LOGINFreyaI gave birth in a one-room apartment above a laundromat with Harper holding one hand and a human midwife holding the other.When he came out screaming, they put him on my chest, and I looked down at him and my whole world changed. He had black hair and pale gray eyes and he looked so much like his father that it hurt, but I kissed his forehead and named him Ezra, and I swore to him out loud that he would never know what it felt like to be unwanted.Sable pressed close. He's ours, she said. Just ours.Just ours, I promised her.Harper stayed two weeks. She slept on the floor beside my bed, cooked for me, took Ezra when I couldn't keep my eyes open. When she had to go back to Blackmoor before anyone started asking questions, she stood in the doorway with her bag on her shoulder and her eyes wet. "Call me if you need anything.""I will," I said, and we both knew I wouldn't, because every call was a risk.Then she was gone and it was just me and my son.The first year nearly broke m
AlaricMy mother died on a Tuesday.She was a fated mate, bonded to my father by the Goddess herself, and everyone in the kingdom called it sacred. But I watched that sacred bond eat her alive for fifteen years. My father controlled where she went, who she spoke to, what she wore, and the bond made it so she couldn't leave even when staying was killing her. She loved him because fate told her to, and he used that love the way a man uses a leash. She got thinner every year. Quieter every year. And then she was gone, and my father sat at her funeral with dry eyes and moved on within the week.I was fifteen when I decided that fated mates were a curse dressed up as a blessing, and I would never let the Goddess choose for me. I chose Vivienne because she was my equal, because I picked her with my mind and not my blood, and because loving her felt like freedom instead of a trap.Then the bond hit me at the tournament with an omega I had never seen before, and everything I had built to prot
FreyaI woke up in a bed I didn't recognize, in a room that smelled of herbs and dried lavender, and the first thing I felt was the absence.Not pain, not sadness. A hollow space in my chest where the bond used to live, scraped clean, and my whole body felt wrong without it. I pressed my hand flat against my ribs and there was nothing there, no warmth, no pull, no hum. Just me.Sable, I called. Sable, are you there?She didn't answer for a long time. Then I felt her, curled up tight and small somewhere deep inside me, barely breathing.I'm here, she whispered. But he's gone, Freya. I can't feel him anymore.I know, I told her. I know.Merris sat in a wooden chair beside the bed, and her eyes were red and swollen. A younger woman stood behind her near the stove, early twenties, same kind face, watching me with worry. Merris's daughter."Where am I?" My throat was raw."My home," Merris said quietly. "I share it with my daughter Lena on my days off. When you collapsed in his study, I ha
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 phys
FreyaVivienne 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 fitti
Freya Nobody asked me if I wanted to go. Two royal warriors walked me to a black car near the end of the convoy and shut me inside alone, and through the tinted glass I watched the whole world I knew standing frozen in the dirt. The Alpha was still half bowed. The pack was still on its knees. And the King was already walking back to his own vehicle at the front like he had done nothing more interesting than sign a paper. She is my mate. He had said it in front of everyone. In front of the Alpha, in front of the warriors who dragged me, in front of the whole pack that had watched me be nothing my entire life, the Lycan King had stood in the dirt of Blackmoor and called me his. No one had ever claimed me before. No one had ever stood up for me, not once, not in twenty years, and he had broken my chains and taken me away in front of all of them, and I couldn't stop my heart from racing with it. Maybe he had walked out of that room and felt the bond pulling at him the way it pul







