“Pick which one lives and which one dies,” her father said from the throne as the auction hall chanted around her. She had spent 23 years learning to stay quiet. Then the dark-haired shifter looked up with eyes like winter ice — and she spoke three words that changed everything. The guards moved to obey. But no one saw what she hid in the folds of her gown that night…

“Pick which one lives and which one dies,” her father said from the throne as the auction hall chanted around her. She had spent 23 years learning to stay quiet. Then the dark-haired shifter looked up with eyes like winter ice — and she spoke three words that changed everything. The guards moved to obey. But no one saw what she hid in the folds of her gown that night…

Dia did not sleep that night.

She sat beside Hector through the dark hours, changing the cloth on his brow, pressing water to his cracked lips, watching the fever burn through him like a fire she could not quench. By the gray light of dawn creeping through her chamber windows, she had made her decision.

She could not save him alone.

The thing festering in that wound was beyond her. She needed someone who had stood in battle beside this man. Someone who would know what blade had opened his side — and what poison had been left in it.

She needed the golden-haired one.

But the walls had ears. The servants reported to her sister. Every whisper, every glance, every unusual request would find its way back to Fana before the hour was out. And Fana had ordered him to the cells.

If Dia breathed the golden man’s name to an attendant, Fana would know.

So she would not ask quietly.

She would demand him. In front of everyone.

The morning meal was held in the great hall. Her father sat ruddy with wine despite the early hour, Fana at his right hand in a gown of crimson silk. When Dia entered, for once his eyes did not slide past her.

“There she is,” King Addis boomed. “My new huntress. Come. Sit.”

She let them eat first. She laughed in the right places. She smiled when Fana told a cutting joke about one of the courtiers. She played the part.

Then she set down her cup with a deliberate click.

“I find I am bored, Father.” Her voice carried. “My new pet has been a disappointment.”

She turned the cup idly between her fingers.

“But I bought two. And tonight I have an appetite for the other.”

Her father barked a laugh — genuine and loud. “There is the spirit I have waited twenty years to see.” He snapped his fingers at the steward. “Bring up the second wolf.”

They brought him in chains. Four guards — and even four did not make it look easy. He came through the doors with his head high, golden hair catching the morning light, every line of his body radiating barely contained violence.

Then his eyes found Dia.

And the contempt on his face turned to something far worse.

I am on your side, she wanted to scream. Please understand.

Instead, she lifted her chin and let her painted mouth curve.

“There he is,” she said. “My fierce one.”

The guards forced him to his knees a few feet from her chair. She rose slowly — deliberately — took the chain at his collar, and wound it once around her hand.

“You are not whimpering yet,” she said. “I am almost impressed.”

“Touch me again,” he said, very low, “and I will take your hand off at the wrist.”

He meant it.

She made herself smile. “You see?” She glanced back at her father. “He still has some fight in him. I do prefer them with a little fight.”

She tightened the chain, drawing his face up an inch. Then she lowered her voice so only he could hear.

“Let us see how long it lasts. Kiss me.”

Incredulity broke through his fury. “What?”

“You heard me.” She pulled the chain tighter — and felt the absolute refusal in every line of him. He would die before he did it.

She leaned down close as though to murmur a last cruelty in his ear.

“Please,” she murmured. “For your friend.”

His entire body went still.

“He is alive. But I cannot save him alone.” Her voice cracked. “I am begging you.”

She drew back.

His eyes had changed. The fury was still there — but behind it, the first faint crack of doubt. She let him see, for one unguarded instant, the terrified girl beneath the paint.

And then he closed the distance and kissed her.

It was careful. Deliberate. His mouth startlingly warm, soft where the rest of him was hard angles. His chained hands did not move. He kissed her in a way that looked to every watching soul like submission.

It did not feel like submission.

Her eyes fell shut without her permission. Heat rushed through her — sudden and shameful. The hall erupted in laughter and applause.

She did not hear most of it.

“Well.” She turned to her father, amazed her voice worked. “I think I shall take this one to my chambers after all. He shows promise.”

Fana’s eyes flashed. For a long moment, Dia thought she would refuse. Then her sister smiled.

“As you wish. But do be careful. That one bites.”

“I am counting on it,” Dia said — and led him out.

