chapter 3
700 Words
The robe finished sliding from his shoulders and pooled around his feet.
My stomach dropped.
Every horrible story I'd heard during the journey came rushing back at once.
The girls who never returned.
The shallow graves.
The whispers exchanged over mugs of ale when people thought children weren't listening.
The monster king.
This is it.
My fingers curled into the bedsheets.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
If death was coming, I didn't want to watch it happen.
One second passed.
Then another.
Nothing happened.
A strange weight settled over my shoulders.
I flinched.
Slowly, I opened my eyes.
A thick fur cloak was draped around me.
I blinked.
The Alpha King wasn't standing over me anymore.
He had already crossed the room and was pulling another robe from a carved wooden stand.
For several moments, I simply stared.
My mind refused to catch up with what my eyes were seeing.
"What are you doing?" I finally asked.
The king glanced back.
"Getting dressed."
I frowned.
"But... your robe."
"It was dirty."
I stared harder.
Dirty?
Of all the explanations I expected, that wasn't even on the list.
The king fastened the fresh robe around himself before sitting on the edge of a nearby table.
"You look disappointed."
My mouth fell open.
"I am not disappointed."
"You definitely look disappointed."
"I don't."
"You do."
"I thought you were about to..."
The words died somewhere between my throat and my lips.
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"About to what?"
Heat flooded my face.
I looked away so quickly my neck hurt.
The king laughed.
The sound caught me completely off guard.
I had spent weeks hearing stories about him.
None of them had mentioned laughter.
Monsters weren't supposed to laugh.
They were supposed to roar.
To growl.
To tear people apart.
Not sit across from frightened girls looking annoyingly amused.
"You thought I'd throw you onto the floor the moment we were alone?" he asked.
I remained silent.
Mostly because the answer was yes.
His smile faded little by little.
"So that's what people believe."
Something changed in the room.
The humor drained away.
My pulse still hadn't slowed.
Every instinct screamed that this calm was temporary.
That at any moment the stories could prove true.
The king poured two glasses of wine.
The bottle clinked softly against the table.
He pushed one toward me.
I didn't touch it.
His gaze dropped briefly to the untouched glass.
"Smart."
I frowned.
"Never accept a drink from someone you don't trust."
For some reason, that made me feel even more uncomfortable.
The king turned toward the giant windows overlooking the city below.
Lights flickered across the darkness beyond the glass.
"You know what they call you?"
I shook my head.
"What?"
"A pacifier."
The word made my skin crawl.
His voice made it sound worse.
Like a curse.
Like something he despised.
My fingers tightened around the fur cloak.
The king swirled the wine in his glass.
"They send women here whenever the harvest fails."
His tone was flat.
Cold.
"They send women here when taxes are late."
I swallowed.
"They send women here when wolves attack livestock."
The muscles in his jaw tightened.
"They send women here whenever they need someone to blame."
A bitter laugh escaped him.
"And then they convince themselves they're brave."
His eyes remained fixed on the city.
"As though sacrificing someone else's daughter requires courage."
For the first time, I found myself questioning the stories I'd grown up hearing.
Not abandoning them.
Questioning them.
Because the man before me didn't fit neatly into the nightmare everyone had described.
Then another thought surfaced.
A question that had been clawing at the back of my mind since the banquet.
"What exactly is FRA?"
The effect was immediate.
The king froze.
Not hesitated.
Not paused.
Froze.
Slowly, he lowered his glass.
The amusement was gone.
The anger was gone.
For the first time, I saw something that genuinely unsettled me.
Fear.
Not fear of me.
Fear of the subject itself.
The silence stretched.
Then he spoke.
"What exactly have they been telling people about FRA?"
Before I could answer, a violent crash echoed somewhere inside the palace.
- Writer
