HIS RELUCTANT MATE

I was not supposed to be here. That was the thought that followed me through the palace gates on the night of my arrival not wonder, not awe, not the breathless reverence that a place like this probably expected from a girl like me. Just the quiet, practical certainty that I had made a terrible mistake and was too desperate to turn around. The Voss Palace rose from the earth like something the ground had been saving for centuries. I had seen it once in a photograph when I was nine years old a torn, water-stained page from a magazine blowing across a market road in Lowerfield and I had stared at it long enough that my mother called my name three times before I moved. I had thought then that nothing so beautiful could be real. I understood now that I had been wrong about beautiful things. They were always real. They were simply not built for people like me. The palace gates were iron and gold, enormous and intricate, carved with wolves mid-leap and crescent moons and vines so detailed they seemed to grow rather than having been made. Torches burned on either side, throwing warm amber light across the stone steps, and red roses climbed the gate pillars in thick, wild tangles, their petals scattered down the steps like something had bled here and nobody bothered to clean it up. I stood at the bottom of those steps with a worn canvas bag over one shoulder, bare feet on cold stone I had lost the left sole of my shoe three streets back and decided shoes were a luxury I couldn't afford to care about and I took one breath. One steady, deliberate breath, the way I had taught myself to breathe before hard things. Then I walked up. The gate was slightly ajar. A palace guard stood to the right with the expression of a man who had seen everything and been impressed by none of it. He checked his ledger. Found my name. Looked up at me the worn dress, the canvas bag, the bare feet, the rose petal stuck to my ankle and said nothing. Stamped something. Jerked his head toward the open gate. I walked through. The courtyard inside was larger than my entire street in Lowerfield. Manicured hedges. Stone paths. Torchlight catching the gold detail on every surface. The air smelled like cedar and night-blooming flowers and something underneath it all that I couldn't name something that made the small, quiet part of me that carried wolf blood stir uneasily, like it recognized something my mind hadn't caught up to yet. I was halfway up the main path when the feeling hit. Not a sound. Not a movement. Just a shift in the air. A sudden, complete awareness, like stepping into cold water, like every hair on my arms rising at once. My steps slowed without my permission. My eyes moved upward before I understood why, pulled by something that didn't feel like choice. And then I stopped walking entirely. He was standing at the top of the steps. Not on the balcony above, not at a safe, observable distance at the top of the steps directly in front of me, arms crossed over his chest, dark-clothed and utterly still, blocking the path to the entrance with the particular ease of someone who had never in their life been required to move for anything. I had not been told there would be a prince at the door. He was tall broader through the shoulders than I'd expected, with a jaw sharp enough to cut something and dark hair that fell slightly across his forehead in a way that looked effortless and probably was. His clothes were fine and perfectly fitted and somehow still looked like he'd put them on with the attitude of someone who knew they didn't matter. His eyes even in the torchlight, even across the distance of three steps between us were the color of winter. Grey-green and cold and absolutely, completely fixed on me. He looked at me the way people looked at things they were trying to decide whether to bother with. I looked back. I had been looked at that way my entire life by landlords, by creditors, by the women in Lowerfield who thought my mother's ambitions were above her station, by everyone who had ever assessed me and found me wanting. I had learned a long time ago that the correct response to being evaluated was not to shrink. It was to stand still and make them finish looking and refuse to feel anything about what they concluded. I stood still. He looked. A long moment passed in which neither of us spoke and the torchlight moved between us and the night air carried the smell of roses and cedar and that strange, unnameable charge that had started the moment I felt him. Then he said, "You're the new staff." His voice was low and even and completely without inflection. Not a question. A categorization. Like he had looked at me long enough to sort me into a box and was now confirming the label. "Yes," I said. "You're late." I glanced at the palace entrance behind him, at the pale light spilling through the grand doors, at the absolute stillness of the courtyard around us that suggested, strongly, that I was not late by any significant measure. "I don't believe I am." Something moved in his face. Not much. The smallest tightening at the corner of his jaw, like I had said something that landed differently than he expected. "The staff entrance," he said, "is on the east side of the building." I looked at the path that led directly to the front entrance the path the guard had directed me down, the path that went straight and obvious from the gate to the steps where he was standing. I looked back at him. "The guard sent me this way," I said. "Then the guard made an error." "Then I'd suggest speaking to the guard," I said pleasantly, "since the error was his." The temperature in the courtyard dropped two degrees. He looked at me with those winter eyes for a moment that stretched long enough to become a statement and I felt it again, that pull, that strange invisible thread drawn taut between us, sharp and warm at the same time, completely unbidden, entirely unwelcome. Something in my chest pulled toward him like a compass needle finding north and I had absolutely no idea what to do with that so I did what I did with most things I had no idea what to do with. I ignored it. "I'll find the east entrance," I said. "Thank you for the direction, Your Highness." I moved to step around him. He didn't step aside immediately. Just a half-second barely anything, barely a pause but enough that I passed closer to him than the width of the steps required, close enough that the cedar and winter scent of him became specific and real rather than ambient, close enough that the pull in my chest went from compass needle to something considerably less metaphorical. Then he stepped aside. I walked up the last step and past him and I did not look back. I kept my spine straight and my steps even and my face entirely neutral and I found the east entrance exactly where he said it would be and I walked through it and down the corridor and I did not stop until I turned the first corner and found myself alone. Then I stood very still and breathed. One. Two. Three. My heart was doing something it had absolutely no business doing. The pull in my chest was still there faint now, directional, like something had been tied to me without my consent and the other end of the string was somewhere behind me. Stop it,I told myself firmly. He's a prince. You're staff. You are here to work, send money home to your mother, and survive in that order. I straightened my canvas bag on my shoulder. Ahead of me, the palace corridor stretched long and marble-floored and gold-lit, and from somewhere deeper inside it came the brisk, certain sound of approaching footsteps that I would shortly learn belonged to Madam Edra. Behind me, through the stone walls, I was almost certain I could still feel those winter eyes. I told myself it meant nothing. I was already wrong. ✨