She kept her spine straight all the way through the corridors. Aware with every step of the enormous silent presence behind her. The fact that he could break the chain and break her with it. And had not.

She reached her chambers. Drew him inside. Closed the door.

“I am so sorry,” she said in a rush. “The kiss. The chain. The things I said. I had to. I could not ask for you quietly. My sister had forbidden it.”

He stared at her as though she had begun speaking a foreign tongue. Then his gaze moved past her — to the man on the rug. Dark hair clinging to a fevered brow. Chest rising and falling in shallow, rattling breaths.

Everything in his face changed.

“Hector.”

He was across the room before she could speak. Dropping to his knees with a sound half a name and half a sob.

“I’m here. I’ve got you.” He pressed two fingers beneath Hector’s jaw, found the pulse, and his shoulders shuddered with relief and terror both. “Gods. What have they done to you?”

“It is a wound beneath his ribs,” she said. “It has gone bad. I do not know what shifters need — what blade did this, whether there was poison.” Her voice broke. “He woke once. Only once.”

The golden-haired man looked at her across his dying friend’s body.

“You truly are trying to save him,” he said.

“Yes. I swear it. Will you help me — please?”

For a long moment, he simply looked at her. Then he turned to Hector, his hands going to the bandage with the swift, sure confidence of a man who had done this on a hundred battlefields.

The poison had a name.

The golden one — whose name, she learned, was Ajax — gave it to her as he worked.

“Nightshade,” he said. “They’ve blooded their blades with it. We’re not saving him by draining the wound. We’re only buying him time.”

“Then what saves him?”

“An antidote. Any alchemist worth the name would have it.” His jaw tightened. “Of course, any alchemist in this palace would sooner spit on a dying wolf than cure one.”

“I’ll get it,” Dia said. “Whatever it is.”

He studied her for a long moment. Then he huffed something almost like a laugh and turned back to Hector. “Get some rest, Princess. I’ll watch him.”

She did not rest.

She lay awake on her bed as the hours passed, watching Ajax tend to his friend with a gentleness that broke something open in her chest. The great warrior — all fury and muscle and barely leashed violence — cradling Hector’s head in one massive arm as he coaxed water between his lips.

There was history there. Years of it. A bond she could not name but could feel radiating off them both.

She woke to sunlight and a new problem.

Two maids came each morning to tend her fire. Dia sat bolt upright, heart hammering.

“Ajax — the maids — they come in the mornings. They’ll be here any moment.”

He raised a golden brow from where he sat against the bed, insultingly relaxed.

“All right.”

“When a noble woman buys a slave like you, they assume you are not —” She paused, heat flooding her face. “For breaking. That you are for — for her bed.”

A slow, delighted grin spread across his face. “They think I’m your bed slave?”

“And we have to make them go on thinking it.”

“Yes.” She groaned. “Will you stop enjoying this?”

“No.” His eyes traveled over her. “The question is whether you can pull it off. Forgive me, but you don’t smell like a woman much acquainted with a good time.”

“You cannot smell —”

“I’m a wolf.” His voice was gentle now. Almost kind. “I can smell a racing heart. Yours is racing now. And not because you’ve ever once had a man on his knees for you and meant it.”

“I can do it.” It came out high and fast. “If we can’t make this look right —”

“Breathe, Princess.”

She stopped. She was very nearly in tears. And the great warrior on her floor was looking at her with something softened out of mockery.

“You’re really not doing this for sport,” he said quietly.

“No.”

He sighed. “All right. You’re the Princess. You own me. You just have to look thoroughly satisfied and not at all surprised about it. Can you manage smug?”

“Possibly.”

“Think of something you’re proud of.”

Despite everything, a small hysterical laugh escaped her. She clapped a hand over her mouth.

“There. That.” He nodded. “When they come in, you let me do the work. All you have to do is not blush like a maiden at her first dance.”

The latch rattled.

Ajax moved — fluid and certain — sinking to his knees at her feet. Golden head bowed. One hand circling her ankle through her skirts. He turned his face up with such open, hungry devotion that her breath caught.

It was a performance.

Her body did not appear to know that.

“My lady,” he murmured, his thumb stroking the bone of her ankle. “Tell me what you want.”

The maids had frozen in the doorway. Dia found the laugh still under her skin and let it tilt her mouth into something almost smug.

