THE LUNA THEY’LL NEVER LOVE

3: DAUNTING CONDITIONS

PHEEONA

My brain short circuited at Vizellan’s words.

My father let out a roar of disbelief. "You cannot be serious!”

He was on his feet before the words were fully out, which was something I had seen exactly twice in my life — once when a rival kingdom's envoy had made the mistake of insulting my mother at a diplomatic dinner, and once when Caelan had come home at sixteen with a broken nose and a story that didn't hold together.

Both times it had ended badly for the other party.

The Torvain cousins looked at my father standing and adjusted nothing about their posture or their expressions.

That, more than anything, told me everything about who I was dealing with.

"Three husbands," my father said, and the word three came out like something he was picking up off the floor with two fingers. "You expect me to give my daughter to three men. To all three of you. Simultaneously."

"We expect nothing," Crowen said. "We're stating what will happen."

"What will—" My father stopped himself, tried to ollect himself. I watched him do it, watched him reach for the composure that had gotten him through thirty years of ruling a kingdom that was always one bad season away from a crisis. "My daughter is not a territory to be divided."

"No," Vizellan agreed, with the air of someone being very patient. "She's a mate bond shared between three wolves. The arrangement follows from the biology, not from any particular desire of ours to complicate your family structure."

My father’s face turned a color I didn't have a name for.

I couldn’t imagine what I must have looked like.

Caelan's hand found my arm under the table.

I appreciated it because my own hands were fists in my lap and had been since Vizellan had said ‘as her husbands’ and the words had rearranged every assumption I'd walked into this room with.

"You can't expect my daughter to marry all three of you," my father said, and his voice had gone very quiet, which was far more dangerous than loud. "I won't allow it."

Crowen looked at him for a moment. Something shifted in his expression. It wasn’t anger, or offense, just a slow and absolute certainty, the look of a man deciding how much of the truth to put in a room.

And then he questioned, “Yet you would allow her to be f****d by all three of us.”

The silence was deafening.

My face went red.

One of the advisors made a sound like he'd swallowed something wrong. Caelan went rigid beside me. My father's face did something complicated that I didn't look at directly because looking at it directly would have undone me.

"That's how it works," Crowen continued, and his voice hadn't changed. It came out in the same register, same pace, like he was discussing something no more bland than crop rotation. "I can't satisfy her heat alone. Neither can either of my cousins. One wolf completing the bond won't end it. The heat needs all three bonds settled before it releases her." He paused. "Unlike you, we've lived a long time. We're thoroughly aware of how heats work on the end of the female. We'll have to take our time with her. Go slowly. Make sure she enjoys it."

His eyes moved to me as he said the last part.

The heat, which had been doing something complicated in my body since they'd walked through the door, made its opinion of that statement extremely clear.

I kept my face where it was through what I can only describe as a heroic exercise of will.

"Enough," my father sneered.

"Yes," Vizellan said pleasantly. "It will be, once the bond is completed." He tilted his head slightly. "But we won't do it unless she is our wife. That's not a negotiating position. It's the only position we have."

"Why?” The word came from Caelan, quiet and controlled, the voice he used when he was doing his job rather than being my brother.

He was looking at the three of them with the assessment of a beta who had spent years learning to read threats accurately. "You could have taken her. You had the army, you had the force, you had every advantage eleven months ago and you walked away. Why does the title matter to you?"

The question landed and sat there, and for the first time since they'd walked in, something moved through the room that wasn't entirely controlled. Nashyn's expression shifted into something with more edges than the easy manner he'd been wearing since he sat down. Vizellan looked at the table for half a second. Crowen’s jaw worked once before he settled it.

"Because she's ours," Crowen said finally. "And what is ours carries our name."

My father made a sound that wasn't quite a word.

"Lunaris will not be absorbed into Ashenbane,” Crowen said. “At least not fully. It keeps its name, its structure, its governance. You and your son continue to rule it."

My father's eyes narrowed. "And what exactly do you take from it?"

"The title of king regent," Vizellan said. "Shared between the three of us."

"And Pheeona," Nashyn added, "takes the title of queen."

"This is unacceptable," my father said.

The cousins said nothing.

"Lunaris is not without recourse. We have allies. Kingdoms that will stand with us."

Nashyn tilted his head, almost apologetically. "Shadowcrest sent a letter of submission to Ashenbane six weeks ago." He paused. "The Bloodied Peaks hasn't opened its borders to anyone in over eight years.” He gave another pause, this one shorter. "Take that information however you find it most useful."

My father sat down, slumming in his chair with defeat.

I watched it all from my chair with my hands still in fists and my body doing a complicated negotiation of its own.

The proximity of the three of them was doing something to the heat that wasn't exactly relief but was adjacent to it, like standing near a fire after being cold for a very long time, the warmth almost painful in the places that had gone numb.

I was more alert than I had been in weeks. More present.

I was thinking about Lunaris. About my father's face when Nashyn had mentioned Shadowcrest. About what it meant that these cousins were offering us terms at all, that they were sitting in this room talking when they could have simply arrived and taken what they wanted, the way they had taken everything else.

They hadn't.

Caelen was right, eleven months ago they had walked away from a completed conquest because of a girl on a terrace in her morning robe.

They had come back with gifts and letters and patience, month after month, and they had been refused every time, and they had not once retaliated.

I didn't know what to do with that. I wasn't ready to do anything with that.

But I was sitting in a throne room in a kingdom that was still standing because of it, and my body was staging a daily deterioration that had no end point except the one sitting across from me.

The offer on the table was better than anything I had any right to expect from men with their reputation and their power and eleven months of rejection behind them.

I was still thinking about all of this when Crowen's eyes moved from my father and found me, and something in the way he looked at me extracted me from my own head with the efficiency of a hand reaching in and pulling.

"We've heard from everyone in this room," he said, and his voice had shifted, aimed at me with a precision that made everything else in the room feel slightly far away. “Yet we haven't heard from the princess herself. Tell us what you have to say.”

My father started to speak.

"I wasn't asking you," Crowen warned, without looking at him.

The room went quiet again.

A different kind of quiet this time.

I looked at Crowen, at the absolute stillness of him, at the way he was watching me with that patience that felt like it had been built over a very long time, tested regularly and never broken. I looked at Vizellan, who was watching me with something that might have been curiosity if it had been willing to show more of itself. I looked at Nashyn, who was watching me with that edge beneath the easy surface, and who, when my eyes met his, did not look away.

I thought about Lunaris.

About my father's hands covering mine in my bedroom yesterday morning.

About thirty-two days of a body that had stopped being mine to manage.

About wolves, mate bonds, and everything I knew and had been told about what it meant to have mates.

There was no other choice.

I unclenched my hands in my lap.

"I accept your offer," I said.