I Left Potatoes, My Alpha King Raged

Chapter 4

Isabella delivered my first humiliation on day one.

By then I was already being addressed as Luna Chris, though we hadn't yet held the formal Bonding Ceremony.

She walked into my room in a white couture gown that practically glowed. She didn't bow. She just looked me up and down with those big, doe-like eyes.

"Oh my," she said, stifling a giggle behind her fingers. "You really do look like me. The older servants around the house say Alexander always insists on turning the lights off when he's with you. Do you know why? Because only in the dark can he pretend you're me. Only then can he go through with it."

She drifted closer and ran a fingertip down the hem of my green dress.

"Such a pity. A counterfeit is still a counterfeit. This color always looks a little provincial on you."

I looked at her smug, preening face.

I didn't get angry.

I smiled.

"Lady Isabella. Since you love green so much, it just so happens I have a gift for you."

I clapped my hands once. Lily came in carrying a tray. On the tray sat a vivid, almost garish green hat, custom-made, ribboned, theatrical.

"A welcome present, my lady. May your life be tolerable. And may every man you marry, including the one you're chasing, give you a handsome pair of horns."

Isabella's lovely face twisted with rage that day.

She ran weeping to King Alexander.

That night he came to my room. His expression was thunderous.

"You humiliated Isabella?" he demanded.

"I just gave her a hat," I said, biting into an apple, perfectly bored. "She said she liked green."

He was so furious he couldn't speak.

After that, he never spent another night in my bed.

Every shred of affection that had once been mine flowed away from me, like water finding new ground, and pooled at Isabella's feet. The expensive flown-in seafood. The latest designer jewelry. All of it routed straight to her chambers.

Even the tonic the Pack Doctor prescribed for me, to rebuild my strength, was intercepted.

"Luna, I'm so sorry," the Doctor said, looking pained. "Lady Isabella has been ill lately. The Alpha said the best medicine should go to her first."

Isabella didn't only steal what was mine. She wanted the last shreds of my dignity, too.

At a garden party, she set her sights on the necklace around my neck.

It was a piece of jade strung on a simple black cord,the first gift King Alexander had ever given me. It wasn't worth much. To me, it was worth everything.

"That necklace is so unique, Luna Chris," Isabella cooed, reaching for it. "Won't you let me have it?"

I knocked her hand away. "No."

In the middle of the argument, King Alexander walked over.

Isabella, on cue, collapsed dramatically. "King," she whimpered through tears, "I just thought it was pretty. I asked if I could see it. I never imagined she'd react so violently."

He frowned, glanced at the cheap-looking necklace, and turned to me.

"Luna Chris. It's just a worn-out necklace. Give it to her."

He didn't remember.

He didn't remember that he had bought it for me on a wet midnight, at the door of a grimy basement bar, with the very last bills in his pocket. A token of love. Our token.

Isabella, peering out from behind him, smiled at me,the smug little smile of a victor.

I looked at the man I had loved for seven years. Something inside me went still and very, very cold.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because she's been through a great deal," he said, as though it were obvious. "You're the Luna of this Pack. You should be magnanimous. Hand over a trinket. It's not as if you're short on jewelry."

I listened to him say that, and the whole thing began to feel almost absurdly funny.

"I see."

I unclasped the necklace. With both of them watching, I hurled it as hard as I could into the artificial lake beside us.

"Since the King has spoken,then no one shall have it. What is mine is mine. Only I get to decide what becomes of it."

Apparently Isabella was so traumatized by my "outburst" that she went home and took to her bed.

Then came the absurd poisoning charge.

Isabella claimed she had been poisoned by my oatmeal. She wasn't actually injured in any way that anyone could find. But somehow, conveniently, a sachet of Wolfsbane was discovered under her bed,with my name written on it in fresh ink.

King Alexander didn't listen to a single word from me. He stripped my title and threw me into the dungeon.

And it was there, in that cell, that my heart finally died.

It was there I began planning the long trick,my own death.