“Later,” she said. “I am not finished with you yet.”

One maid made a small sound. They busied themselves with the fire, cheeks pink, and within minutes they had fled — whispering.

The instant the door closed, she snatched her hand off his head. Ajax looked up with the most enormous, wicked grin she had ever seen.

“‘Later. I’m not finished with you yet.'” He repeated it, savoring it. “Not bad, Princess.”

“Do not.” She pressed cool hands to her burning face. “Ever speak of this again.”

He laughed — full and warm. She did not tell him she liked the sound.

Getting the tincture, Ajax decided, meant bargaining, not buying.

“Find a maid who runs errands outside the palace,” he said. “Offer her an evening with me. She fetches your tincture. No royal name attached.”

“You would do that?”

“I’d do considerably worse.” He looked at his friend, and all the humor drained from his face. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him. Nothing.” The grin flickered back, gentler. “Besides. I’m told I’m very charming.”

They staged it for the afternoon maid, a nervous girl named Pel. When they heard her footsteps, Ajax pulled Dia onto the bed — and then somehow she was straddling him, chains pooled on the coverlet, his huge warm body bare to the waist beneath hers.

The door opened.

“We have to make it believable,” he murmured, his hands settling at her waist. “Breathe. You’re doing fine.”

She was not doing fine. She was acutely aware of the heat of him, the hard muscle under her hands, the strength in the fingers at her waist. He looked up with that hungry devotion.

But they were close now. And somewhere in the looking, the performance and the thing itself blurred.

His thumb moved against her waist. She did not think it was for the maid.

The door clicked shut. She started to climb off.

“Wait.” His hands held her. “She’s still in the doorway. Stay a moment.”

So she stayed. And felt his heart beating under her palm. And did not look at his face — because she did not trust what her own would do.

The tincture came two days later. And it worked.

They gave Hector the antidote at dusk. Ajax cradling his friend’s head in one massive arm with a gentleness that made Dia’s chest ache.

“He’ll live,” Ajax said quietly. “Thanks to you.”

“Thanks to us.” She looked at the two of them. “And because there was nothing left to do but wait.”

They talked.

“Why does your king hate us so much?” Ajax asked. Their backs were against the bed, Hector asleep beside them. “He hates us like a man hates something that was done to him. And I can’t work out what we ever did.”

“He was not always like this.” Dia’s voice was soft. “When I was small, he was kind. He read to me. He kept an injured fox we found in the gardens — and told me a king’s first duty was mercy.”

Her voice wavered.

“And then he changed. So slowly I almost did not see it. The mercy went out of him. It is as though something reached inside him and left a stranger wearing his face.”

“We’re not what you’ve been told,” Ajax said after a moment. He looked at Hector. “We’d die for the ones who are ours. Especially him. He carries the whole weight of our people and never asks to put it down.”

He nearly died coming here. My prin —

He stopped.

Prince, she thought. He nearly said Prince.

“I know he is worth saving,” she said quietly. “Both of you. Which is why — when he can run — I am going to get you both out of here.”

Ajax went still. “You’d do that.”

“I would.”

He had shifted closer without her seeing. “Most people know what’s right and do nothing because it’s hard.” He leaned in. “But you —”

Her eyes drifted closed. His hand came to her cheek. His thumb brushed her jaw. She tilted her face toward his.

“And what,” said a voice like cracking ice, “is happening here?”

They sprang apart.

Hector was awake. His pale blue eyes moving between them with a cold, dawning fury.

Ajax broke first, scrambling to his side. “You’re awake. You’re really awake. Gods, Hector, you’ve been burning up for days — I thought —”

“I asked a question,” Hector said.

Ajax flinched like a boy caught out by someone whose opinion mattered more than anyone’s in the world. “It’s not — she’s been helping us, Hector. You’d have been dead days ago if she hadn’t.”

Hector turned his head. He looked at Dia for the first time since he had woken.

She had been waiting for it. She had been braced for it. And still it hurt.

There was nothing of the auction stage in his gaze now. None of the confusion. None of the unwilling fascination. None of the desperate, fevered tenderness. He looked at her the way her father looked at the things he meant to be rid of.

