The Alpha’s Weak Mate

Chapter Two

The three days went by like a held breath. On the third night, I went to see my mother.

The family crypt lay beneath the east chapel, down a spiral stair worn smooth by centuries of Dracana feet. Pale crystal glowed in the wall sconces, turning the stone the color of milk. The kings and queens of my line slept here in rows of carved marble, their stone faces serene, their names cut deep.

My mother’s tomb was at the far end, in a corner where the light didn’t quite reach. The effigy on the lid was plain, a young woman with her hands folded and her eyes closed. They hadn’t carved her any jewels. I had never decided if that was cruelty or economy.

Her name was chiseled along the edge. I had traced those letters so often that their edges had gone soft under my fingertips. No one else ever came down here. I knew because the dust on the other tombs was never disturbed, and the dust on hers was always mine.

“I’m getting married,” I told her.

The silence in the crypt was thick and old. It had always been easier to talk here, to a woman who couldn’t answer, than to anyone upstairs who could.

“To a wolf. They call him the Beast of the Shadow Pack, which you would have hated. Or maybe you wouldn’t. I don’t know what you would have thought.” I pressed my palm flat against the cold marble. “That’s the trouble. I never got to find out.”

I waited for the old anger to come, the one that had carried me through the last three days. Instead, something quieter rose in its place.

“I’m scared,” I whispered. It was the first time I’d said it aloud, even here. “Everyone upstairs thinks I’m too weak to be afraid of anything. That I’m too empty to have anything to lose. But I don’t want to die in a pack of strangers who hate me. I don’t want to be the reason the peace breaks. I don’t want to be... nothing. Not there, too.”

The crypt gave nothing back. It never did.

I stayed until the cold had crept through my slippers and into my bones. Then I took my mother’s comb from my pocket, turned it once in the pale light, and slid it into my hair, where it caught the black strands like a promise I hadn’t known how to make.

“I won’t die there,” I said. “I’ll be so stubborn about it that death will give up.”

I climbed the stairs without looking back. If I had, I might not have left.

* * *

We left at dawn.

The courtyard was gray and half asleep, the cobblestones slick with mist. A black carriage waited at its center, drawn by two black horses, with six guards in silver-trimmed black mounted around it. A coachman sat on the box with his eyes fixed straight ahead. My trunk was already strapped to the back, as if I were a parcel being delivered.

I searched the windows of the palace. In the tall one above the east stairs, a flash of pale blue silk: Jasmine, watching, one hand over her mouth. I couldn’t tell if she was laughing. I decided it didn’t matter.

My father wasn’t there.

I hadn’t expected him. I had told myself I hadn’t expected him, with such determination that it should have been true. But some stubborn, childish part of me had still hoped, right up until the carriage door opened and my stepmother stepped out of the shadows of the colonnade and I understood that she was all the farewell I’d been allotted.

“Your father sends his regards,” she said, which was a lie. Her smile was thin as a blade. “And a reminder. The treaty holds only as long as the marriage does. Do try not to die before the vows, Lysandra. It would be so inconvenient.”

I looked at her for a long moment, this woman who had taken my mother’s place and my father’s attention and, in all the ways that mattered, my home.

“I’ll do my best,” I said, “to survive out of spite.”

Something flickered across her face. I didn’t wait to see what. I climbed into the carriage and pulled the door shut behind me.

Through the window, I caught one last glimpse of the courtyard. At the servants’ gate, where she wasn’t allowed any closer, stood Hesper in her plain cap. She didn’t wave. She lifted her chin, once, the way you do for someone riding into battle.

I lifted mine back.

Then the carriage lurched forward, the gates swung open, and the only home I had ever known fell away behind me.

* * *

We passed through three villages before noon.

The first was whole, its cottages tidy, its fields green. The second had lost half its roofs, blackened timbers rising from the thatch like broken ribs. Humans worked the fields on both sides of the road, and as the carriage passed they stopped, stared, and went back to work a little too quickly, as though someone had told them not to be seen looking.

In the third village, there was a row of fresh graves.

They were marked with wooden stakes, not stone, a long line of them behind the chapel. I counted until I lost count. I had been angry at my father all week for making me the price. It was harder to stay angry at a number when the number had names carved into wood.

I leaned back from the window and said nothing for the rest of the day.

We reached the border at dusk.

There was no wall, no gate, no marker of any kind. The road simply ran toward a dark line of pines and ended where the trees began, as if the land itself had decided that was far enough. The trunks stood close together as the bars of a cage. The air that drifted out from between them was cold, and it smelled of resin and wet earth and, underneath, something wild that made the fine hairs along my arms stand up.

The guards slowed, then stopped. The captain dismounted and opened the carriage door himself, which was the first courtesy any of them had shown me.

“This is as far as we’re permitted, Highness.” His hand rested on his sword hilt. The knuckles were white. “They’ll come to you.”

“Who will?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

I stepped down onto the road. My legs were steadier than I expected. Behind me, the guards were already turning their horses, a low, hurried murmur of hooves and leather. One of them, a young one, didn’t quite meet my eyes as he went. I couldn’t blame him. I’d have run, too, if I’d had somewhere to run to.

My trunk hit the dirt with a thud. Then the carriage was rolling away, and the sound of it shrank, and the dark pines were very quiet.

A twig snapped.

Then I saw the eyes.

First one pair, low to the ground, burning gold in the gloom. Then another, amber. Then a dozen, two dozen, spreading through the trees in a slow crescent until I stood at the center of a ring of watching light. Shapes moved behind them: broad shoulders, thick fur, the unhurried grace of animals who had never needed to be afraid of anything. They were bigger than any wolf had a right to be. Some of them were bigger than horses.

None of them made a sound.

I stood very still and kept my hands where they could see them, the way you do with something that could kill you before you finished the thought.

One of the wolves stepped forward. Its outline rippled, the fur drawing back like water, the bones shifting with a sound I felt in my teeth, and a tall man stood where it had been, scarred and bare-armed in the cold. He looked me over slowly, from my boots to my black hair, and his mouth twisted as though he’d tasted something sour.

“So this is the vampire princess,” he said. “The one who’s supposed to save us all.”

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. That was twenty years of training: when in doubt, say nothing, and no one can use your words against you.

Then something made me look up.

On a ridge of black rock above the road, apart from the others, stood one more wolf. It was larger than the rest by half, dark as the space between stars, and utterly still. Even from there I could feel its gaze settle on me, measuring, weighing, finding me lacking, as if I were something it had been told to expect and had already decided to regret.

I lifted my chin. It was the only weapon I had.

The great wolf held my gaze for a long, silent moment. Then it turned and slipped into the trees, and the ring of eyes tightened around me.

I had the terrible feeling that I had just been inspected by my husband.