Chapter 5

Ophelia

"Come, my daughter." My father's voice had taken on a tenderness so unfamiliar it made my skin crawl.

He extended his hand. "We need to talk. Just the two of us."

His palm closed around mine, and to anyone watching, it would have looked like a father reluctant to let go.

But his fingers found my wrist and tightened--slowly, deliberately--until his nails were pressing crescents into my skin.

I kept my face neutral. I didn't make a sound.

We moved through the corridor together, a picture of familial affection. He nodded to the courtiers we passed, smiled at the servants, played the role with the effortless fluency of a man who had been performing it his entire life.

And I walked beside him, my wrist screaming under his grip, and I smiled too, because that was what I had been built to do.

The study door closed behind us.

He shoved me away from him so hard I hit the wall, shoulder-first, sliding down it slightly before catching myself.

When I looked up, the warmth was gone entirely--stripped away as cleanly as a mask being dropped into a drawer.

"You BITCH." His voice was quiet, which was always worse than shouting. "One meeting and you've already got that animal eating out of your hand. I suppose I should be impressed."

The contempt in his eyes was absolute. "Well done, daughter."

The words landed the way they always did--with precision, in the exact places they'd been designed to hurt.

But something was different this time. Something that had spent twenty years trembling inside me had gone, very suddenly, still.

I straightened.

"I learned from the best." I met his gaze and didn't look away. "You spent years teaching me how to please men. It turns out I was an excellent student."

The color that flooded his face was extraordinary. His hand moved to the leather strap coiled on the edge of his desk--a reflex so old and automatic that he probably didn't even register the reach.

He raised it.

And then he stopped.

I was watching him steadily, my chin lifted, and I hadn't flinched.

"You won't," I said. "You can't. Not tonight. Not when Alric might see." I let that land. "You can't damage the merchandise."

His arm lowered. The strap returned to the desk.

He moved around it instead, pulled open a drawer, and slammed a document onto the surface between us with enough force to scatter the papers around it.

"Enough. Find it."

I approached slowly. I looked down at the page.

And the blood left my face.

The Heart of the Moon.

I knew the name. Everyone did, the way you know the names of things that exist in cautionary tales.

The legendary relic said to hold dominion over the wolves. A keystone of wolf power, a thing of sacred significance to their kind.

And in the wrong hands —

In his hands —

"This was never about peace." I heard the words come out of me, flat with the weight of understanding.

"From the very beginning. You were never offering a truce." I looked up at him. "You want to own them."

He said nothing. He didn't need to.

The full architecture of it assembled itself in my mind with horrible clarity.

The alliance. The wedding. Me--positioned within the wolf clan, trusted, close, given access that no spy could purchase.

A tool so perfectly placed that she wouldn't even know she was being used until it was too late.

And when the plan succeeded or failed, when the wolves were enslaved or the war ignited--what happened to the tool then didn't factor into the calculation at all.

I had known, intellectually, that he didn't love me.

I had known it for years, had built my understanding of the world around that fact the way you build a house around a wound.

But I had held onto something. Some final, foolish shred of the seven-year-old girl who had knelt on a temple floor and still, despite everything, believed her father was something more than a monster wearing a king's face.

It dissolved now. Completely and without ceremony.

"I won't do it." I raised my eyes to his. "I won't be part of this. I won't help you destroy innocent people."

The silence lasted exactly two seconds.

"What?"

"I said NO." My voice came out louder than I had ever let it get in front of him.

It startled me too--the sound of it, clean and certain and entirely my own.

"I refuse. I will not help you slaughter people who have done nothing to deserve it."

Something crossed his face that I had never seen there before. Not anger--anger I knew. This was something colder and more deliberate. A smile that had nothing warm in it.

"Ophelia." He said my name almost gently. "You sweet, naive girl."

He walked toward the wall, rehung the strap with the careful movements of a man in no hurry.

"You think Alric is your salvation now. Your protector."

He turned, and the smile hadn't moved. "You met him TONIGHT. You know nothing about what he is. Nothing about what his kind truly are. Then, I will show you."

My pulse spiked. "What are you—"

The door slammed.

The lock turned.

I stared at the wood for a half-second before the reality of it broke over me and I was across the room, both hands on the handle, pulling.

"Open this door!" My voice echoed off the stone walls. "Open it--you cannot —"

The door didn't move.

Let me show you what they really are.

What had he meant? What had he already set in motion?

The answer arrived before the question finished forming.

The door flew inward--not the main door, a side entrance I hadn't registered--and Lord Harrow stumbled through it, reeking of wine, his eyes moving over me with an expression that turned my stomach to ice.

"Well, well." He was already grinning. "All alone, little princess."

One second. That was all it took to understand completely.

This was my father's response.

Not the whip--something worse. Ruin me. Damage the commodity that had dared to disobey.

Remove my value so thoroughly that I would have no options left.

"Get away from me." I backed toward the window, calculating the distance between us, between me and the other door, between me and anything I could use. "Don't come near me —"

He crossed the room faster than I expected and caught my arm, wrenching me toward him.

The wine on his breath hit me like a wall. His free hand found the neckline of my gown.

I fought. I clawed at his face, got my knee up hard enough to make him grunt, bit down on his forearm until I tasted blood.

But he was twice my weight and considerably past the point of feeling much, and the edge of the desk caught the backs of my legs and the world tilted —

The door did not open.

It ceased to exist.

The wall beside it exploded inward, and Alric was standing in the wreckage of it, and the man I saw was not the man I had walked with through a moonlit garden.

His eyes were red. Not reddened--red, burning, lit from somewhere behind the iris like coals.

His teeth were wrong. His hands were wrong, fingers ending in something curved and dark and absolutely lethal.

And his face--that face that had looked at me with such careful warmth--was wearing an expression that had no human word attached to it.

Pure killing intent. Nothing else.

I don't know how he crossed the room.

I didn't see it happen. One moment he was in the doorway; the next he was behind Harrow, and his hand was —

"She is MINE."

The voice was barely language. It came from somewhere below speech, from the part of a creature that existed before words were invented.

Then his claws drove through Harrow's chest.

I watched it happen. I couldn't look away. The five points emerging from the front of Harrow's ribcage, the sound of it, the blood coming fast and dark, Harrow's eyes going wide with an expression that wasn't pain yet but was something worse--the absolute surprise of it.

When Alric withdrew his hand, he was holding Harrow's heart.

It was still beating.

I heard myself scream. My legs gave out and I was on the floor, back against the wall, and the sound coming out of me didn't feel like it belonged to my body.

This is what your father wanted you to see, some distant, functional part of my mind supplied.

This is the lesson he arranged. This.

The heart stilled. Harrow's body finished falling. The iron smell of blood filled every corner of the room.

And Alric turned to look at me.

The red was fading from his eyes. His hands were returning to something human-shaped. But the expression that replaced the killing fury was not guilt, was not horror at what he'd done —

It was possession. Absolute and unquestioning.

"No one touches you." His voice was still wrong--still carrying some echo of the thing he had been ten seconds ago. "No one. Ever."

I couldn't move. I couldn't speak.

I sat on the floor of my father's study in a spreading pool of someone else's blood, and I looked at the man I had kissed in the moonlight less than an hour ago, and I understood--with a clarity that left no room for comfort--exactly what I had chosen.

He was not human.

He would never be human.

And I had placed my hand in his and asked him to take me away.

We are not the same kind, something inside me whispered.

We will never be the same kind.