She gathered herself. “I am glad you are feeling better. Does your wound still pain you? I could change the dressing if —”

“What do you want?”

Dia blinked.

“What do you want?” Hector’s gaze did not waver. “Ajax may believe you. He’s always been easily led by a pretty face. But I am not him. No one does anything for nothing — especially not your kind. So tell me plainly, Princess. What is it you want?”

Dia gaped. “Nothing. It just — it seemed like the right thing —”

“The right thing.” Hector said it as though the words were absurd.

“Enough.” Ajax turned to Dia, and to her surprise, the easy confidence was nowhere to be found. “Sweetheart, could we —” He stopped. “Could we have a moment? The two of us to talk alone.”

“Oh.” Dia glanced between them. “Yes, of course.”

Hector pushed himself up another inch. “You’re going to leave two enemy shifters alone together in a room while neither of us is so much as bound?”

Ajax’s grin came back. “She will. Because she’s nice. Have you heard of nice? It’s a thing some people are.”

“You are entitled to your privacy,” Dia told Hector quietly.

Hector’s gaze snapped back to her. “And would you say we’re also entitled to our freedom, Princess?”

Yes, she wanted to say. But the word lodged in her throat.

“Leave us,” Hector said.

Dia could hardly wander the palace at this hour, so she did the only thing she could. She stepped into the adjoining dressing room and pressed her ear to the gap in the door.

“Cannot believe you,” Hector said. “I’m out for two seconds and I wake to find you tangled up with the human princess like a lovesick pup.”

“I was trying to save your life.” Ajax’s voice was tight. “You were dying, Hector. Do you understand that? And Dia — she’s been bleeding herself dry to keep you alive. Why are you being like this?”

“Why am I —” A sharp, disbelieving breath. “Are you serious right now? Have you forgotten why we’re here?”

“Of course I haven’t forgotten.”

“Then keep your focus. And stop messing around with the first warm body that smiles at you.” A beat. Then Hector added, “It’s beneath you.”

Silence.

When Ajax spoke again, the swagger had drained entirely out of him. “Yes, Alpha.” A pause. “And you’re welcome, by the way.”

“Ajax —”

“No, truly. Your gratitude is as always overwhelming. Truly, I’m moved.”

“Fine.” Hector snapped. “I’m grateful. Are you content?”

“You don’t sound grateful.”

A groan. “What?”

“It was difficult getting that antidote. I’ll have you know. Required a great deal of personal sacrifice on my part.”

A beat of silence. “You slept with some maid in exchange for it, didn’t you?”

“No.” A pause. “Well. Maybe.”

The silence that followed was so complete that Dia held her breath.

And then — stripped of all the ice, all the disdain — came in a tone that she suspected very few people had ever been allowed to hear.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Ajax said softly. A pause. “Now.” Ajax added. “Thank Dia. She’s obviously listening at the door. She’s far too nice to actually leave.”

Dia clapped both hands over her mouth.

There was a long, eloquent silence from the other room.

The days that followed were, Dia decided, the strangest of her entire life. She was a princess of the realm with two enormous wolf shifters living in her bedchamber. She could not get rid of them — and she had not the faintest idea how she was going to get them out of the palace alive.

Beside, there was the tension between the two wolves. Hector and Ajax circled each other with a low, constant friction. Hector cold and withholding. Ajax needling him one second and going quiet and wounded the next. The two of them like a long-married couple in the middle of a quarrel neither would name.

“You stare at him a great deal,” Ajax observed one evening, sprawled against the wall, watching Dia watch Hector across the room.

Dia startled. “I — no —” She cleared her throat. “I am only checking whether the wound is healing well.”

Ajax grinned. “Well enough for what, though, sweetheart? Well enough to be your next bed slave?”

Across the room, Hector’s head came up. His pale eyes found Dia’s and held them.

The worst part was that she could not look away.

“No,” she croaked. “For the escape. So I know when he is strong enough to run.”

“The escape?” Ajax repeated, delighted.

Hector growled — low, short, aimed at the charged space between all three of them.

Ajax’s grin widened as though it confirmed something.

“I do not understand the two of you at all,” Dia said.

“No,” Ajax agreed cheerfully. “You don’t.”

She woke that night with a dry throat. The room was washed in thin blue moonlight. Dia slipped from bed and crossed the cold floor in her nightgown. Ajax was asleep in the far corner, sprawled and dead to the world.

