REJECTED BY THE PRINCE, CLAIMED BY HIS RUTHLESS UNCLE.

CHAPTER FOUR:THE PRICE OF THE PRINCE REJECTION

Three days later, summoned before the royal council with her mother gripping her arm hard enough to bruise, Liana learned exactly how much worse things could get.

The council chamber was cold despite the fire roaring in its great stone hearth, its walls lined with tapestries depicting the kingdom's ancestors, its long table occupied by grim-faced elders who did not look at her so much as through her, as though she were a problem to be solved rather than a person to be considered. King Alaric sat at the head of the table, his expression carved from granite. Cassian stood near the window, arms crossed, refusing to meet her eyes.

It was the eldest councilman, a thin man named Elder Thorne with a voice like dry parchment, who finally spoke.

"You understand, child, that what has happened is unprecedented. A royal heir has rejected the Moon Goddess's chosen bond. Already we see the consequences — crops failing in the south, wolves losing control of their shifts during the full moon, the sacred stones at the temple beginning to crack. The Goddess is angry, and her anger threatens the entire kingdom."

Liana said nothing. She had learned, in three days of humiliation and whispered gossip following her everywhere she walked, that silence was safer than speech.

"We have searched the old records," Elder Thorne continued, "and found a law dating back to the kingdom's founding. When a royal heir rejects a mate chosen by the Goddess, the rejected party cannot remain unclaimed. To restore the balance that has been broken, she must be joined instead with another member of the royal bloodline."

A cold feeling began spreading through Liana's chest, some instinct warning her of what was coming before the words fully arrived.

"There is only one eligible member of the bloodline unmarried and unmated," Elder Thorne said. "Alpha Lucien Nightbane."

The name landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water.

Liana had heard of him, of course — everyone in the kingdom had heard of him, though few had actually seen him with their own eyes. The Ruthless Alpha. The King's younger brother. Ruler of Blood Fang Territory, a place spoken of only in hushed, careful tones, as though saying its name too loudly might summon its master. They said he had not smiled in a decade. They said his enemies did not survive long enough to regret crossing him. They said his own mate had died years ago and that he had buried whatever capacity for gentleness he once possessed alongside her.

"You cannot be serious," Liana heard herself say, the words slipping out before she could stop them. "You want to send me to live with a man they call ruthless? A man who—"

"It is not a request," King Alaric said, speaking for the first time, his voice heavy with something that might have been regret, though it did nothing to soften the finality of his words. "The kingdom's survival depends on restoring what my son broke. You will marry Lucien Nightbane before the next full moon."

Liana looked toward Cassian, some desperate part of her still hoping he might object, might argue that this was too cruel a punishment even for a woman he didn't want. But he only stared out the window, his jaw tight, his eyes carefully empty of anything resembling guilt.

She understood, in that moment, exactly what this arrangement meant to him. It wasn't punishment. It was convenience. A way to erase her from his life entirely, to send her somewhere so far and so feared that he would never have to look at her again, never have to be reminded of the mate he'd thrown away for the sake of a woman who cared more for a crown than for him.

"Am I permitted to say anything?" Liana asked quietly. "Or has this already been decided without me, the way everything else in my life has been decided without me?"

Something flickered in King Alaric's expression — not quite guilt, but something adjacent to it. "I am sorry, child. Truly. But there is no other way."

There never is, Liana thought bitterly. Not for someone like me.

She left the council chamber with her future no longer her own, a marriage arranged not out of love or even simple practicality but out of desperate political necessity, bound now to a man the entire kingdom feared and she had never once laid eyes on.

That night, alone in her room, she opened the small chest at the foot of her bed and began, with trembling hands, to pack the few belongings she could call truly hers. A worn blue shawl that had belonged to her father. A small carved wooden bird he had given her the winter before he died. A handful of dried lavender that still, faintly, carried the memory of happier days.

She did not know what waited for her in Blood Fang Territory. She did not know if the stories about its Alpha were true, or exaggerated, or somehow worse than anyone dared say aloud. She only knew that within a week, she had lost her mate, her dignity, and any illusion she'd once held about her place in this kingdom — and that in a matter of days, she would be leaving everything familiar behind to become the wife of a man they called the most feared wolf alive.

As she closed the chest and blew out her candle, plunging the room into darkness, she allowed herself one final, fragile thought before sleep finally claimed her.

Whatever waits for me in the north cannot possibly be crueler than what I am leaving behind.

She had no way of knowing, not yet, just how wrong — and how right — that thought would turn out to be.

• • •

Sleep did not come easily. Liana lay awake long after the candle had burned to nothing, staring up at the ceiling while the palace settled into its nighttime quiet around her, and it was somewhere in that long stretch of darkness that Selena finally came to her.

She heard the door open first, the soft click of the latch, and for one foolish moment she thought perhaps her sister had come to apologize — to admit that she felt some flicker of guilt over the way everything had unfolded. That hope died the instant Selena's voice reached her, light and careless, as though she were discussing nothing more serious than the weather.

"You're not asleep. I can tell."

Liana didn't move. "What do you want, Selena?"

Her sister crossed the room and settled herself at the foot of the bed without being invited, the way she always had, as though every space in the world belonged to her by default. In the thin moonlight filtering through the curtains, she looked lovely and untroubled, none of the weight of the last three days visible anywhere on her face.

"I wanted to see you before you left," Selena said. "We are still sisters, after all, whatever else has happened."

"Are we?" Liana finally sat up, pulling her blanket around her shoulders like armor. "It didn't feel that way in the council chamber. It didn't feel that way when Cassian took your hand in front of the entire kingdom and I stood there like something he'd scraped off his boot."

Selena's expression flickered, something almost like discomfort passing behind her eyes before she smoothed it away. "I didn't ask him to reject you. That was his choice."

"But you knew," Liana said quietly. "You knew he loved you before the ceremony. You let me stand there in front of everyone without a single warning."

"Would a warning have changed anything?" Selena's voice sharpened, the careless mask slipping just enough to reveal something colder underneath. "You would have gone up there anyway. The Goddess doesn't ask permission before she ruins someone's life."

The words hit harder than Liana wanted to admit, mostly because some small part of her suspected they were true. "I hope you're happy," she said instead, because there was nothing else left to say. "I hope being his Luna is everything you wanted."

"It will be." Selena rose from the bed, smoothing her nightgown with the same unconscious grace she brought to everything. At the door, she paused, and for just a moment, something almost like uncertainty crossed her face. "For what it's worth — I never wanted you to be sent to Blood Fang. That part wasn't supposed to happen."

"But it did," Liana said. "And you're still here, about to become Luna, while I'm being sent to marry a man they say has no mercy left in him."

Selena didn't answer that. She only slipped back out into the corridor, closing the door softly behind her, leaving Liana alone once more with nothing but moonlight and the small silver mark still glowing faintly beneath her collarbone — a mark that would fade by morning, the healers had told her, once a rejected bond finally, fully broke.

She wondered, staring at that fading light, whether the ache in her chest would fade as easily.

Somehow, she doubted it.