THE ALPHA'S REVENGE BRIDE

Episode.6

I woke before the servants came, the way I always had at Blackstone, and for one disoriented moment I reached for the familiar shape of my own room before I remembered where I was.

The ceiling above me was wrong. Too high, too far away, painted with a mural of wolves running beneath a full moon that I hadn't noticed the night before, too exhausted by then to notice anything except the size of the bed and the fact that no one had followed me into the room to watch what I did with my grief.

I lay there a long while before I made myself move, staring at those painted wolves, tracing the line of the largest one with my eyes until I'd memorized the exact curve of its spine. It felt easier than thinking about the conversation I'd had in the throne room, though my mind kept circling back to it anyway, the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth.

‘You've made your reasons very public.’

‘No, I didn't.’

I hadn't expected honesty. I'd expected denial, or worse, the practiced sympathy men like my father performed when they wanted something from a woman and needed her to believe, briefly, that he cared. Alkane Viktor had offered me neither. He'd simply agreed that he intended to make me suffer, and somehow that bare admission had unsettled me less than any comfort would have.

At least I knew, now, exactly what I was dealing with.

A knock came at the door not long after, brisk and businesslike, and I called for whoever it was to enter before I'd even properly sat up.

The woman who came in was perhaps ten years older than me, dressed in the silver-grey uniform I now recognized as palace staff, a ring of keys at her belt and an expression that suggested she had very little patience for anything she considered unnecessary.

"Lady Clifton." She said it the way one might announce an inconvenient piece of weather. "I'm Greta. I oversee the Luna's household staff, or will, once you're formally wed. Until then I've been assigned to see you settled."

"Thank you," I said, and stood, smoothing the borrowed nightgown I'd been given the evening before.

Greta's eyes moved over me with the swift, assessing efficiency of someone cataloguing a problem rather than greeting a person. "His Majesty requests your presence at breakfast. Informally," she added, in a tone that suggested informal was somehow worse than the alternative. "The Council convenes at midmorning, and he prefers to conduct certain matters before the day grows complicated."

"Is breakfast one of those matters?"

Something flickered across Greta's face, gone before I could name it. "His Majesty rarely eats breakfast with anyone. You'll want to dress quickly."

She said it as though this were simply useful information and not, as I suspected, a warning wrapped inside one.

The gown laid out for me was finer than anything I'd owned at Blackstone, pale silver silk with a high collar and sleeves embroidered in a pattern of climbing ivy, and I stood still while two younger maids fastened it around me with quick, practiced hands that never quite met my eyes.

"You needn't be so careful with me," I said, when the second maid flinched slightly at a pin that scratched too close to my collarbone. "I won't bite."

The girl offered a small, uncertain smile, and it was the first genuine expression I'd seen since arriving. "Forgive me, my lady. We were told the last woman His Majesty was displeased with lost her position rather quickly."

"The last woman?"

"An advisor's daughter. Before you." She hesitated, clearly wondering if she'd said too much. "It isn't my place to say more."

I let it go, though I filed it away carefully, the way I filed away everything that didn't quite fit the shape of what I'd been told. A palace, I was learning quickly, ran on the things people didn't say as much as the things they did.

Greta led me through corridors I hadn't seen the night before, past windows that looked out over gardens far more manicured than anything at Blackstone, past portraits of kings and Lunas long dead, their painted eyes seeming to track me as I passed the way the living ones had the day before.

The breakfast room, when we reached it, was smaller than I expected, warmer too, sunlight pouring through tall windows onto a table set for two rather than the grand hall I'd half imagined. Alkane was already seated, a report of some kind open beside his plate, and he looked up when I entered with an expression I couldn't quite read.

"Lady Clifton." He gestured to the seat across from him. "I trust you slept."

"Better than I expected to, Your Majesty."

"Good." He returned his attention to the report for a moment, though I had the distinct sense he wasn't actually reading it anymore. "You'll find the palace runs on a schedule I don't often trouble myself to explain to guests. Since you're not precisely a guest, I thought it fairer to start with breakfast than to leave you to discover the rules by breaking them."

"That's uncharacteristically considerate of you."

His eyes lifted to mine, something almost amused flickering there before it was gone. "Don't mistake it for kindness. I've simply found that women who don't understand the rules tend to cause considerably more trouble than the ones who do."

"And which am I meant to be?"

"That," he said, "remains to be seen."