She stepped around him toward the table where the water stood.

She did not hear Hector move.

One moment she was reaching for the carafe. The next — there was a hand around her wrist. Her back met the wall. And Hector was there, caging her.

“What do you want?” he said. “No performance. No audience. Just you and me. What do you really want from us?”

“Nothing.” Her voice came out steady. “I want to help you.”

“Why?”

“Because it is wrong — what is being done to your people.” She lifted her chin. “Because I have watched it for years and hated it and been too frightened to do anything. And for once — I can do something. That is all.”

Hector frowned. His pale eyes kept dropping against his will from her eyes to her mouth and back again.

“Stop it,” he said.

“Stop what?” she asked.

His thumb brushed across her lower lip. Slow. Disbelieving. As though his hand had stopped taking orders from the cold and furious part of him.

Dia’s whole body went still and warm and trembling at once.

For one suspended moment, they stood there. He swayed toward her. Dia’s eyes drifted closed.

Then he wrenched himself back as though she had burned him. He let go of her wrist. Stepped away.

“Stay away from him,” Hector said.

“From who?”

“Ajax.” His pale eyes glittered in the dark. “Whatever you’re playing at with him. Stop it. I mean it, Princess.”

Then he turned. Went back to his place on the floor. And lay down with his back to her.

Dia stood against the wall for a long time.

Dia had spent two days trying to think of a way to get them out. The outer gates were locked at sundown. Two enormous men — however cleverly hooded — would be marked by every farmer and patrol from here to the border.

Wolves, on the other hand, could run.

“It is the collars,” she said. “Everything else I can imagine a way around. If you could shift — you could be gone in a night.”

“But the king keeps the key,” Hector said.

“How would you know that?”

“Because that is where I would keep it. If I were a tyrant who wanted no man to free my wolves.”

Dia cleared her throat. “So we need the key off my father’s belt. Which means getting close to him.”

Ajax whistled low. Dia pressed her fingers against her eyelids. She did not know how.

Luckily, Fana swept into her chambers an hour later with an opportunity.

“Sister.” She pressed a cool kiss to Dia’s cheek. “One begins to wonder if she has lost you to her new amusements.”

“You were the one who told me a new slave required attention.”

“I suppose so.” Fana tilted her head. “Tell me something. Your golden pet spent an evening last week with a chambermaid named Pel. And on that same day, little Pel paid a visit to the apothecary by the south gate and purchased the specific antidote to a particular blade poison.”

Dia’s mouth went very dry.

“If I did not know you better, sister — I would think you were healing that wolf.”

“I wanted him alive,” Dia said. “He will die in his own time — when I am done with him. Not before.”

Fana studied her for a long moment. “How very practical of you.” She murmured. “But this gossip cannot stand, my love.” She took Dia’s hands in both of hers. “So I am going to help you. Tonight we dine with Father. You will bring both your slaves to court — and let the whole hall see that their princess has not gone soft on her new amusements.”

This was a test.

If Dia flinched even once, Fana would know. And that would be the end of Ajax and Hector.

“Of course,” she said, and made it warm. “I would be delighted.”

“Splendid.” Fana smiled. “Father has been so very pleased with you since the auction. Do not disappoint him.”

She was gone before Dia could answer.

“She knows,” Dia whispered to her shifter guests. “She means to corner me in front of the entire court and see what I do.”

“Or she means to put her enemies in one room with the king and watch what falls,” Hector said slowly.

“Either way,” Ajax said, “tonight is when we are tested.”

“Tonight,” Dia said, “is when I take the key off my father’s belt.”

Both wolves turned to look at her.

“It is our best chance. I rarely see my father. And without the key —” She looked at Hector. “You cannot run.”

Hector held her gaze. Then he inclined his head.

“I will need a distraction at the moment I lift it,” Dia said. “If he turns his head and feels my hand on the wrong ring —”

“He will not.” Hector’s voice was low. Certain. “We will give you the moment.”

They got ready for dinner. They dressed her like a queen — the wolves in their collars. She had to clip the chains to their throats herself and look them in the eyes while she did it.

Ajax led her without comment. Going to one knee and tilting his chin obediently. His warm eyes meeting hers when she fastened the lead.

