But a door that opened easily and could not stay open was only a cage with better manners, and I understood, with slow, cold clarity, that I was a prisoner who had been told she was a guest.

I didn’t try the door again.

Bryn came to my room in the mornings with a goblet, and in the afternoons with news of the house, which was mostly complaints about the Beta’s boots and the state of the pantry. She came again at night, supposedly to check the window latch, which was never loose. By the fifth day we both knew she wasn’t checking anything. She didn’t want to leave me alone, and I didn’t want her to go.

We sat on the window seat with the quilt over our knees, and she told me why she’d volunteered for the house.

“My wolf’s small,” she said, shrugging as though it didn’t matter. “Didn’t make the warriors. The Beta said I’d be dead in a skirmish within the hour. So I learned to bake instead.” Her mouth twisted. “Turns out nobody fights well on an empty stomach.”

I laughed, and it startled us both.

It was a few nights later, with the lamp turned low, that she asked. “Tell me about the palace. If you want. I’m not being nosy. It’s only... I thought vampire royals were all like the stories.”

“What do the stories say?”

“That you’re cold. That you’re cruel. That you don’t love your children.” She hesitated. “I’m not sure I like finding out which parts are true.”

It was a strange thing, to be asked a real question. I’d been told things all my life: where to stand, what to wear, when to keep quiet. Nobody had ever asked because they wanted to know.

So I told her. Not all of it. I gave her the version I’d rehearsed in the cracked mirror: my mother dead when I was two, my father remarried within the year, two half-sisters whose shadow magic came early and bright. The east wing. The cold tray outside my door.

“And your magic?” Bryn asked.

“There isn’t any.” I said it lightly. I’d had a great deal of practice saying it lightly. “I turned twenty a few months ago and nothing has ever come. Not a flicker. The court physician told my father some vampires bloom late. Then he stopped saying that.” I picked at the edge of the quilt. “I’m the weakest vampire in the kingdom. It isn’t a figure of speech. They tested me twice. You were sent a princess tied up in a ribbon, with nothing inside the box.”

“Lysandra—”

“It’s all right, truly. There’s nothing remarkable about me except my hair, and only because it’s wrong.” I made myself smile. “My father didn’t send me because I was valuable. He sent me because I was the one child he could afford to lose. He said so in front of the entire court. You were probably told to expect a diplomat. You got a spare.”

The room went quiet. Bryn had gone very still, and when I finally looked up, her amber eyes were bright and furious, though not at me.

“That,” she said, “is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s only the truth.”

“It isn’t the truth. It’s what they told you until you started telling it to yourself.” She shoved off the window seat, paced to the door and back. “I’ve watched you for five days. You haven’t complained once. You stepped out of that carriage into a ring of wolves in the dark and didn’t scream. That’s not nothing.”

“I was too frightened to run.”

“That’s what courage is, you idiot.”

I stared at her. No one had ever called me an idiot in a voice that sounded like affection.

On the sixth day, someone knocked who wasn’t Bryn.

Two sharp raps, a pause, a third. Bryn opened the door and stepped back with a look I couldn’t read. “Gamma.”

The man in the doorway was broad-shouldered, sandy-haired, with a crooked nose and a smile that actually reached his eyes. He looked nothing like the Beta. He looked like someone who laughed easily and meant it.

“Princess!” He bowed, not deeply but with real courtesy. “Forgive me for taking so long. I’ve been told I’m bad at waiting. I’m Caden, gamma of the Shadow Pack, which is a very grand way of saying I’m the one they send when someone needs to be told something nicely.”

I blinked. “And the Beta is the one they send when someone needs to be told something not nicely?”

His laugh came out of him in a startled bark. “You’ve met him.”

“Briefly. He didn’t seem pleased.”

“That’s just his face. He’s been like that since he was twelve.” Caden dropped into the chair by the window without waiting to be asked, and for the first time in six days a person in this house sat down in my room as though it were an ordinary place. “I’ll be brief. I’m also told I’m not good at that. The Alpha wanted you to know the confinement isn’t a punishment.”

