REBORN: THE BEAST LORDS' CONTRACT

CHAPTER 3 — The Blood-Bargain

King Alaric's advisors argued in furious whispers for the better part of an hour while Luna stood at the altar, spine straight, refusing to sit even when Iris tried to bring her a chair. She had waited ten years to say those words. She could stand a little longer to see them land.

It was Ronan who broke first — not with words, but by crossing the space between them, his enormous shadow falling over her, close enough that she caught the low woodsmoke scent she remembered from nights that had, in another life, felt safe.

"What happened to you," he said quietly. Not a question. A certainty.

Luna looked up at him, and for one unguarded second let him see exactly how much the question cost her. "You'll find out," she said, "if you survive the seven days to ask me properly."

He didn't move away. She noted that, filed it, the way she was filing every reaction from every one of them like evidence for a case she hadn't decided yet how to argue.

King Alaric finally returned to the dais, and the weight in his expression told Luna, before he spoke, that she'd won. "The Crown will permit this," he said, "under strict terms. The bargain will be sealed with blood-magic, binding to the Pilgrimage's exact seven-day window. If the journey is not completed within that time — " he paused, and Luna felt the old, familiar chill of a trap closing around a decision she'd made with her eyes open, " — every contract shatters violently, and the weaker-bonded party in each pairing will not survive the backlash."

Me, Luna thought. That's me. I'm the weaker-bonded party in every single pairing.

She had built her own noose and handed them the rope. She had known she would, from the moment the idea formed in the dark right after her death. It was the only leverage she had — the only way to force five proud, dangerous men to actually protect her instead of destroying her, because now her death on the journey killed something in each of them too.

"I accept," she said, before she could think better of it.

The priest's blood-ritual dagger passed to King Alaric's hand instead of the temple altar, and the ceremony that followed bore no resemblance to any wedding rite in Veyth's history. Five drops of blood — one from each husband — fell into a basin already holding a sixth. Luna's. The mingled blood glowed faintly gold, then black, then settled into something like smoke trapped under glass.

"Seven days," King Alaric said. "Beginning the morning the Pilgrimage departs. Six days from now."

Kade's eyes hadn't left her once through the entire ritual. When it was done, he stepped close enough that only she could hear him.

"You're not afraid of any of us," he said. It wasn't a compliment. It sounded, if anything, almost wounded.

"I already died once," Luna said. "There's nothing left in this temple that frightens me half as much as living through the same mistake twice."

She turned and walked down the aisle alone, five husbands and an entire kingdom staring after her, and did not look back to see which of their faces had gone pale.