Hector was harder.

He stood very still while she approached with the leash. His pale eyes never leaving her face. He did not kneel. He waited — made her come to him, made her reach up to his throat to clip the lead in place.

His eyes the whole time were burning.

“Princess,” he said. Very low.

Dia’s hands shook so badly she nearly dropped the chain.

“Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

His jaw worked. Then he went slowly to his knees. It looked like a king holding still beneath a coronation.

“All right,” Dia breathed. “We can do this.”

The hall was full to the rafters by the time they entered. Word had spread — the Princess and her two beasts at the king’s table. Not a courtier in the palace would have missed it.

Dia walked between her wolves with the leashes wound around her hands. The eyes hit her as she crossed the threshold — hundreds of them. She made her chin lift and her face perfectly cold.

Ajax played the part as easily as breathing. His golden head lowered just enough.

Hector walked like a man who had chosen to walk there. A wolf electing not to bare its teeth.

The courtiers nearest the door stepped back.

“Smile,” Dia hissed under her breath.

“No,” Hector replied pleasantly.

She gave up and walked.

Her father waited at the high table with a cup in his hand and Fana at his right. “My daughter — how magnificent you look. Come — show me what you have brought.”

She bowed and came up onto the dais. “My pets.” She let her voice carry. “I thought you would like to see them, Father.”

She sat at his left. Ajax knelt easily beside her chair, looking for all the world like a great golden hound at heel. Hector knelt on her other side.

The wine was poured. The food served. The court resumed its noise.

Then Hector shifted just slightly — his shoulder brushing her knee. The heat of him burned straight through her velvet skirts.

Dia made herself smile at something her father said. She had to play her part. So she settled her fingers in Hector’s dark hair and combed them slowly through the strands at his nape.

A long shudder moved through him. A small catch of breath only she could hear. His head tipped back — barely — into her hand.

Heat bloomed low in her belly. Sudden and shocking.

“He has gone tame for you,” her father observed. “After all that snarling at the auction. Remarkable.”

“He has learned what pleases me,” Dia said — though it sounded breathless.

Hector’s chained hand moved. Slowly. Hidden by the slope of the table. His fingers came to rest against her ankle — heavy and warm.

She drew her fingers slowly from his hair and rested her hand against the side of his throat above the collar. She felt him swallow against her palm.

Somewhere behind her, Fana had crossed to Ajax’s kneeling form.

“So — you’re the one keeping our chambermaids awake at night,” Fana said.

Ajax’s grin tipped up. “Famous, am I? Notorious, perhaps?”

“I should like to know what the kitchen maids find so compelling.”

“Whenever Her Highness pleases.”

There was something happening there — Fana’s silver voice and Ajax’s easy boldness. But Dia did not have the spare attention to track it.

Because Hector’s hand was moving up her leg.

“Dia.” Her father’s voice cut through the haze. She turned.

He was looking at her strangely. The expansive warmth had drained from his face. His eyes had gone flat and glassy. She had seen this before — him staring at nothing, lips moving around words not his own.

The episodes never lasted long. The servants had learned collectively to act as though nothing was happening until he came back.

“Father.” She said softly. “Father, are you well? Drink some water — here.”

Hector shifted — a small deliberate movement, his shoulder brushing her father’s chair. Just a slave settling his weight.

Her father’s glassy gaze drifted toward the movement. Slow. Incurious.

Now.

She leaned in, pressing the cup gently into her father’s hand, her hip brushing his side. Her fingers — under cover of pouring — passed briefly against the second ring at his belt.

The key was small. Cold. It slid free with a softness that astonished her.

She pressed it into her palm.

“Drink, Father. Please.”

He blinked at the cup. She did not look down at what was folded in her palm. She did not look at Hector.

“Forgive me.” Her father blinked. “I am tired tonight.”

“It’s all right, Father.”

She made her excuse and rose. She led her pets off the dais and across the great hall with every eye in the kingdom on her back. Her face was cold.

And hidden in the folds of her skirt was a small, cold iron key.

That night, she pressed her hand on the panel behind her father’s library. The wall swung inward on hidden hinges. Her father had shown her the passage once when she was nine. She had thought it was a game then.

“Well,” Ajax murmured, “you’re full of surprises.”

