MARRIED TO THE HIDDEN LYCAN KING

Chapter 2 — The Contract

(Kaeryn)

Draven found me in the map room an hour before she was due to arrive, which meant he'd been waiting for exactly this — the one hour I couldn't easily throw him out.

"You could still call it off." He said it lightly, the way he said most dangerous things, leaning against three hundred years of territory lines like they were furniture. "The council would grumble. They'd survive."

"The council would survive. Would we?" I didn't look up from the ledger. "Silver Vow scouts were seen eleven miles from the eastern border last month. You brought me that report yourself."

"I brought it to you because it proves my point, not yours." He pushed off the map table, and for a second the easy charm dropped and I saw the version of my cousin that actually frightened people. "They're getting close again, Kaeryn. A human bride doesn't fix that. A human bride is a liability with a heartbeat."

"A human bride is exactly why they've never found us." I finally looked at him. "Every King for three hundred years has married outside the bloodline for a reason. No shifter scent trail on the wife. No pack-bond flare that a hunter tracker can trace back to this house. You know this."

"I know the theory." Draven's jaw tightened. "I also know you're the last full-blooded heir this House has, and you're about to chain your fate to a woman who has no idea what she's walking into, no training, no defenses, and no say in any of it. That doesn't sound like protecting the bloodline to me. That sounds like feeding it to something new."

I didn't answer, because the worst part was that I couldn't tell if he was wrong.

I'd read her file twice. Wren Ashworth. Twenty-four. An archivist, of all things — a woman who spent her days preserving things too fragile to touch carelessly, which felt like either a very good omen or a very bad joke depending on the hour I thought about it. No criminal record, no shifter blood anywhere in six generations we could trace, a mother who'd clearly told her almost nothing, and a grandmother who — according to the old ledgers — had once come dangerously close to figuring out the truth on her own, decades ago, before the debt quietly bought her silence along with her family's safety.

I had told myself for months that this was purely strategic. A necessary transaction to keep the Veil intact while Draven's faction and the Silver Vow both circled closer. I had told myself I felt nothing about it either way, because feeling something about a stranger I was legally obligating for the rest of her natural life felt like one more cruelty on top of the first.

I was lying to myself, and I'd known it since the morning her photograph landed on my desk and something low and unfamiliar in my chest had gone still, the way it does right before a hunt.

"She'll hate you," Draven said, quieter now, almost gentle, which was somehow worse than his anger. "You know that. You're taking her whole life and calling it a contract."

"I know."

"And you're still doing it."

I closed the ledger. Outside, gravel crunched under tires that weren't mine — a black car, three hours early, cutting straight through everything I'd planned to say to myself before I had to look this woman in the eye and become, in the span of one signature, the reason her entire life had just ended and begun.

"She's here," I said, and for the first time in eleven years of ruling this House alone, I felt something that wasn't quite dread and wasn't quite anything I had a name for.

Draven followed my gaze to the window, and whatever he saw in my face made him go very quiet.

"Kaeryn." His voice had lost all its lightness. "Your eyes just changed color."