Chapter 4

Freya

Vivienne Cole arrived the next morning, and the palace threw her a welcome I could hear from the far side of the grounds.

I watched from a window in my wing, high above the courtyard, while the King walked down the steps to meet her car, and when she stepped out, tall and slim and golden-haired in a white coat, he took both her hands in his and smiled at her, and I learned that he could smile. She rose up on her toes and kissed his cheek, and the whole courtyard applauded, and I stepped back from the window and closed the curtain, and my hands stayed pressed against my chest for a long time, because the bond was tearing at me from the inside and there was no one to tell.

That was the first day. The months that followed taught me my place better than any chains could have.

My maids hated me. They never said it, because saying it could be reported, but they didn't need words. My gowns came back from the seamstress a size too small, every single one, so that I had to stand in fittings and ask out loud for them to be let out while the maids traded looks over my shoulders. They angled the tall mirrors toward me while I dressed and undressed. They held conversations outside my door in voices pitched to carry, about how Lady Vivienne kept her waist, about what a real Luna should look like standing beside the King, about how some people had schemed their way into titles their bodies disgraced.

I ate alone. I walked the gardens alone. At official events I stood at the King's side in my let-out gowns while the court stared at me and whispered, and he never once turned his head toward me, and Vivienne sat three seats down, beautiful and smiling, and every person in that room knew she was the real one and I was just a title he was forced to carry.

Merris was the only kindness in my days. She braided my hair in the evenings and told me stories about the palace, and she never once looked at my body like it was a problem to be solved, and some nights that alone kept me from breaking apart.

Then, at the end of my fourth month in the palace, the royal physician came to my wing with a leather folder and no greeting.

"The council requires an heir," he said, opening the folder on my table. "Your cycle has been charted. Your fertile window opens tonight. His Majesty will come to your chambers after the evening meal. You will be bathed and ready."

He said it flatly, with no feeling at all, and then he left, and I sat down slowly on the edge of my bed because my legs wouldn't hold me.

You will be bathed and ready.

At Blackmoor they would have chained me to a wall for strangers. Here they drew me a bath and scheduled my body by the calendar, and I understood, sitting there with my heart pounding, that I had never actually left the breeder house. I had just been transferred to a better one.

Sable stirred inside me, uncertain. Mate is coming to us, she said. Mate is finally coming.

Not the way you think, I told her, and for once she had no answer.

He came after dark.

I stood in the middle of my room in the robe they had dressed me in, my hair loose the way the maids had been ordered to leave it, and when the door opened and he filled the doorway my body lit up with wanting him and I despised every cell of it.

"This is duty," he said. "The council requires an heir and I require the council. Do not mistake anything that happens in this room for a change between us."

"I understand, Your Majesty."

"Alaric." He crossed the room toward me, unbuttoning his cuffs. "In this room, under these circumstances, you may use my name. Protocol would make the rest of this absurd."

Alaric. Four months as his mate, and I learned his name from a breeding appointment.

Then his hands touched my shoulders and the bond roared up between us, and everything I had promised myself dissolved in it.

I had sworn I would be still. I had sworn I would give him a body and keep my heart out of the room, and I broke every promise inside a minute, because the bond didn't care about promises. His mouth found my neck and I gasped, and my hands rose to touch his chest, and he caught both my wrists and pinned them above my head against the bedpost, and he held them there the entire time. My body he would take. My touch he refused.

He was not rough with me. That was the worst part. His hands knew exactly what they were doing, and my body answered him completely, and twice I felt his lips hover over the mating point on my neck, felt him breathe there, felt the tremor run through his whole frame before he wrenched his head away, and I understood that his wolf wanted to mark me and the man would rather die.

The bond made it feel like love. That was its cruelty. For an hour, in the dark, with my hands pinned and his heartbeat against mine, it felt exactly like love, and I had gone my whole life without being held, and I couldn't stop myself from taking every second of it.

When it was over he released my wrists and rose, and the cold air rushed into the space where he had been.

He dressed with his back to me. I lay in the wreck of my bed and watched him, and my throat closed, and I ordered myself not to say anything, and I failed.

"Alaric."

His shoulders stopped moving.

"Was any of it ever going to be different?" My voice came out small and I hated it. "If I had been someone else. Someone thinner, someone highborn. Would you have wanted me then?"

He stood with his back to me for a long moment, buttoning his shirt.

"Get some rest," he said. "The physician will confirm the results in two weeks."

His phone rang while he was picking up his jacket, and he answered it in the doorway, and his voice changed. It came out low and warm and patient, a voice I had never heard him use, a voice I didn't know he owned.

"I'm finished here," he said into the phone. "I'm on my way to you now."