“After you,” Dia said.

The passage went down past the cellars. She stumbled on the uneven steps. Hector’s hand caught her elbow. Then — the moment her foot landed — he let go.

They came up into the old orchard through a hatch beneath an apple tree.

This was goodbye.

“Go,” Dia whispered.

Ajax turned to her. Hector did not. He had already moved into the shadow of the trees.

“Hector.” Her voice cracked on his name.

He didn’t turn. After everything — healing him, fighting for him, risking everything to free him — he couldn’t even look at her.

“Hey.” A warm hand came to her cheek, turning her face away from him. Ajax.

“Thank you,” he said softly. “There are not many like you in the world, Dia. Not human. Not wolf.”

Her eyes filled. The tears spilled anyway.

“And you are not what they say you are either,” she whispered. “I see that now. I wish I could do more.”

“You have done more than enough.”

Then he kissed her. Slow and warm and achingly real. And Dia let herself have it. Let herself pretend — just for these stolen seconds — that she wasn’t losing them both.

She gripped his shoulders until pain lanced through her chest. Rage and hurt and betrayal so visceral it stole her breath.

She pulled her mouth from Ajax’s with a shocked sound and turned her head.

Hector stood at the edge of the trees. His expression was carefully neutral. But his hands were clenched into fists. And something in his pale eyes blazed.

And in her chest — in that opened door place — she didn’t understand. The hurt was deafening. As though she were feeling his emotions.

Impossible as that was.

“Ajax.” Hector’s voice was too calm. “We are leaving now.”

Ajax let her go, stepping back reluctantly. “Right. Sorry, Alpha.” He looked at her one last time. “Take care of yourself, sweetheart.”

Then they were gone. Both of them. Swallowed by the dark.

She didn’t remember climbing back down through the passage. When she closed the door to her chambers, the room felt enormous. The rug where Hector had lain was still rumpled. The pillow on the chaise still held the shape of Ajax’s head.

She sank onto the edge of the bed and pressed a hand to that place in her chest where the pain had bloomed.

What was that? The feeling had been so vivid — and it hadn’t been hers. When Ajax kissed her, the desire had been her own. But that rage and hurt had felt like Hector.

And that was impossible.

Unless — she thought of the way Hector looked at her sometimes when he thought she wasn’t watching.

It didn’t matter now. He was gone.

A scream cut the air.

Her head jerked up. Then another — closer. And beneath it, the long rolling note of the alarm horn. Footsteps thundered in the corridor. Shouts. The clash of steel.

She crossed to the window on legs that felt like water. Down on the southern terrace, fire bloomed against the dark. By its light, she saw guards scrambling in disarray. And among them — something larger.

Several somethings larger.

Wolves.

A man on the terrace looked up and saw her lit in her window. He pointed. Shouting.

Dia ran.

Her slippers skidded on polished stone. Bodies littered the floor. A steward she’d known since she was small lay sprawled across a threshold. Don’t look at his face.

Behind her, she heard footsteps. Not boots on stone — but something softer. Padded.

She ducked behind a tapestry in the long gallery. Through the fabric, she could hear the wolves coming closer. She understood now what her father had meant when he called them beasts.

They didn’t need to see her. They could smell her.

The tapestry was wrenched aside.

Dia’s scream died in her throat as a hand fisted in her hair.

“Little human.” The accent bent her own tongue into something feral. “Do you know what your father did to my sister?”

“Please.” She whispered. “I didn’t do anything.”

His grip tightened — forcing her head back until her neck was exposed. She felt his breath against her throat. The scrape of teeth against her skin.

A snarl tore through the corridor.

It was not a sound a man made. Deep and resonant and absolutely furious.

The shifter froze.

Then something enormous slammed into him from the side. He was gone — torn off her, his hand ripping free of her hair so fast it took strands with it.

She crumpled to the floor, her legs refusing to hold her. When she forced her eyes open, Hector had the shifter by the throat — pinned against the wall with one hand.

His pale eyes blazed with a fury so cold it burned. And when his lips pulled back — Dia saw fangs.

“Vakran.” His voice was low and terrible.

“Alpha.” The man choked. “Alpha — I did not know —”

“Look at her.” Hector said. “Look at what you have done.”

