chapter 8

FREYA

The tablet was still on the nightstand the next morning, logged into a pack social feed I hadn’t opened in years. Curiosity got the better of me, the way it always does right before it hurts you.

My name was everywhere.

Someone had pulled a photo from the botched engagement party, the shot of me frozen on the podium with the placard slipping from my hand. It had spread across half a dozen pack pages by then, captioned with things that made my stomach fold in on itself. The rejected Luna. The fat runaway bride. The abandoned mate. Someone had turned Lucian’s laugh into a meme, paired against a picture of my stricken face, and the comments underneath ran on for pages I shouldn’t have scrolled through.

I told myself I would stop after the first few. I didn’t.

No wonder he wanted the sister instead, someone had written. Another agreed, adding that some she-wolves simply weren’t built for royalty, that I’d embarrassed my father’s name just by standing next to it. A third guessed I’d run off in shame, too much of a coward to face what I’d apparently done to deserve this. Someone had made a poll asking whether Lucian had made the right choice, and I watched the numbers climb against me in real time, each vote landing straight to my heart, the same place I’d spent my whole life trying to armor over and never quite managed.

There were photos too, cruel side-by-side comparisons of Lilith and me from old pack events, arrows and captions doing the work insults used to do more honestly. I remembered every one of those events. I remembered standing next to my sister in a dress my mother picked, smiling for a camera while someone in the crowd murmured about which of us the Lycan line would prefer, and some old child in me had always known the answer before the rest of me caught up to it.

I didn’t hear the door open. I didn’t hear him cross the room, not until the tablet was gone from my hands, snatched clean out of my grip before I could stop him.

Damien didn’t say anything at first. His face had gone very still, the easy charm wiped off it completely, replaced by something harder and colder than I’d seen from him yet. He looked at the screen for exactly one second, long enough to read whatever was still open on it, and then he threw the tablet at the stone floor with enough force to shatter the glass into a dozen pieces.

I flinched at the sound. He didn’t.

“Don’t read that garbage,” he said, and his voice had none of its usual lightness in it.

“I wasn’t” I said, which was a lie, and we both knew it.

“Doesn’t matter.” He crouched down and started picking up the broken pieces, careful, methodical, like the act of cleaning it up was the only way he knew how to be angry without breaking something else. “None of them know you. None of them were there. They’re just people with nothing better to do than pile onto a story that isn’t theirs.”

“They’re not wrong, though,” I said quietly, and I hated how small my voice sounded even to my own ears. “About how I look. About what he thought of me.”

Damien straightened up so fast I startled. “They’re wrong about all of it,” he said, and there was something fierce in the way he said it, something that didn’t match the picture I’d built of him as the careless Hamilton twin who never took anything seriously. “You hear me? Every word of that was wrong.”

I didn’t know what to do with the way he was looking at me, so I looked away instead, down at my hands, at the thin blanket pooled around my knees. Nobody had ever done that before. Not for me. My whole life people had watched me get torn apart and said nothing, my own mother included, and here was a man with every political reason to let me drown in it, choosing instead to put his fist through a piece of glass because it had hurt my feelings.

“Why do you care?” I asked, quieter this time, and I meant it as something bigger than the tablet.

Damien didn’t answer right away. He sat down on the edge of the bed, careful to leave space between us, and rubbed a hand over his jaw like he was deciding how much of the truth he wanted to hand over.

“Because somebody should have a long time ago,” he said finally. “And it clearly wasn’t going to be anyone in that palace.”

Before I could figure out what to say to that, a knock came at the door, sharp and formal, nothing like the easy rhythm Damien used. He stood, jaw tightening again, and opened it to find a palace courier standing stiffly in the hallway, a sealed envelope held out in front of him like it might bite.

“For Lady Freya Ashford,” the courier said. “By order of Alpha Ashford.”

Damien took it and shut the door before the man could say anything else. He turned the envelope over once in his hands, and something in his expression shifted from anger to something more like dread.

“It’s your father’s seal,” he said, and passed it to me.

I broke it open with fingers that weren’t quite steady. The message inside was short, formal, and unmistakably my father’s voice, cold even through ink and paper.

You will appear at the mating ceremony tonight. You will apologize to Prince Lucian before the entire court. Failure to do so will be considered a rejection of your duty to this pack and to this family. Do not embarrass me further.

I read it twice. Then a third time, waiting for the words to rearrange themselves into something less final.

“They want me there tonight,” I said. “For the ceremony.”

Damien’s expression darkened. “You don’t have to go.”

I looked up at him, and something in me had gone very quiet and very still, the panic of a minute ago folding itself into something else entirely, something colder and far more darker.

“No,” I said slowly. “I think I do.”