“It feels like one.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” He seemed to mean that, too. “But you’ve seen the lawn. Nearly everyone out there lost someone to your people. Parents, children, mates. They’re not ready to see a vampire walking about the grounds, and I won’t pretend they will be soon. The Alpha would sooner keep you safe and angry than let you walk out and get hurt.”

“And how long is that?”

“As long as the Alpha decides.” He spread his hands. “But hear me. The three of us at the top, Alpha, Beta, and I, put our names to this treaty, and we mean to keep it. The rest of the pack will follow, or they won’t, and it won’t change what’s been decided. As far as the leadership goes, you are welcome here.”

Welcome. I turned the word over, looking for the trap in it, and couldn’t find one.

“The Beta didn’t look very welcoming,” I said.

“The Beta doesn’t look very welcoming at his own birthday.” Caden’s smile softened. “He told me, once the carriage was gone, that you walked up those steps without flinching. For him, that’s a speech.”

I didn’t know what to do with that, so I said nothing.

“And the Alpha?” It came out before I could stop it. “Does he share that welcome?”

Something crossed his face too quickly for me to name. “The Alpha doesn’t do anything he doesn’t mean,” he said carefully. “He wouldn’t have signed otherwise.” Then he rose, straightened his coat, and gave me another bow, deeper this time. “On behalf of the leadership of the Shadow Pack, welcome home, Luna.”

I stopped breathing.

Luna. I knew the word, from old stories and older enemies: the she-wolf queen, the Alpha’s mate, the mother of the pack.

“I’m—Luna?” My voice sounded far away. “So the contract. It’s already... I’m already...”

Caden blinked. He looked at me, then at Bryn, then at the ceiling, with the expression of a man who has just discovered he’s stepped on a rake. “Ah,” he said. “I think that’s a conversation for Bryn.” He was gone before I could ask anything else.

Bryn shut her eyes. “No,” she said. “You’re not Luna. Not yet.”

“But he called me—”

“He called you what you’ll be. Not what you are.” She exhaled. “A Luna isn’t made by a contract, Lysandra. She’s the Alpha’s wife and the pack’s mother, and the pack has to be bound to her. That only happens one way: the wedding under the moon. Full moon, open sky, the Alpha and his bride standing before the moon goddess. She has to see it. She has to bless it. Then you’re Luna. Not before.”

“But the papers—”

“Papers are for people. Lunas are for the goddess.”

I sat very still. “So that’s why there was no ceremony. It wasn’t skipped. It simply wasn’t the right night.”

“The Alpha chooses the night.”

“And has he chosen?”

Bryn’s silence was answer enough. “If he has,” she said at last, “he hasn’t told anyone.”

So I was not a wife, nor a Luna, nor quite a prisoner. I was something that hadn’t been named yet, and until someone chose the night, I would sit in a warm room in a stranger’s house and wait to find out what I was.

That night I stood at the window long after Bryn had gone. The moon hung above the pines, pale and watchful. For twenty years, I had been weighed by people who’d decided what I was worth before I opened my mouth. Now some old goddess I had never prayed to would have her turn.

“I don’t know if you’re listening,” I whispered. “I’m not much to look at. But I’d rather you looked at me for my heart and not my power or heritage”

The moon, naturally, said nothing.

But for the first time since the border, the silence didn’t feel like a verdict.

I turned from the window, meaning to sleep, and stopped.

A square of paper lay on my pillow.

It hadn’t been there when Bryn left. I would have noticed. I noticed everything in this room now, the way a prisoner learns the shape of her cell. I hadn’t heard a footstep, a creak, not even the whisper of a hinge.

I crossed the room and picked it up. The paper was cheap and rough, folded once. Inside, in thick black strokes pressed so hard the pen had torn the page, someone had written:

THE GODDESS DOES NOT BLESS LEECHES.

YOU WILL NEVER BE OUR LUNA.

LEAVE BEFORE THE HIGH MOON, OR BE CARRIED OUT.

My hands began to shake. I told myself it was rage.

Then I noticed the ink. It smeared under my thumb, black and glistening, and a thin dark line crept across my skin.

It was still wet.

I looked at the bolt on my door. Shut. I looked at the latch on my window. Fastened.

Whoever had written this had come into my room some other way, and gone out the same way.

Or they had never gone out at all.

Behind me, very softly, the floorboard creaked.