Chapter 3

Kieran

"Your Highness, the weekly report."

Rhys stood in the doorway with his leather folio, spine straight, chin lifted. He was trying to project calm authority. He hadn't fully learned how yet.

I shifted my mask, the edge pressing wrong against the scarring today, and gestured for him to begin.

"Prince Adrian attended three public hunts this month, all uninvited. Alpha Hendricks and Lord Carmont dined privately with him last week — both your long-standing allies." Rhys turned a page. "Several eastern pack leaders have begun addressing correspondence directly to Prince Adrian's office. Without routing through yours."

I ran my thumb along the ridge of bone that jutted from my right knee. Broken in three places, healed crooked, permanently warped. The pressure sent a thread of pain up my thigh. I let it.

"Getting bold," I said.

"Yes, sir."

Good. I'd spent three years making sure they would.

Before the war, I'd been the obvious heir. My elder brother long dead, my father too frail to rule. I'd governed this kingdom since I was twenty-two — a decade of building alliances, managing borders, earning loyalty through competence rather than blood alone.

Then the border campaign. An enemy who knew our positions, our supply lines, our patrol routes. Someone had fed them intelligence from inside. I lost the battle, lost my beta, and came home with half my body shattered and a curse carved into my face.

My nephew Adrian — young, whole, charming in the way a blade is charming — stepped into the gap. Every ambitious lord in the kingdom began quietly recalculating which side of the succession to stand on.

They thought I was finished. I let them. The more comfortable they grew, the more they revealed themselves. Three years of playing the broken prince, and I could now name nearly every traitor at court.

"Let them dance," I said. "When every snake has left its hole, we close the net."

Being crippled had its uses. At the very least, I'd learned who was real and who was performance.

Rhys nodded. He understood strategy in the abstract. He hadn't yet learned to enjoy the patience it required.

"That's everything, sir. I'll—"

He stopped. I raised an eyebrow.

"There is... one more matter." He cleared his throat. "Your mother has found a potential match. A bride."

I stopped touching my knee.

No heir. That was the crack in my claim, the one vulnerability Adrian's faction kept probing. My mother had been trying to fill it for three years, parading every eligible woman in the kingdom through my study door. I'd turned them all away. I could see the calculation in their eyes, or the pity. Sometimes both at once, which was worse.

"Who?"

"Elowen Sterling, sir."

I laughed. Short and humorless.

"Sterling." I leaned back in my chair. "Adrian's cast-off. The girl he humiliated in front of the entire district."

"Yes, sir."

"And Baron Sterling — the most transparently servile Alpha in three kingdoms — is now offering me his disgraced daughter. How generous of him."

"Actually, sir..." Rhys shifted his weight. A bad sign — Rhys only fidgeted when he was about to say something he knew I wouldn't like. "The girl proposed it herself. She volunteered. And the Queen Mother was quite pleased with the match."

"She volunteered." I turned the word over. "A woman who was publicly shamed for failing to hold my nephew's interest now claims she's devoted to a man she's never met. Does that strike you as plausible, Rhys?"

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

"Her father is stupid and sycophantic," I said. "He spent three years grooming that girl for Adrian. Now that Adrian's tossed her aside, he's recycling her. Send the refusal."

"Sir, the Queen Mother—"

"Rhys." My voice dropped. "You report to me. Not to my mother."

He recognized the edge. He bowed and left.

The study was quiet. I kept the curtains drawn most days — less for the light than for the mirror-like reflection in the glass. The mask felt heavier when I was alone.

She volunteered. As if that mattered.

Even if the girl meant it, and she didn't, it wouldn't survive the first meeting. One look at the curse marks that crawled across my face, at the leg that bent where it shouldn't, and she would flinch the way they always did. The devotion of a woman who'd never seen the thing she was devoting herself to was worth exactly nothing.

I pressed my thumb into the bone ridge again. Harder.

Let her.

Elowen

"He has no plans to marry."

Father's palm hit the dining table hard enough to rattle the silverware. Across from me, Rosalind picked up her teacup without flinching.

I stared at the place where my plate should have been. They hadn't set one.

"Well." Rosalind sipped. "You wanted to be different. Throw yourself at the cripple. And even the cripple turned you down."

Chloe giggled behind her napkin.

"One day." Father pointed at me. "You have one day to make those bruises disappear. Tomorrow, you're going to Adrian. And this time, you will behave."

A servant walked me to my room and locked the door from outside.

I sat on my bed with my hands in my lap. My stomach was hollow — I hadn't eaten since yesterday morning. Through the closed window, I could hear two maids in the corridor.

"They're clearing the eastern road tonight. The Regent Prince's carriage."

"What for?"

"Military business, probably. They say he barely leaves the palace anymore..."

Their voices faded.

I looked at the locked door. Then at the window.

Before the brothel, I would have sat on this bed and waited. Accepted whatever Father decided. But something had cracked open when I said no to Adrian, and the old reflexes wouldn't reset. Obedience used to be as automatic as flinching. Now I'd flinched, and survived it, and the mechanism was broken.

I couldn't go to Adrian. I couldn't.

The window latch was stiff. My hands shook as I forced it open. The drop to the garden was far enough to make my stomach clench, but the flower bed below looked soft.

I swung my legs over the sill and jumped.

The landing jarred my bruised ribs. I crouched in the dirt, teeth clenched, listening. No shout. No alarm. The dining room was on the other side of the house. Nobody was watching the locked girl's window.

I ran.

Barefoot — they'd taken my shoes. The cobblestones were cold and sharp under my feet. My gold dress was torn and dirty from the cellar, the hem dragging through puddles. My hands were shaking, my heart hammering in my throat, and underneath the fear there was something I hadn't expected.

Something that felt like being uncaged.

The eastern road was empty when I reached it — cleared for the prince. The carriage appeared around the bend, dark and heavy, flanked by mounted guards bearing the Kavanagh crest.

I stepped into the road.

My foot caught on a loose cobblestone and I went down hard, scraping my palms raw on the street.

The guards drew swords instantly. "Halt! Who goes there?"

I pushed myself up. My knees were bleeding through the silk. My hair hung loose and matted. My face was swollen.

I looked at the carriage, my heart pounding so loud I could feel it in my teeth.

"I want to propose to Prince Kieran."