002

I woke to a sharp pain behind my eyes, my brain threatening to spill out from my skull. I remembered a hallway tilting under my feet. Had it all been a dream?

Then I remembered the look on Wren's face. The wave. The smile.

I sat up fast. Something felt wrong before I'd even fully opened my eyes. This wasn't my room. My room at home was plain, simple, nothing special. This one was dark and crimson red, with a dark ambiance that made me shiver.

My stomach dropped. I threw the covers back and ran for the window.

"No. No, no, no. That little bitch."The words came out thin, more breath than sound. Beyond the glass, towers and stone I'd never seen before stretched toward a sky that felt too bright, too clean.

I was in the palace.

They'd drugged me. Sent me off unconscious, like a parcel too much trouble to deliver awake.

How noble of my family.

"How could they do this to me." The words broke apart in my throat as it all settled in. This wasn't a threat anymore. Not something I could still argue my way out of. It was already done.

The door opened before I could pull myself together. A group of maids walked in, followed by a woman whose bearing alone marked her as someone important — straight spine, chin level, the kind of stillness that comes from never having to hurry for anyone.

"It's time for your bath, my lady," one of the maids said. Behind her, another carried in a gown finer than anything I'd ever owned, and jewelry that caught the light like it was made of sunlight, while the rest of them moved through the room, stripping and remaking the bed like I wasn't even standing there.

I walked up to the noblewoman, the only one who hadn't spoken, and found only disgust waiting in her eyes when they met mine.

"There's been a mistake," I said, shaking my head frantically and forcing the words out steady. "I'm not supposed to be here. You have the wrong girl."

She didn't answer. Not for a long moment — long enough that I wondered if she'd heard me at all.

"Clean her up properly. Use the scented water—lavender, if we have any left. That's what the Alpha Klaus likes." She said it to the maid beside her, not to me, like I'd already stopped being a person worth talking to. "Breakfast is in an hour. He doesn't like waiting."

The maids bowed. She left without another glance my way, and their attention swung back to me like a closing door.

"This way, my lady. Your bath is ready."

"Wait." I grabbed the sleeve of the nearest maid, my voice climbing toward panic. "Please, just listen to me. There's been a mistake. I was drugged — I'm not supposed to be here. I don't want to die. I need to leave this place, please."

None of them answered. None of them even looked at me.

I ran for the door instead. Locked. Of course it was locked.

The maids came toward me again, herding rather than leading, and something in me snapped. I grabbed a candlestick from the side table and pointed it at them like a weapon, daring any of them to take another step.

For twenty minutes, that standoff held. Twenty minutes of them circling, coaxing, backing off, trying again, while I stood with my back to the wall and a candlestick shaking in my hand, until exhaustion finally started eating through what was left of my resolve.

One of the maids broke first, her calm cracking into real fear. "Please, my lady. You're going to be late. They'll have our heads on a stake if we don't get you ready in time."

I looked at each of their faces. Not one of them was faking that fear for my sake. It was real, and it matched exactly what I felt standing in their place.

I couldn't let them die for something that wasn't their fault.

I set the candlestick down and let them lead me into the bathroom without another fight.

It was, despite everything, beautiful — a white porcelain tub trimmed in gold, sitting in the middle of a room bigger than my bedroom back home. The maids helped me out of my dress and into the water, refusing when I asked to bathe myself, saying it was forbidden. The water smelled like lavender, warm and sweet, and they washed every inch of me with a thoroughness that made it clear this wasn't really for me at all.

By the time they finished dressing me, I barely recognized the girl in the mirror.

They led me out toward the dining hall, and I made myself pay attention to everything on the way the doors, the turns, the number of guards at each corner, anything that might matter later if I got another chance to run. Because I would. I refused to die quietly at the hands of a man I'd never even met.

The palace itself was nothing like the stories back home. Where I'd expected decay and menace, I found gold light and high ceilings and gardens outside every window we passed — beautiful, in complete contrast to everything I'd been told to fear. But beauty had never saved a single girl who'd walked these halls before me. What good was a gilded cage to anyone who still ended up dead inside it?

Fear settled into my chest like a stone as we walked, heavier with every step closer to the dining hall. Would he be able to tell, the second he looked at me, that I wasn't fully what I was supposed to be?

I might not survive breakfast. I might be executed on the spot for pretending to be something I wasn't.

Moon Goddess, please. I don't want to die.

I made myself a promise instead — quiet, private, the only thing steady enough to hold onto as the doors to the dining hall came into view. If I survived whatever waited on the other side, I would make every one of them pay for selling me off like a sacrifice they never planned on grieving.

Even if it was the last thing I ever did.