Chapter 6: Reversal

Raven's POV 

I woke to the firelight and the smell of chocolate, vanilla, and rose.

My shoulder throbbed where the arrow had been. Someone had wrapped it in clean linen. I was lying on a bed too soft to be anything but expensive, wrapped in furs that weren’t mine.

Voices drifted from beyond a half-open door.

I didn’t move. I didn’t call out. Something in me… Ara, maybe… told me to stay still and listen.

“Rowan, have you checked on her?”

“She’s stable, Ansel.” The voice sounded like the third wolf, with eyes as dark as coal. “The wound wasn’t as deep as it looked.”

“Good.” The first wolf said. I could still hear the authority in his voice, so his name was Ansel; it made sense. “We don’t have time for her to be fragile.”

“She almost died an hour ago.” The second wolf, the one who had freed me from the net, sounded sharper than I remembered. “Some patience wouldn’t kill you.”

“Patience is a luxury we don’t have, Asher.” A pause. Then I heard the sound of footsteps. “Father has weeks. Maybe less to survive. You know what the healers said.”

Silence.

I lay very still, my heart loud in my own ears.

“The curse doesn’t care how we feel about it,” Ansel went on. “One king. Not three. The bloodline chooses through the mate bond, and the bond is only complete when it has been fully sealed. A rescue in the woods and a howl in a clearing are not enough.”

“So what do we do?” Asher asked. “Compete for her?”

“We protect her,” Ansel said. “We keep her close. And whichever of us she chooses first, chooses completely… that’s the one who takes the crown.”

My stomach turned to ice.

“She’s not a chess piece,” Asher said, low.

“No,” Ansel agreed. “She’s the only person alive who can put a crown on one of our heads instead of leaving the throne empty for the wolves who’d tear this kingdom apart fighting over it. That makes her the most important person in this territory. Treat her like it.”

I heard someone… Rowan, I thought… shift his weight. “She was thrown out by her own pack an hour before we found her. Discarded because she couldn’t shift. Now she’s the key to a throne. Do you understand how that sounds to her? Do you understand what she’ll think when she finds out?”

“She doesn’t need to find out yet,” Ansel said. “Not until she’s steady. Not until the bond has time to take root properly.”

“So we lie to her?”

“We give her time,” Ansel corrected. “There’s a difference.”

I didn’t think there was. Not from where I was lying.

My chest ached, worse than the arrow wound. I thought of Rowan’s hand finding mine in the dirt. I am here. I am not letting go. I thought of Asher’s cloak around my shoulders, his fingers steadying the clasp like it mattered whether I was warm. I thought of Ansel’s shadow falling over me like a wall between the men who wanted me dead and me.

For one hour, I had let myself believe someone had chosen me. Not my blood. Not my wolf. Me.

Maybe I was wrong again.

“She’s exhausted,” Rowan said. “She just lost her home, her family, her mate…”

“He was never her mate,” Asher cut in. “We are.”

“You know what I mean.” Rowan’s voice dropped further, and I had to strain to catch it. “She has nothing left. No pack. No name. And now we’re telling her the only reason we’re keeping her is a crown.”

“We’re not telling her that,” Ansel said. “We’re not telling her anything yet. She stays here. She heals. She bonds with one of us, and the kingdom has a king again, and the curse breaks, and everyone is safer for it. Including her.”

“And if she doesn’t want any of us?” Rowan asked. “If she wakes up and decides she’d rather take her chances as a rogue than be part of this?”

A long pause.

“She won’t get that choice,” Ansel said quietly. “She has nowhere else to go. No pack will take in an exiled omega with a mate bond to three princes. She’s ours whether she understands why yet or not.”

I pressed a hand over my mouth to keep the sound in.

Ours. Not chosen. Owned.

Ara stirred inside me, and for once she didn’t growl. She went very still, very quiet, the way a wounded animal goes quiet when it realizes the trap has already closed.

“I don’t like this,” Rowan said finally.

“You don’t have to like it,” Ansel said. “You have to keep her alive and keep her here until one of us seals the bond. After that, none of it will matter. She’ll be Queen. She’ll want for nothing.”

“She’ll want the truth,” Rowan said.

No one answered him.

I lay in the dark, staring at a ceiling I didn’t recognize, in a bed that wasn’t mine, wrapped in a stranger’s furs, and I thought about Cassandra standing in the dirt with my crown falling from her hair, screaming that no one was listening to her.

Cassandra had taken my crown because my family said the pack needed a stronger Luna. Now the princes planned to keep me because their kingdom needed a king.

Somehow, everyone always had a noble reason for taking away my choices.

For the first time all day, I understood exactly how that felt.

The door creaked.

I closed my eyes fast, forced my breathing to slow, and lay perfectly still as footsteps crossed the room. A hand brushed the hair back from my face… gentle, careful, the same hand that had pulled the silver from my shoulder.

Rowan’s voice, barely a whisper. “I’m sorry.”

I didn’t open my eyes.

His apology did not change what I had heard.

I was still trapped. The cage was simply softer this time.