Chapter 3: The Kingdom That shouldn’t Exist

“Has the princess awakened?”

The question came before I opened my eyes.

“Not yet … but if the mark truly awakened, then we’ve found her.”

“After twenty years?”

“Tell His Majesty.”

My eyes flew open. Princess. Who were they talking about?

⸻

Silk against my skin. Morning light too soft to belong to any room I’d ever woken in. Every muscle in me went tight before my mind caught up … in Blackthorn, comfort like this always came with a bill attached.

A woman in pale robes approached slowly, hands open, empty, visible. “You’re safe now.”

I flinched back into the pillows before she’d finished the sentence. “Don’t touch me.”

She stopped instantly. Didn’t argue. Didn’t reach anyway like Lucien’s healers always had, murmuring it’s for your own good while they held me still. “No one here will touch you without your permission.”

Something in my chest cracked at that, quiet and sudden. No one had ever asked.

⸻

As she worked salve into the cuts on my palms, I let my eyes wander … silver wolves carved into white marble, six-pointed stars set into every doorway, a maid bowing to a guard just for holding a door. In Blackthorn, servants kept their eyes down and their bodies smaller than they were. Here, no one flinched from anyone.

“Where am I?”

She smiled, gentle. “The Kingdom of Silvercrest.”

I frowned. “I’ve never heard of it.”

The room went still. She traded a look with the maid folding linens by the window … quick, worried … and the maid murmured, almost to herself, “Of course she hasn’t.”

⸻

An old man entered without knocking, arms full of scrolls that looked older than the castle itself. He studied my face first. Then my collarbone, where the mark had gone quiet again beneath my collar. Then the journal someone had set on the table beside my bed.

His face changed … the particular stillness of a man watching a theory become fact in front of him.

“Bring me the royal archives.”

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

He hesitated, scrolls trembling slightly in his grip. “Because if I’m right…”

The doors burst open before he could finish.

⸻

Three men filled the doorway, and the whole room dropped to its knees like the floor itself had ordered it.

The eldest stopped short at the sight of me. His breath caught audibly, his hand rising halfway to his chest like something had struck him there. “…Impossible.”

The youngest came closer, jaw tight, eyes moving over my face like he was checking it against a memory. “She has Mother’s eyes.”

The middle brother didn’t tower the way the others did. He crossed to my bedside and knelt instead, bringing himself level with me, something careful and warm in the way he held himself … like he understood, without being told, that I flinched from anyone standing over me.

“You don’t know us,” he said, quiet.

“Should I?”

None of them answered. The eldest turned and left without another word, and moments later every bell in the castle tore into the sky at once, ringing like the walls themselves had been waiting twenty years to make that sound.

⸻

They walked me to the Hall of Records with a hand hovering near my elbow that never once landed … permission asked with silence instead of words. Books lined the walls floor to ceiling. An old historian waited beside a tapestry taller than the door, and without speaking, he drew the cloth back.

My breath left me in one long pull.

The painted queen looking back at me had my mouth. My eyes. The exact tilt of my chin when I was trying not to cry. The historian touched the painted collarbone, and beneath a few careful brushstrokes of fabric, there it was … the same six-pointed mark I’d spent my whole life hiding under high collars.

⸻

He asked for the journal.

My hand tightened around it before I could stop it. It was the only thing of hers I had left, and some old animal instinct didn’t want to let it out of my grip. But I held it out anyway, because everyone in this room had already given me more truth than Blackthorn had in a lifetime.

He flipped through slowly, then stopped, and held a page close to the fire. Ink bloomed out of nothing beneath the heat, faint and silver.

If the stars ever find you… go home.

Below it, in the same shaking hand …

Trust the Silver Wolf.

I pressed my knuckles to my mouth. She hadn’t just known. She’d planned for this, years before I ever stood in that hall and watched my whole life end. Tears came before I could stop them, and no one in the room told me to.

⸻

A woman entered with eyes the color of old silver, unclouded and startlingly clear. She looked at me the way the others hadn’t … not with grief, but with calculation, like she was reading something written just beneath my skin.

“Tell me,” she said. “Have you ever wondered why you never awakened a wolf?”

I had. Every night of my childhood, actually, lying awake waiting for a shift that never came, certain something in me was broken.

She smiled, small and knowing. “Because you were never meant to awaken an ordinary one.”

The room held its breath with me.

“Your blood has been asleep,” she said. “waiting to come home.”

⸻

Then she told us what had actually happened twenty years ago.

Silvercrest hadn’t fallen. It had been erased … deliberately, methodically. Every kingdom convinced the royal line had died in a single night. Maps redrawn. Books burned. Children raised without ever hearing the name. Someone had spent two decades making sure the world forgot this place had ever existed.

And whoever had done it, the Oracle said, was very likely still hunting whoever survived.

The brothers exchanged a look I understood without translation … the look of men who’d suspected this and hoped they were wrong.

⸻

The Oracle set a silver dagger on the table between us. A ceremonial bowl. A small handful of moonstones, and beside them, a crown gone dull with age.

“There is only one way to prove who you are,” she said. “The Blood Moon Ceremony. If the mark responds, you are the lost princess.”

A pause I felt in my teeth.

“If it doesn’t, you die.”

The middle brother was on his feet instantly. “It’s too dangerous.” The youngest argued they should wait, gather more proof first, give me time. The Oracle only shook her head, unmoved.

“We no longer have time.”

⸻

She placed the dagger in my hands. The hilt was cold, heavier than it looked.

Every eye in the room was on me. I looked at the blade. At the journal still sitting warm from the fire. At three men who already believed, in their bones, that I belonged to them … and at how none of them had once tried to make that decision for me.

“If I’ve spent my whole life running from the truth,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake nearly as much as I expected it to, “then I’m done running.”

I pressed the blade into my palm.

The first drop of blood hit the bowl.

Every candle in the room exploded into silver flame at once, and the floor trembled beneath my knees like the castle itself had exhaled.

⸻

Far away, in a hall still stained with my blood from another kind of ceremony, Alpha Lucien Blackthorn clutched his chest and went to his knees without knowing why.

His wolf tore through him with a roar that had no source, no enemy, nothing to fight but the impossible thought crashing through him all at once.

She’s alive.