Chapter Three

They didn’t touch me.

That was the first strange thing. I had braced for hands, for teeth, for being dragged through the trees like a kill. Instead the wolves simply moved, a living wall of fur and muscle that closed in on both sides and turned me up the road, and I walked because the alternative was to stand alone in the dark.

The scarred man led the way, still in his human shape, with the careless ease of someone who had never once worried about the cold. He didn’t speak. Behind me, a younger man hauled my trunk onto one shoulder as if it weighed nothing, his jaw tight, as though carrying a vampire’s luggage were an insult he intended to remember.

I counted my steps, because counting was something I could control. Four hundred and twelve before the pines began to thin.

I had expected a fortress. Spiked walls, a keep with skulls on the gate, something to match the name Beast of the Shadow Pack. What stood on the hill ahead was a house.

A big house, built of dark stone and darker timber, three stories of steep roofs and tall windows glowing gold with lamplight. Smoke curled from half a dozen chimneys. Wide steps climbed to a carved door, and bare gardens, tidy against the coming winter, ran down on either side. It was nothing like the Dracana palace, which had never been built to be lived in. It was smaller, warmer, and so unexpectedly ordinary that I stopped walking.

It looked like a home. That frightened me more than any fortress could have.

The door opened before we reached it. A young woman stood in the light, somewhere near my own age, with a brown braid over one shoulder, her sleeves pushed past her elbows, and a smear of flour on her wrist. It gave me the absurd urge to laugh. Her eyes were a wary amber, and her nostrils flared as I climbed the steps. She was smelling me, I realized. Taking inventory.

“Beta,” she said.

So the scarred man was the Beta, second only to the Alpha himself. The Alpha had sent his second-in-command to collect me and hadn’t bothered to come at all.

“Bryn.” The Beta jerked his chin at me. “The princess. The Alpha’s orders: a room, a meal, and she stays inside. No one bothers her.”

“And the Alpha?” My voice came out smaller than I intended. “Where is he?”

The Beta looked at me for the first time since the border. “Occupied.”

The word dropped like a stone. I waited for more. There wasn’t any. The Beta gave a short nod to Bryn, turned, and went back down the steps, and the wolves melted into the dark behind him until the garden was empty.

Occupied.

I had told myself on the long ride that I didn’t care. That I would be spared any ceremony of welcome, any false courtesy, any staged pageant of enemies pretending to be allies. But somewhere beneath the practiced indifference, a stubborn part of me had expected him. The man who had demanded a vampire bride would at least want to look at what he had bought. Instead I stood on his doorstep like a parcel left on the wrong porch.

“He’s not coming,” Bryn said, not unkindly. “Not tonight, anyway. I’d come in. You look frozen.”

“I’m not cold.”

“You’re blue around the mouth.” She stepped back and held the door wide. “I’m not going to pretend I’m glad to see you. But I’ve got a room made up, and it’s cold out here, so.”

It was the most honest welcome I’d ever received. I went in.

The hall was stone-floored and timber-beamed, warm after the dark. A long wall of pegs held cloaks and boots and a worn leather coat, none of it arranged, all of it used. A faded rug lay frayed at the edges from years of heavy feet. There were no ancestral portraits staring down in judgment, no polished marble, no guards. Somewhere deeper in the house, someone was laughing, and the sound cut off abruptly, as though the laughers had noticed me.

My trunk thudded onto the floor behind me. The young man who’d carried it left without a word.

“Kitchen first,” Bryn said, leading me down a passage. “You’ll eat something, then I’ll show you up.”

The kitchen was bigger than my entire suite in the east wing, with a scrubbed table and iron pots hanging from hooks. Bryn set a goblet in front of me, then a plate of bread and roasted meat, and stood with her arms crossed as if daring me to complain.

“I didn’t know what you eat,” she said stiffly. “I know about the blood. It’s deer. Fresh this morning, from the hunt. We don’t keep humans for it, so you’ll have to make do.”

I looked at her, then at the goblet. “You don’t keep humans?”

“We don’t keep servants at all.” Her chin lifted. “A few of us volunteer to run the house. Cooking, cleaning, keeping the Alpha from living on raw venison. We eat, we sleep, we’re part of the pack. It’s not a palace.”

It wasn’t an accusation, quite, but it landed like one. I thought of Hesper in her plain cap at the servants’ gate. I thought of the woman frozen with her tray in the throne room, and of every human who had ever lowered their eyes to me.

“In my father’s palace,” I began, “the humans are—”

“I know what they are.” Bryn’s voice went flat. “Don’t say it in this house.”

