Chapter 1 The Price of a Throne
The rope bit into my wrists before I even opened my eyes.
“Get up.” A boot connected with my ribs, not hard enough to break anything, hard enough to make sure I understood who was in charge. “The Alpha doesn’t like waiting.”
I pushed myself up from the dirt, and the world tilted orange behind me. Hallowmere. Still burning. Three days now and it hadn’t stopped, like the fire had decided to finish what the soldiers started.
“Move.” Another shove, this one between my shoulder blades.
I moved.
The rope connected to iron cuffs, and the iron burned my skin every time I flexed my fingers. Wolfsbane. Someone here knew exactly what they were doing when they chained a wolf’s daughter.
“You could at least look sad about it,” the guard beside me muttered. Young. Younger than the others, and the only one who hadn’t sworn at me once since dawn. “Your home’s still smoking back there.”
“Would that make you feel better?”
He didn’t answer. Good. I didn’t want an answer. I wanted to keep walking, keep breathing, keep every piece of myself locked down tight enough that none of them could see what it cost me to put one foot in front of the other.
Grief was a door. I’d learned that a long time ago. Open it in front of the wrong people, and they’d walk straight through and take whatever was left of you standing on the other side.
The trees thinned out ahead of us. Stone rose up where the forest ended… walls taller than any three men, torches burning along the top even in daylight, like they wanted everyone to see the fire before they saw anything else.
Ashguard.
I’d grown up hearing the name the way children hear the names of diseases. Something that happened to other packs. Something far away.
Not anymore.
“Head up,” the young guard said, low enough that only I could hear it. “Don’t let them see you shaking.”
“I’m not shaking.”
He glanced down at my hands anyway. They weren’t. Small mercy, that my body hadn’t betrayed me yet.
The gates opened before we reached them, like someone inside had been watching for us the whole time. The hall past the gates swallowed every sound… my footsteps, the guards’ footsteps, the murmur of a crowd that went dead silent the second I crossed the threshold.
I didn’t look at them. I looked for the throne.
He was already looking at me.
The Alpha sat with one boot braced against the base of his chair, chin resting against his knuckles, like my arrival was interrupting something far more important than his own hall. But his eyes tracked every step I took down that aisle, and something in his jaw went tight before I’d even reached the steps.
“Bring her closer,” he said.
The guards shoved me forward until the chains pooled at my feet, right at the base of the throne. Up close, he was younger than I expected. Sharper, too. Like a blade someone had left out in the sun too long.
“Soraya Hallowmere,” he said, testing my name like it might bite him.
“That’s what’s left of it.”
A ripple moved through the hall behind me. Nobody talked to him like that, apparently. He didn’t react to the ripple. He kept watching me the way you’d watch a fire you hadn’t decided was dangerous or just warm.
“Do you know what I do to people who lie to me?” he asked.
“I imagine it’s unpleasant.”
“It’s never happened. Not once, in this hall, in this pack. I always know.” He leaned forward. “So tell me something true, Hallowmere. What were you doing when my men found you?”
“Watching my home burn.”
Nothing moved on his face. I’d expected that one to land easy, expected some flicker of satisfaction that his gift had caught the truth of it. Instead I watched him freeze in a way that had nothing to do with satisfaction at all.
“Again,” he said, quieter.
“I don’t understand.”
“Say something else.”
I held his stare and gave him the twelve guards, the two boys my own age who never made it past sixteen, every true thing I had, and watched each one land on him like a stone dropped somewhere he couldn’t see the bottom of.
He stood. The whole hall went silent enough to hear the torches burn.
“Elder Rhys,” he said, without turning. “Has anyone in this hall ever lied to me and gotten away with it?”
An older man near the front straightened. “No, my Alpha. Never.”
“Has anyone ever stood here and given me nothing at all? Not a lie. Not even the shape of one?”
A pause. “No,” the elder said. “Never.”
The Alpha came down the steps toward me, and I didn’t step back, though every instinct in my body was screaming at me to. I’d spent my whole life learning how to disappear inside a room. It had never once failed me.
It was failing me now.
“Take the chains off her wrists,” he ordered.
The young guard moved fast. I rubbed the raw skin underneath without meaning to, and I watched something in the Alpha’s jaw tighten at the sight of it.
“You’re not going to the cells,” he said.
Relief rose in my chest before I could stop it. “Then where?”
“Where I can watch you.” His voice didn’t soften, if anything it hardened, like he was arguing himself into something rather than offering me comfort. “You’re the only person who’s ever stood in front of me and given my gift nothing to hold onto. That doesn’t make you safe. That makes you the most dangerous thing that’s walked into this hall in years.”
“So I’m a prisoner.”
“You’re insurance.” He turned to the elder without waiting for my answer. “She stays in the east wing. Guarded. Watched. If she so much as breathes wrong, I want to know within the hour.”
“And if she tries to run?” the elder asked.
The Alpha looked at me the way a man looks at something he’s already decided to keep, whether it wants to be kept or not.
“She won’t get the chance.”
I felt those words settle somewhere under my ribs, colder than the iron had been. I had spent my whole life being the thing no one noticed, the daughter tucked away where nobody thought to look twice.
Now I was standing in the hall of the man who’d burned that home to the ground, and he was looking at me like I was exactly what I’d spent my whole life avoiding becoming.
A weapon he hadn’t decided how to use yet.
