The ruthless king runaway bride

Chapter 1: The Night I Saved Myself

The cake was a disaster, and I had never been prouder of anything.

Three layers of lemon sponge, leaning left. Frosting smeared on with the back of a spoon because my hands wouldn't stop shaking. One crooked candle, carried a mile through the rain under my coat.

I stood on Lowell Danforth's porch with water running down my neck and my heart pounding in my teeth, and I thought: tonight. Finally, tonight.

I was twenty-one. Nobody at home had remembered. That was fine. I had somewhere better to be.

For a year, Lowell had made me wait. The bond caught the moment he touched my hand at the Harvest Gathering, and my wolf, Linnet, had claimed him on the spot. Mine, she'd said. But Lowell said we should wait until my wolf was strong enough for a full claiming. He would rather have me whole than have me fast. I had loved him for it.

Tonight I was done waiting. I wore a green dress under my coat. I had practiced the words in the mirror until they stopped sounding like a stranger's. I'm ready. I choose you. I'm yours, if you're still mine.

A white convertible sat in the gravel beside his truck. It looked familiar. I told myself it was his mother's, or a cousin's, and looked away. My fingers found my mother's silver ring on the chain at my throat.

I knocked. The door swung inward under my knuckles. Unlocked.

"Lowell?" I stepped inside, shaking the rain from my hair. The hall was dark and too warm, as if a fire had been burning for hours. "It's me. I brought you something."

Then I smelled it, under the smoky cedar of his cologne. Sugary. Thick. Expensive vanilla.

My stomach turned over.

I knew that scent. My stepsister wore it like a signature.

Upstairs, a floorboard creaked. A laugh drifted down the stairwell, low and breathless and unguarded. I had listened to that laugh through my bedroom wall for nine years.

Linnet went rigid inside me. Then she growled, thin and shaking, the first real anger she had ever shown.

Don't, I told her. There's an explanation.

I climbed the stairs. Near the top hung a new photograph from the Harvest Gathering: the two of us at the bonfire, my hand in his, my face turned up to him. I looked so happy.

At the end of the hall a door stood open an inch. Lamplight spilled across the floor. Bedsprings creaked. A man's voice said something low, and I didn't need to hear the words.

Bettina came to drop something off, I told myself. A coat. A book. Anything.

I pushed the door wider.

Bettina sat tangled in Lowell's sheets, golden hair wrecked across the pillow, shoulders bare. Lowell stood beside the bed, dragging his shirt over his head. On the nightstand sat a pair of gold earrings I had watched my stepsister fasten that very morning. Next to them lay Lowell's heir ring, the one he had promised to slip onto my finger one day. He had dropped it there like loose change.

The bond didn't snap. It tore. A sound came out of me that I didn't recognize.

The cake slid from my hands and hit the floor. Frosting splattered across my shoes. The candle rolled away and went out.

Lowell spun around. His face went white, then red. "Delphine. It's not—"

"Don't." My voice split down the middle. "Don't you dare say it isn't what it looks like."

Bettina didn't reach for the sheet. She leaned back against the pillows and smiled at me, slow and satisfied, as though I had walked in exactly on cue.

"You really should have called first, Del."

Only my mother had called me that, before she died. Bettina knew it.

My knees went soft. I gripped the doorframe until the wood bit my palm. "You're my mate," I told Lowell. It came out small. "The Moon Goddess chose you for me."

"The Goddess made a mistake." He looked at my shoulder, my shoes, the ruined cake. Not my face. "A year, Delphine. A year of holding your hand and nothing else. I'm not built for that. You know I'm not."

"You said you'd wait. You promised."

"I said what you needed to hear."

He said it the way a man says he took out the trash. Then he looked at me, and there was nothing sorry in his eyes. He wasn't a man who had been caught. He was a man who was relieved.

"Bettina doesn't make me beg," he said.

Behind him, Bettina laughed softly into her palm. That small sound hurt more than anything he had said. The unlocked door. The warm house. The car I hadn't wanted to recognize. She hadn't been caught either. She had planned this. She had wanted me to walk in carrying a cake.

Linnet cried out, a thin, hurt keening. I pressed my fist against my sternum.

"She's my sister," I whispered.

"Stepsister." Bettina slid off the bed and pulled Lowell's sweater over her head, unhurried. The vanilla rolled off her skin so thick I wanted to gag. "And let's be honest, Del. You never could keep him happy. Daddy's little saint with her little rules. Did you really think a man like Lowell would wait around forever for a girl who can't even shift?"

It landed exactly where she aimed it.

Nine years of being the quiet one. The tea at breakfast. The borrowed clothes that never came back. The rumors that always seemed to start at my own dinner table. I had made myself smaller every year to keep the peace, and I had called that strength.

My mother's ring was cold against my collarbone. Corinne Ashby would have crossed that room and slapped them both. But she had been nine years in the ground, and I had learned a different way to survive.

I ran.

I took the stairs, crossed the dark kitchen, and was halfway to the front door when a hand closed around my wrist.

Lowell. His palm was warm. My skin remembered it before my mind caught up, and I hated that more than anything he had said.

I twisted against his grip. Linnet shoved at my skin, and for one second my bones ached with the start of a shift. Then it died. Too weak. Lowell's fingers tightened.

"Let go."

"It's pouring, Delphine. You're shaking." He sounded almost gentle. "You can't go out there like this. Sit down. Calm down. We'll all be adults about it."

"Adults." I laughed, and it cracked in half. "You mean you and her."

Behind him, a floorboard sighed. The vanilla reached me a heartbeat before she did.

"Here." Bettina pressed a glass into my hand and folded my fingers around it with her cool ones. Honey-colored. Ice clinking against the sides. "You're white as paper. Drink. You'll feel better, I promise."

Thunder rattled the kitchen windows. Lightning flashed across Lowell's jaw and across my stepsister's smile. Lowell's grip tightened, just slightly. Bettina wasn't pleading. She wasn't worried. She was watching me the way a cat watches a bird that has finally stopped fluttering.

I should have thrown it in her face. Bettina had never in her life handed me anything without wanting something back.

But my throat was raw from the scream I hadn't let out, and some stupid, wounded part of me still wanted to believe my own family couldn't be this cruel.

I lifted the glass. I drank.

Sweet at first. Honey and something citrus. Far off, my wolf screamed at me to stop.

Then bitterness bloomed at the back of my throat, sharp and chemical, and I knew I had made a terrible mistake.

The glass slipped from my fingers. My tongue went numb, then my lips, then my fingertips. A slow warmth poured down my spine and pooled low in my belly where it didn't belong. The lights smeared into long gold streaks. Linnet howled, a raw and broken sound that echoed only inside my skull. The floor lurched sideways.

I grabbed for the counter and missed.

Bettina's smile widened.

"There she goes," she whispered.