Chapter 1

HAZEL

“Please, Mother, I really can't do this anymore.”

My voice trembled as I looked at my mother, trying to hold back the tears burning behind my eyes. “I'm tired, I'm dizzy, and I can barely stand without feeling like the whole room is spinning. Please, just this once, let someone else help her.”

Mother didn't even look at me. She sat beside Margaret's bed, gently brushing the hair away from her forehead while the physician prepared the blood transfusion, as though the girl lying beneath the white blankets were her own daughter and I were nothing more than an annoying stranger interrupting an important moment.

“Hazel, don't start this again,” she said coldly. “Margaret has suffered enough in her life, and now that she finally has a family, you want to deny her the one thing that could help her recover?”

I stared at her, unable to believe those words had come from the same woman who used to kiss my forehead whenever I had a nightmare as a little girl. I remembered how she would hold me against her chest and promise that nothing bad would ever happen to me while she was alive, but now I was sitting in front of her with bruises on my arms and barely enough strength to keep my eyes open, and she couldn't even bring herself to look at me.

“I'm not trying to hurt Margaret,” I whispered. “I'm just asking you to see that I'm hurting too.”

“Enough!” Father said from the doorway.

His voice was so sharp that I flinched, and when I turned toward him, I found him watching me with the same disappointment he had shown me every time I questioned one of their decisions concerning Margaret. He wore his usual dark royal coat, his golden Larkspur Pack crest shining on his chest, and there was not a single sign of worry on his face as he approached the bed.

“Margaret is family now,” he continued. “Her father gave his life serving this pack, and I made a promise to protect his daughter. I will not break that promise simply because you have decided to behave selfishly.”

My lips parted, but for a moment, no words came out. I wanted to ask him whether his promise to a dead man mattered more than the promises he had made to his own daughter, but the question hurt too much to say aloud.

“I'm your daughter too, Father.”

“And you have a wolf,” he replied without hesitation. “You are stronger than Margaret, and you are perfectly capable of helping her.”

I looked down at my arm, where the physician had already tied a band around my upper arm to make the vein easier to find. The skin around the needle marks had turned an ugly shade of purple, and some of the older punctures had barely healed before another needle was pushed into them. I couldn't remember the last time I had gone a whole week without sitting in this room, watching my blood disappear into a bag meant for someone who never seemed to get better.

“Your Majesty,” the physician said carefully, drawing Father's attention. “Perhaps we should postpone this procedure until Princess Hazel has recovered from her previous donation. Her pulse is weak, and she has been experiencing repeated episodes of dizziness.”

For one foolish second, hope rose inside my chest. I looked at Father, waiting for him to ask how bad my condition had become, and then I turned toward Mother, silently begging her to agree with the physician, but neither of them gave me the answer I needed.

“How long will the delay be?” Father asked.

“Several days, possibly longer, depending on her condition.”

“And what happens to Margaret during those several days?”

The physician hesitated. “We would continue monitoring her, Your Majesty, but—”

“Then you will proceed.”

The words fell into the room like a door slamming shut, and the physician lowered his eyes before returning to his equipment. I watched him in disbelief, unable to understand how a man who had spent years treating our family could stand there and obey an order that might hurt me simply because my father had given it.

“Father, I'm scared,” I admitted, my voice breaking despite my desperate attempt to remain calm. “Something is wrong with me. I can barely feel my wolf anymore, and sometimes I try to reach for her, but she doesn't answer. What if something happens to me?”

Mother finally turned to look at me, but the expression on her face made my stomach tighten.

“Your wolf is probably resting because you have been exhausting yourself with unnecessary worries,” she said. “Stop frightening everyone with these dramatic stories, Hazel. Margaret needs you, and I expect you to behave like the princess you were raised to be.”

I swallowed the painful lump in my throat and looked away before they could see me cry. I had been sixteen when Margaret first came to live with us, a frightened girl who had supposedly lost everyone she loved during the war, and I had welcomed her because I believed that giving someone a home was a beautiful thing to do. I never imagined that, little by little, the girl I had tried to comfort would become the center of my family's world while I became the person expected to suffer quietly in the background.

“Please,” I whispered one last time as the physician reached for my arm. “I'm begging you.”

Nobody answered.

The physician cleaned the inside of my elbow, and I turned my face toward the wall as the needle entered my skin. A sharp sting travelled up my arm, but the pain was nothing compared to the cold emptiness spreading through my body as the dark red blood began flowing through the tube. My head grew heavy, and the voices around me seemed to drift farther away, as though I were sinking beneath deep water while everyone watched without noticing.

I tried to sit straighter, determined not to give Father another reason to call me weak, but the room tilted so suddenly that I grabbed the edge of the bed. My fingers felt numb, my heartbeat became strangely uneven, and a wave of nausea rose into my throat as black spots danced across my vision.

‘Hazel.’

I froze.

The voice was so faint that I almost mistook it for a thought, but there was something familiar about it, something that reached into the deepest part of me and made my eyes fill with tears.

‘Hazel, can you hear me?’

My wolf.

For days, I had called for her in the darkness of my bedroom, begging her to answer me, but there had been nothing except a terrible silence where her presence used to be. Now, as my blood flowed out of my body, I could barely feel her, like a small creature trapped beneath a mountain of stones.

‘I'm here,’ I tried to tell her. ‘Please, don't leave me.’

A weak pulse of warmth passed through my chest before disappearing, and I gasped as my body suddenly sagged against the pillows.

“Father!” Margaret cried from the other bed, although her eyes had been closed only moments earlier. “Something is wrong with Hazel!”

The physician hurried toward me, checked my pulse, and glanced at the blood collection bag with a frown. Then he looked at the results from my latest examination, which lay beside his instruments, and all the color drained from his face.

“Your Majesty,” he said, his voice suddenly tight with fear. “There is something seriously wrong with Princess Hazel's blood. Her condition is much worse than we thought, and if these results are correct, continuing this transfusion could—”

“Continue the procedure,” Father ordered.

The physician stared at him. “But, Your Majesty, you need to understand what this means.”

“I gave you an order, Doctor.”

The room fell silent as the physician looked from my father to my trembling body, and for the first time since I had entered the infirmary, I saw something in his eyes that frightened me more than the needle in my arm.