We ate mostly in silence after that, though it wasn't the uncomfortable kind. I found myself watching him without meaning to, the economical way he moved, nothing wasted, nothing performed for an audience that wasn't there. It was strange, sitting across from a man I'd been told to think of as a monster, and finding instead someone who ate his breakfast the same unhurried way he seemed to do everything else, as though he had already decided time belonged to him and saw no reason to spend it carelessly.

"You'll meet with Greta again after this," he said eventually, setting the report aside. "She'll walk you through what's expected of you before the wedding. Fittings, protocol, etiquette council members will expect from a future Luna."

"And if I fail to meet their expectations?"

"Then they'll gossip, and I'll ignore them, and life will continue." He said it so plainly that I nearly laughed, the sound catching in my throat before I could decide whether it was appropriate. "I didn't marry you to please my counsel, Lady Clifton. I imagine you've gathered that much already."

"I have."

"Then you needn't perform for them. Only for me, and only when it matters."

I studied him for a moment, trying to determine whether that was meant as reassurance or another kind of warning entirely. With him, I was beginning to suspect, the two often looked identical.

"And when does it matter?" I asked.

"You'll know," he said, "when it does."

Greta collected me not long after, and the morning dissolved into a blur of fittings and instructions I only half absorbed, my mind still turning over the strange, careful conversation at breakfast. A wedding gown was measured against me, silver and white, heavier than anything I'd worn in my life. A tutor arrived to walk me through the correct forms of address for visiting dignitaries, which fork belonged to which course, how far to incline my head for a duke versus a duchess versus a foreign Alpha to pay respects.

I absorbed it the way I absorbed everything, quietly, methodically, cataloguing details the way I once catalogued grain shipments and border taxes, because it was easier to survive a day by learning its rules than by dwelling on how thoroughly my old life had been dismantled to make room for this one.

It was during a brief pause between fittings, while Greta consulted with the wedding tailor over some detail of the sleeves, that I first noticed the woman watching me from the doorway.

She was perhaps my own age, dressed in palace colors but with the particular polish of someone born to nobility rather than raised to serve it, her dark hair pinned with a precision that suggested she'd spent considerable time in front of a mirror that morning. When she caught me looking, she didn't look away. She smiled instead, slow and assessing, the kind of smile that measured rather than welcomed.

"You must be Lady Clifton." She stepped into the room without waiting to be introduced. "I've heard so much about you."

"I'm afraid I can't say the same," I said carefully. "I don't believe we've met."

"Lady Seraphine." She said it as though the name alone should mean something to me. "My family has served the Crown for generations. I was... close to His Majesty, before all of this." Her eyes flicked, deliberately, to the half-finished wedding gown draped across the mannequin beside me. "It's strange, isn't it, how quickly things change."

There was nothing overtly hostile in what she'd said, and yet every word had been arranged with the precision of a blade slid carefully between ribs.

"I imagine it must be," I said, keeping my voice even, "for both of us."

Something tightened briefly around Seraphine's mouth, there and gone, and I understood, with the particular clarity I'd learned from years of reading my father's court, that I had just made an enemy without raising my voice once.

"Well." She recovered her smile quickly. "I do hope you'll be very happy here, Lady Clifton. Truly." The word landed with all the sincerity of a slammed door. "Do let me know if you ever need... guidance. The palace can be difficult to navigate, for those who weren't raised for it."

She left before I could answer, her skirts trailing a little too deliberately behind her, and I stood there for a moment turning over the shape of what had just happened.

‘Close to His Majesty.’

I thought of Khanna's half-finished sentence in the dark of my old bedroom, the way she'd caught herself before saying too much about a king she claimed not to know. I thought of the maid's careful mention of an advisor's daughter who had displeased him and lost her position quickly. I wondered, not for the first time since arriving, exactly how many women had stood in rooms like this one, measuring themselves against a throne that had never once considered offering them a genuine welcome.

Greta returned before I could examine the thought further, already speaking about the evening's schedule, and I let myself be pulled back into fittings and forks and the correct depth of a curtsy, filing Seraphine away in the same careful place I'd filed everything else since the horns woke me at Blackstone.

I was beginning to understand that this palace, for all its silver and black marble and painted wolves running beneath painted moons, was simply another kind of battlefield.

I had spent my whole life learning to survive one of those already.

I intended to survive this one too.