I closed my mouth. I drank.

The blood was richer than anything the palace kitchens had ever sent me, wild and warm, and I hated how much I needed it. I ate a little of the bread to be polite. Bryn watched me do it with an expression I couldn’t read, and when I finished she took the plate away without a word.

Upstairs, at the end of a long corridor, she opened a door and stepped aside.

The room was beautiful. Not palace-beautiful, all marble and cold gilt, but warm: a wide bed heaped with quilts, a thick rug in deep green, a window seat looking out over the black line of the pines. A washing room opened off to one side, steam still rising from a basin someone had filled. It was larger than the whole of my old rooms. It was the first room I’d ever been given that hadn’t been meant as a punishment.

“The Alpha asked that you not be disturbed,” Bryn said from the doorway.

“Asked?”

“Ordered.” The corner of her mouth twitched, then flattened again. “Is there anything else?”

“When will I see him?”

She hesitated. It was only a heartbeat, but I’d spent twenty years reading the faces of people who didn’t want to answer me. “I don’t know,” she said, and closed the door.

I stood in the middle of the room for a long time, listening to the house settle around me. Then I sat on the edge of the bed, because I had nothing else to do, and for the first time since the throne room, I had nothing to do but think.

That was the problem.

What if he hates me?

The question came quietly at first. Then it came again, louder. By every account, Alpha Liam had hated vampires since before I was born. He had inherited the war the way other men inherited land. Why would a man like that look at a bride sent by his enemy, a bride said to be the weakest of her kind, and feel anything but contempt?

And if he did, what then? Vampires and werewolves did not marry. Not often. Not ever, if you listened to the old stories. In a thousand years, I knew of perhaps a handful of unions, all of them political, all of them short, and the children born of them could be counted on one hand. The bloodlines resisted each other, the scholars said, the way oil resisted water. Whatever the treaty wanted of me, it couldn’t be a family.

So it wasn’t that. He didn’t need me to be loved. He didn’t need me to be a wife. He needed me alive, at least until the ink had dried.

Which brought me back to the thing I’d been circling for hours.

I had expected a wedding tonight.

Not a joyful one. Priests and witnesses, vows spat through clenched teeth, a ring pressed onto my finger by a stranger who looked at me as if I smelled bad. But a wedding. On paper, I was already his wife. The contract had been signed and sealed before I ever left the palace, and the ceremony was only meant to lock the door behind it.

There had been no ceremony. No priest, no witness, not even a word. Only a locked room, a warm bed, and the word occupied.

I pulled my knees up to my chest and stared at the dark window. The treaty holds only as long as the marriage does. That was what my stepmother had said, with her blade of a smile. But what happened when the marriage had never begun? Was I a wife? A hostage? A guest who hadn’t been told she was a prisoner? Perhaps he meant to humiliate me, to make me wait until I begged. Perhaps he was waiting for me to run, so he could say the vampires had broken the peace first. Perhaps he wasn’t thinking of me at all.

I didn’t know which was worse.

I knew what the stories said about him. Everyone did. The strongest werewolf alive. A beast who could break a stone wall with one blow. The only wolf, some whispered, who also had magic, though no one had ever confirmed it, and those who claimed to have seen it hadn’t lived long enough to say more. They said his eyes were black as a moonless night, and that his name alone could silence the oldest wolves in the pack.

Nothing in those stories had told me what he would do with a wife he didn’t want.

I lay down at last without undressing, and I didn’t sleep. I listened instead: to footsteps in the corridor that never came to my door, to the low murmur of voices below, to a long howl rising from somewhere in the pines and answered, one by one, until the whole forest seemed to sing with it. It should have terrified me. Instead, strangely, it made me feel small, and far from home, and not entirely unwelcome.

When the sun finally came, it came through the window all at once, warm across my face, and I lay there with my eyes closed and let it. The vampires of the Dracana clan had never feared daylight. That was a human story, told to frighten children. It was one more thing I had taken for granted until I found myself in a stranger’s bed, in enemy territory, grateful for something familiar.

I sat up. Pale gold light lay across the green rug. Somewhere below, a door opened and closed, a pan clattered, and Bryn’s voice called something to someone I couldn’t see. The house was waking and going about its business, and not one person had come to tell me what I was doing here.

If he wouldn’t come to me, I would learn this house first. Its halls, its people, its rules. I would learn the pack, and I would learn him, before he decided what to do with me.

They called me weak. But weak things learn to watch.