The Substitute

Jace’s POV

“There is no one else.” The Moon Priest’s voice cut through the noise like a blade through fabric. 

“Pack law requires a daughter of Roland’s bloodline. Any daughter. Acknowledged or not.”

The chamber went dead silent. I already knew who he meant. I’d seen her that morning, the quiet one in Jenna’s dressing room, unpinning her sister’s hair with careful hands while I asked whether the bride was ready and didn’t spare her a second glance. 

I’d walked past her the way I walked past every servant in that house, because that’s what I’d assumed she was.

“The wolfless girl,” Lord Ashworth said, curling his lip like the words tasted foul. 

“Roland’s shame. You’d crown that before Tezla arrives?”

“I would better crown a broom before I start a war,” I said. “Send it to her.”

Nobody moved for a full three seconds. Then the doors opened, and two guards brought her in like she was under arrest instead of under consideration which told me exactly how this house had already decided to treat her before I’d said a word.

She had a bruise blooming high on her cheekbone. Someone had struck her, recently, hard enough to leave a mark that hadn’t even finished coloring yet. I noted it the way I noted everything that day, filed, assessed, set aside as not currently relevant.

“You understand the situation,” I said.

“I understand my sister’s missing and everyone in this house has already decided it’s my fault.” Her voice didn’t shake. That surprised me more than it should have. 

“What do you want from me?”

“Pack law says you qualify to stand in her place. Crowned Luna, before moonrise, or the treaty with Tezla dissolves.” I didn’t dress it up. I didn’t have the time, and if I’m honest, I didn’t see the point. “Will you do it?”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then Tezla reads it as a broken alliance. Given the border tensions already sitting between us, that’s provocation. War, likely within the season.” I watched her face while I said it. I watched her do the math I had already done, her life against a hundred strangers she’d never meet, soldiers and border pack members who would never once done a thing to protect her.

“Everyone in this room just accused me of hurting my own sister,” she said. Not to me, to the council, her eyes moving across every face that had condemned her an hour earlier. “And now you need me to save you.”

Nobody answered her. Nobody had the stomach to.

“I’ll do it,” she said, and looked back at me. “Not for you. For the people who’ll die if I don’t.”

Something in that landed wrong in my chest, small and sharp, gone before I could name it. I didn’t examine it. I turned to the priest instead.

“Prepare the ceremony.”

“Jace.” Ashworth again, lowering his voice like that made the insult smaller. “The Tezla envoys will see her face and know within a heartbeat she isn’t the bride they were promised.”

“Then they’ll see a completed binding and a treaty that’s still standing,” I said. “That’s what buys us time. Not her face.”

I didn’t look at her when I said it. I should have. I know that now.

They dressed her in under an hour, Jenna’s gown, taken in at the seams by two seamstresses working with shaking hands and pins between their teeth, because nobody wanted to be the one who made her late for her own sacrifice. 

When she walked into the hall, she didn’t look like a bride. She looked like a girl standing very straight so she wouldn’t fall down.

“Alpha Jace Brown.” The priest’s voice filled the chamber. 

“Do you accept this binding, before pack and Goddess, to secure the peace of Babcock and Tezla?”

“I do.”

“Kenna Will.” A pause, I heard it, the priest’s hesitation, like even he understood what he was about to ask of her. “Do you accept?”

She looked at me. Not for comfort. I don’t think she was looking for anything from me at all, I think she was simply making sure I was watching, making sure that whatever came next, I couldn’t claim later that I hadn’t seen her agree to it with her eyes open.

“I do.”

The priest lifted the crown. It was Jenna’s crown. Made for Jenna’s head, resized in the same frantic hour as the gown, and I remember thinking, distantly, that nothing about this ceremony was built for the woman standing beneath it, not the dress, not the vows, not the crown itself.

He lowered it onto her hair. For a single heartbeat, the stone at its center didn’t gleam, it lit, a pulse of pale silver light spilling out from beneath the metal setting like something underneath had opened its eyes.

I didn’t see it happen. I was already turning toward the doors, already calculating how fast word could reach the Tezla envoys, already three steps past the woman I’d just married.

But across the chamber, the Moon Priest went rigid.

His hands, still raised from setting the crown, began to shake. And when I glanced back, caught only the tail end of it,  his face had gone the color of an old bone, his eyes fixed on Kenna with a horror I had never once seen him wear in twelve years of knowing him.