Chapter 1: The Engagement

Elowen

I'd been standing at my own engagement banquet for four hours, and my fiancé still hadn't shown. I kept my eyes down and didn't listen to the whispers, when a scout came bursting through the doors.

"Alpha Sterling — Prince Adrian — he's at the Red Lantern!"

Silence.

The Red Lantern was a brothel.

Every eye in the room swung toward me. I was wearing a pale gold silk dress, cinched so tight I could barely breathe, with pearls at the neckline and crystal combs stabbing into my scalp. Every part of me had been arranged for this moment. And my groom had chosen a whorehouse over me.

I had no feelings for Adrian. I'd met him once, when I was fifteen, outside the royal palace. He'd looked me over with a lazy grin and said I'd "grown up nicely." His tone had made my skin crawl, but nobody asked me what I thought about it.

That one sentence was enough. My father had spent three years training me to sit straighter, speak softer, smile wider. All for a man who couldn't be bothered to show up.

The humiliation burned through my chest and up my throat.

I looked at my father. Maybe he would see this for what it was. Maybe he would call it off.

He was already looking at me.

His hand cracked across my face before I got a word out.

The sound was sharp and flat. My head snapped to the side. The crystal comb above my left ear came loose and clattered to the floor.

"You." His finger jabbed toward my nose. "You are an Alpha's daughter. And you can't even keep a man's interest over a common whore?"

The guests were leaving. They filed out quietly, not looking at me, the way people do when they've seen something unpleasant but not surprising.

My father wasn't finished. "You're twenty years old and you still can't shift. An Omega. The only thing you're good for is this marriage. This pack fed you, housed you, trained you to be a princess — and this is the result?"

Trained me. After Adrian's offhand remark, my father had pulled me out of the forest where I'd spent my childhood ignored. Locked me in the packhouse. Hired tutors who rapped my knuckles when I held a fork wrong.

He never asked me if I wanted any of it.

I stood with my hand pressed to my burning cheek and said nothing.

My stepmother watched from her chair, chin tilted up. "Well," Rosalind said. "A real lady would have held his attention. But then, she was never really a lady, was she?"

My stepsister Chloe snorted from behind her fan. She was enjoying this. "Maybe," she said, drawing the word out, "you should take some tips from the girls at the Red Lantern. Learn how to be more... proactive."

Something shifted behind my father's eyes. He seized my arm.

"You're coming with me. We're going to find Adrian, and you're going to apologize."

I pulled back. "I don't want to go."

His fingers dug into my arm until the bones ground together. "The Regent Prince Kieran is a cripple now. Adrian is the only one in line for the throne. Do you understand what that means?" His voice dropped low enough that only I could hear. "You will not ruin this."

---

The streets outside the Red Lantern smelled like pipe smoke and cheap perfume. Gold silk and pearls on a road where women leaned in doorways with painted mouths and bare shoulders. A man near a card table whistled low as we passed.

My skin crawled. I tried to pull my arm free.

"Father, please —"

"Shut your mouth." He yanked me forward. "Put down your pride and show some effort."

This was the man who slapped me if my collar slipped too low.

Now he was marching me into a brothel in my engagement dress.

The inside was dim and warm. Red curtains, low couches. Adrian was sprawled on a velvet chaise with a dark-haired woman draped across his lap and another perched on the armrest.

The woman on his lap tipped her head, eyes gliding over my dress and dried tear tracks. "Oh, a new girl, is she?" A lazy giggle. "Trying a different flavor tonight, are we?"

Adrian glanced over. His gaze lingering on my face a moment. Then he turned back to the woman in his lap.

"Not a new girl," he said, low and amused. "Nothing compared to you, love. Not even close."

The shock hit me before the shame. A prince — comparing his own fiancée to a whore, right in front of her. Not even sparing me a word. As if I wasn't worth addressing.

I opened my mouth, but my father cut me off with a sharp sound and a warning glare. Then, calm as if nothing had happened, he stepped forward and bowed.

"Your Highness." A deep, practiced bow. "Forgive the intrusion. Perhaps you've forgotten — today was the engagement ceremony."

"Engagement?" Adrian laughed, sitting up. "I never agreed to an engagement. I said I'd attend a banquet."

My father's face tightened. "Your Highness, the understanding was —"

"Your understanding." Adrian's smile didn't waver. "Not mine. I mentioned once that your daughter was pretty enough, and you've been throwing her at me ever since. There was never a written agreement, Sterling. You know that."

I watched my father's expression crumble and rearrange itself into something obsequious.

Adrian's eyes drifted to me. This time they stopped. He looked me up and down like livestock at market.

My stomach turned. I wanted to step back, but my father held me pinned in place.

"Tell you what." Adrian tilted his head. "She can stay tonight. Her and Lila here." He nodded at the dark-haired woman. "If she's entertaining enough, I might make her my... what's the word." He pretended to think. "Mistress."

I stared at him. An Alpha's daughter. He wanted to make an Alpha's daughter his concubine, to share a bed with his whores as some kind of audition. The absurdity of it hit me before the horror did.

"Wonderful," my father said. "Elowen would be honored."

He didn't even hesitate. Not a flicker of anger on his behalf, not a moment of protest. In his eyes, this was no different from the engagement itself. I was something to be offered.

I was no different from these women. Not to him.

Adrian's eyes slid to me. "She doesn't look honored."

"She's shy." My father grabbed my shoulder and squeezed. "Don't be rude, Elowen. Tell the prince you're grateful."

The dark-haired woman was watching me with pity now. Even she could see what this was.

I looked at Adrian's lazy smile. At my father's desperate grip.

Something cracked open inside my chest. Not courage, exactly. Something more animal than that. A refusal that came from deeper than my trained obedience could reach.

My mouth moved on its own—

"No."