Chapter 5

Freya

I lay there for a long time. Then I got up, wrapped myself in the robe, and opened the door to call for a bath, and the royal physician was already standing in the corridor with her leather folder open.

"If conception fails this cycle," she said, making a note without looking at me, "your next window is the eleventh through the fourteenth. Then the ninth of the month after, and the seventh of the month after that. I will have the full year's schedule delivered to your maids."

She walked away down the hall, and I stood in my doorway in a robe that wasn't mine, in a wing that wasn't mine, in a life that wasn't mine, and I finally understood the trade I had made. Blackmoor would have made me a breeder in chains. The crown had simply upgraded the sheets.

The physician came in two weeks. Not pregnant.

So the calendar turned, and the King came back on the marked night, and left, and came back the next month, and left, and my life shrank down to numbered days. Every month the physician wrote her note without looking at me. Every month the maids whispered louder outside my door, that even her womb is useless, that the King suffers that body for nothing. Every month I ate a little less, because food was the one thing in the palace I could refuse, and the weight came off me slowly, not from wanting to be beautiful, just from misery eating me from the inside, and no one noticed at all.

Vivienne was at every dinner and every ceremony that year, seated near the King, and the court loved her. She never said a cruel word to me in public because she never needed to. Everyone could see who he wanted.

Merris was the only one who noticed what was happening to me. She sat with me in the evenings and put small plates in front of me until I ate something, and once she took my hand and told me I was wasting away, and I looked down at my collarbones showing through my skin and felt nothing about it at all.

Sable grew quiet through that year. Her voice, when it came, was thin.

He touches us and then he leaves us, she said one night. It's starting to hurt, Freya.

I know, I told her. I feel it too.

Fourteen months after I came to the palace, on the marked night of a marked month, I walked the long corridor to the King's wing for the first time, because a maid had delivered word that His Majesty was delayed and I should come to his study instead.

The study doors stood half open, and there was light inside, and I raised my hand to knock, and then I heard it.

Laughter. Low and soft. His.

I should have knocked. I should have turned around. Instead I pushed the door open, and everything in me stopped working.

Alaric stood by the fire with Vivienne in his arms, and he was kissing her, slow and unhurried and tender, one hand cradling the back of her head, and his other hand was resting on her stomach.

On the small, unmistakable, rounded curve of her stomach.

The room tilted around me. My ears were ringing. I must have made a sound, because they both turned, and Vivienne's hand came up to cover the bump, not hiding it, framing it, and Alaric looked at me standing in the doorway in the robe his physician had ordered me into, and he didn't step away from her.

"You weren't summoned here to see this," he said. "But perhaps it's simpler that you did."

"You..." My voice wasn't working. "She's..."

"Vivienne is carrying my child." He said it evenly, and his arm stayed around her. "It happened one night. I did not plan it, and I know it was wrong of me while you and I were still bonded. But she is pregnant with my heir now, and that changes everything. The council has what it needs, so there is no reason to continue what you and I have been doing."

One night. I stood in the doorway shaking. Fourteen months of my body on a calendar, fourteen months of lying still while he refused my hands, and one single night with her had given him everything my scheduled ones never could. I had been bound to him by the Moon Goddess herself, and it still hadn't been enough.

"No reason to continue," I repeated, and my whole body had started to shake. "Then finish it. Reject me."

His eyes narrowed.

"Say it," I said, louder, and the shaking was getting worse. "If she's what you want, if I was never anything to you, then have the courage to say the words. Reject me. Set me free."

Vivienne's mouth curved.

Alaric looked at me for a long moment, and his expression changed, and for one last, stupid, dying second I hoped.

Then he spoke.

"I, Alaric Thorne, Alpha King of the Lycans, reject you, Freya Callahan of Blackmoor, as my mate and my bonded."

The bond tore.

I heard myself scream before I felt it, and then I felt it, a ripping down the center of my chest, through my ribs, through everything, and Sable was howling inside me, a sound I had never heard her make, and my knees hit the marble and I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see, there was nothing in the world but the tearing.

I was on the floor writhing in the pain when I saw it happen. Vivienne swayed on her feet, her hand flying to her forehead, and she stumbled against Alaric's chest in a faint, and he caught her instantly, both arms wrapping around her, his voice urgent, calling her name, asking if she was hurt, if the baby was fine, shouting toward the doors for the physician. He was holding her face in his hands. He was checking her over. He was fussing over her with a worry I had never once seen him give anyone.

His mate was on the floor with her soul torn in half, and he never even glanced down.

Then he lifted her into his arms and carried her toward the doors, and on his way out of the room he stepped past me on the floor.

He did not stop. He did not slow down. He did not look at me at all.

The doors swung shut, and the pain swallowed everything, and the last thing I felt was my cheek hitting the cold marble.