He Rejected my Size, Now He begs

Ten Years of Sleep

"Don't," Vera said, sitting up fast enough that the straw mattress groaned beneath her. "Whatever that is, put it away."

"Relax." Evie's voice had dropped the courtly polish entirely, gone flat and businesslike in a way that scared Vera more than any amount of shouting would have. "This is the last dose. After tonight I won't need it anymore."

"Need it for what?"

"You really don't know, do you." Evie let out a short, disbelieving laugh, the vial trembling slightly in her fingers despite her flat tone. "Ten years and you never once wondered why you never felt the pull. Every other wolf in this kingdom feels their beast clawing to get out by the time they're twelve. Headaches. Fevers. Restlessness they can't explain. You never had any of it. Not once. Didn't that strike you as strange, even a little?"

Vera opened her mouth to argue and found, to her horror, that she had no argument ready. She remembered the headaches other girls complained about at fourteen, the way she had quietly envied them for having something to complain about at all. "I thought I was broken."

"You were kept broken." Evie held up the vial, turning it so the moonlight caught the pale silver powder inside, fine as flour, harmless looking. "Moonshade. A pinch in your morning tea since you were twelve years old. Keeps a wolf asleep indefinitely if the dose is right, and I have always, always been careful about the dose."

The words landed slow, one at a time, like stones dropped into still water, each one sending ripples through everything Vera thought she knew about her own life.

"You poisoned me."

"I managed you." Evie said it without a flicker of guilt, the same tone she might use to describe watering a plant she needed kept exactly a certain height. "Do you have any idea what would have happened if your wolf woke up when it was supposed to? You would have shifted at fourteen, towering over every girl in the training yard, and everyone would have seen exactly what you were before I ever got the chance to be anything at all. I was seven when it started. I did not choose this any more than you did."

"What I was," Vera repeated, low. "What am I, Evie?"

For the first time, something like real hesitation crossed her sister's face, the vial's tremble growing worse instead of better.

"You don't want to know."

"I have spent ten years hating my own body because I thought there was something wrong with me. Ten years of mother's face when she looks at me, ten years of you smiling at me like you knew a secret I didn't. I think I've earned the answer."

Evie's fingers tightened around the vial hard enough that her knuckles went white. When she finally spoke again, her voice had lost its sharpness entirely, replaced by something that sounded almost like fear.

"It's not the moonshade that made you this size," she said. "I want you to understand that clearly, because it matters. I never touched that part of you. I couldn't have, even if I'd tried a hundred different ways."

"Then what did?"

"Nothing did. It's not a curse and it's not an accident." Evie's eyes darted to the door, to the window, like she was checking for anyone listening in the dark. "There's an old bloodline, older than House Thorne, older than the Obsidian Crest itself, from back before the kingdoms split into what they are now. A wolf so big the old stories only ever call it the Behemoth. It doesn't choose the strongest body to carry it. It chooses the body built to endure the weight of it. Your size isn't a flaw, Vera. It was never a flaw. It's the only frame in this entire kingdom strong enough to survive what's been sleeping inside you this whole time."

The heat behind Vera's ribs surged, hard enough to steal the air from her lungs, hard enough that she pressed a hand flat to the mattress just to stay upright. For one dizzying second the room seemed to tilt, the shadows in the corners stretching wrong, and somewhere underneath her own heartbeat she felt that slower, older pulse answer, as if it had been listening to every word and had simply been waiting for someone to finally say it out loud.

"You're lying."

"I wish I were." Evie's composure cracked fully now, ten years of careful control unraveling in real time in front of Vera's eyes. "Do you understand what happens to this family if that thing wakes up inside my own sister? Do you understand what happens to me, once everyone realizes what I've been hiding to protect my own place in this house?"

"You mean to protect your crown." Vera's voice had gone very quiet now, the kind of quiet that came right before something broke completely. "All those years you told me I was lucky nobody wanted me. Lucky I didn't have to worry about a mate bond, about a crown, about any of it. You knew the whole time exactly what you were taking from me."

"I didn't poison you to hurt you," Evie said, voice cracking. "I poisoned you to survive you."

"How did you even manage it?" Vera asked, her voice barely above a whisper now, more to herself than to Evie. "Ten years. Someone would have noticed. The healers. Mother, even, if she ever once bothered to look at me closely."

"Mother knew," Evie said, and something about the flatness of it made it worse than any confession dressed up with guilt would have been. "Not the details. Just that it needed doing, and that I was the one doing it, and that neither of us would speak of it again once it was done. She never asked how. She never wanted to know how. That was always the arrangement between us, unspoken but understood perfectly."

"So this was a family project."

"Don't," Evie snapped, some of her old sharpness returning, though it cracked halfway through the word. "You don't get to make this sound simple. I was a child the first time I mixed that dose, Vera. I didn't understand what I was doing, only that if I didn't, everything I had would be taken from me the moment your wolf came in and everyone saw what you actually were next to me."

"And what am I, next to you? Say it plainly, for once in your life."

Vera stared at her sister, at the vial still trembling in her hand, and felt something shift deep in her chest that had nothing to do with fear anymore.

"Give it to me," she said quietly.

"What?"

"The moonshade. Give it to me, or don't. But you are not putting it in my tea again. Not tonight, not ever again as long as I live." Vera swung her legs off the mattress and stood, and for the first time in her life, she watched her sister take an involuntary step back from her, the vial clutched to her chest like a shield. "Ten years, Evie. Ten years I thought I was the mistake in this family, and it was never true. Not once."

"Vera, please, if it wakes up fully, I don't know what it will do to you, I don't know if you'll still be you when it's finished, that's why I never—"

The door slammed open before Evie could finish the sentence.

A figure stood silhouetted against the corridor torchlight, tall, scarred, dressed in northern furs that had no business being anywhere near the servants' wing of an Obsidian Crest estate. Moonlight caught the edge of a blade in his hand, silver and faintly glowing, aimed directly at Vera's chest without a moment's hesitation.

"Step away from her," he said to Evie, voice low and even. Then, to Vera, without an ounce of doubt in it: "I'm sorry. This won't take long."