Chapter 1

Kiara Pov 

"Come back here, you filthy bitch!"

Cute. I didn't even slow down to appreciate it.

Gamma Raphael's voice cracked on bitch, which told me two things one, he was still doubled over, and two, I'd hit exactly where I was aiming. Small comforts.

"Somebody catch her! Now!"

Maids scattered out of my way in the corridor like I was on fire. Nobody reached for me. Smart. I wouldn't have reached for me either.

Ten minutes ago I'd been on my knees with a rag, scrubbing a floor that didn't need scrubbing, when he'd said I looked pretty for a slave like that was a compliment I should thank him for. I hadn't turned around fast enough. That was my first mistake. My second was thinking please would work on a man who'd already decided what he wanted before he opened his mouth.

Get on the bed, he'd said, casual, like he was asking me to fetch water.

I'd told him I was a virgin. Genuinely thought that might buy me something. He'd looked almost pleased. *I know,* he said. *That's why I sent for you.*

That was the moment something in my chest just stopped bowing. I don't know how else to explain it. One second I was folding myself smaller the way I'd been trained to since I could walk, and the next my foot was already moving.

"Can't nobody catch one little human?" he roared, closer than I wanted. "Useless. All of you, useless!"

I hit the courtyard door with both hands and daylight swallowed me whole. My lungs were already screaming. Behind me, boots. More than one set now.

Worth it, I told myself, sprinting past a stable boy who dropped his bucket and had the good sense not to try me. Worth it, even if this is the last thing I ever do on my own two feet.

"She went right!" someone shouted.

I went left, because contrary is the only strategy I had, and also because right sounded like exactly where they'd expect me to go.

I actually thought I'd lost them for one glorious stretch of corridor. Four steps of nothing behind me but my own heartbeat. I almost laughed. Actually started to, this awful hysterical noise building in my chest

A hand closed around my sleeve.

I twisted so hard the fabric tore instead of my arm, and I was moving again before I understood I was free, laughing for real now, that horrible kind of laugh you make when your body's decided panic isn't useful anymore and hysteria is cheaper.

"You think you can run from me?" Raphael, further back, but no less furious. "Do you know what I am? Do you know what I'll do when I catch you? Where are the damn guards, useless bunch of idiots!"

Great question, Raphael. Where *were* the guards.

I found out cutting around the stable block, feet sliding on gravel, catching myself on the wall hard enough to feel it tomorrow if I had a tomorrow, which was looking increasingly like a big if.

Two guards. Standing right there like they'd been waiting for the invitation.

I hit the ground before I even registered stopping. An arm hooked around my throat from behind, and every ounce of smart-mouth I'd been running on evaporated into pure animal panic, gravel biting into my palms, my own pulse deafening in my ears.

"Got her," one of them said. Bored. Like I was a dropped coin, not worth the bend to pick up.

They hauled me up between them and I let them, because fighting now would just mean fighting and losing, and I needed whatever was left in me for later. I made myself breathe through my nose, slow, steady, while two grown werewolves gripped my arms like I might actually get away a second time.

They didn't take me to the cells.

I clocked it in my legs before my brain caught up the ground under my bare feet went wide and smooth, the kind of stone that only gets that polished when a lot of important people walk on it. The guards on either side of me had gone quiet in a way that felt rehearsed. Like they knew better than to make conversation on this particular walk.

A crowd was already forming by the time we reached the square. Werewolves and human slaves both, spilling out of doorways, and not one of them looked surprised to see me, which meant the story had beaten me here, which meant this had a name before I'd even shown up to it.

I looked up.

Platform. Raised wood. A block at the center, dark in patches I decided not to look at twice.

Okay, I thought, with the kind of calm that only shows up right before everything falls apart. Bread would've been better. At least bread has a punchline.

They forced me down onto my knees. The wood was cold enough to steal my breath, or maybe that was something else entirely.

"They just never learn," some woman in the crowd said, like she was commenting on the weather.

I hadn't expected weeks of starvation. Hadn't expected mercy, either I'm not stupid. But I'd figured on a whipping post. A brand. Something that left me alive to regret it.

Not this.

"Who's doing the execution?" someone asked.

"I heard it's the king."

My stomach dropped somewhere past the platform, past the ground, past whatever was under the ground. Of all the ways this could go, of course it was going to be the one I'd have paid actual money to avoid.

I'd rather die by anyone else's hand. Literally anyone's. Raphael's, even, and Raphael had just tried to choke the life out of me for having an opinion.

But apparently the universe had run out of small mercies for humans right around the time I was born, and it wasn't about to start handing them out now.