Vakran sagged, his head dropping. “My Prince — forgive me. I did not know she was yours.”

“On your knees.”

Vakran went down in a way Dia had never seen a grown man go down. His neck folded.

“She is to be unharmed.” Hector’s voice was lower still. “If one of you even looks at her wrong — I will have your throat myself. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my Prince.”

“Go.”

Vakran went on all fours — his body rippling and reforming mid-stride.

Then Hector turned to her. Dropping to his knees. His hands hovering just shy of touching.

“Dia. Look at me.”

She was shaking so hard her teeth knocked together.

“Where did he hurt you?”

She couldn’t reply. His thumb came up and traced — feather light — the place on her scalp where Vakran’s hand had been.

“I am sorry.” He murmured. “No one touches you again tonight. I will kill them first.”

Something in her chest loosened.

“You came,” she said. It came out very small.

His eyes closed for a heartbeat. “Did you think I could walk away and leave you here? The moment the attack started — I felt your fear.”

“How?” Dia whispered.

“I cannot explain it.” He breathed. “But I would burn this kingdom to ash before I let anyone hurt you. Do you understand?”

“Hector —”

“Come with me.” He pulled her up. “Do not look at the bodies.”

He brought her to the lower council chamber. Inside was her father — bound to a chair, his crown on the table beside him. His face was empty. Glassy. Slack. His lips moved faintly around words she could not hear.

He did not register her at all.

“Father.” She broke from Hector and ran to him. “Father — please look at me.”

Footsteps behind her. The wolves dropped to one knee in unison.

The man who entered was tall and lean and dark-haired — with the same pale eyes and hard jaw as Hector. Ajax came in behind him.

“My son.” The older man clasped Hector’s shoulder. “Thanks to that passage — we took the inner walls without losing a wolf.”

Dia’s stomach went out from under her. Through the passage — from her childhood — she had saved them. And opened her father’s house to an army.

“Addis.” The Alpha King turned to her father. “Look at me.”

Her father’s lips moved. No sound came.

“Do you know me, brother? Twenty winters ago, we rode against the snakes together. You stood as godfather to my son.” His voice cracked. “And then one spring you closed your gates against us. And the next you took the first of my wolves in chains. And you never once told me what we did to deserve it. Speak, Addis. Tell me why.”

Her father did not speak. His eyes drifted slowly away.

The Alpha King looked down at him. Then he drew his sword.

“Please.” Dia screamed. “He is not even here — he cannot answer you —”

“Princess.” The Alpha King did not look unkindly at her. “Your father has signed the death warrants of seven thousand of my people. Whatever has been done to him does not undo what his hand has done.”

Ajax’s arms came around her from behind. He lifted her gently away.

“Close your eyes, sweetheart.”

She closed her eyes.

She heard the sword. A single clean stroke.

Dia made a sound she did not recognize. Her knees gave out — and Ajax took her weight without a word. She wept for her dead father. And for the father she had lost a very long time before him.

Dia awoke with her hands bound. The sash of one of her own scarves had been wound around her wrists with a careful tightness that did not bite the skin. Another — looser — kept her ankles to the bedpost. A third had been pulled across her mouth.

The palace seemed very quiet.

Then the latch clicked. And Ajax came in.

He stood in the doorway for a long moment, his big shoulders filling the frame, a careful, beaten look on his face.

“Hey, sweetheart.”

He closed the door behind him and crossed to the bed. She turned her face away.

“I know,” he said. “I know. I’d be furious with me, too.”

He did not untie her.

“I had orders.” He said low. “The bindings — the gag — that’s the Alpha King’s order. Not mine. Not Hector’s.”

He said the king’s daughter would be bound until he said otherwise. Ajax spread his big hands once. Helpless.

She did not look at him.

“There’s something else I owe you the truth on.” He drew a slow breath. “Hector and I let ourselves be taken at the auction. Sweetheart — the whole point was to learn the palace from the inside out. To find a way for the army to come through.”

Dia closed her eyes. She had known. Of course she had known. The Alpha King had said it last night in the council chamber — and she had understood it then.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Ajax said. “Princess — please. Please look at me.”

He waited. She did not.

“You saw what your father was. You saw what they did to my people. He had to be stopped.” His voice caught. “The gag was very tight.”

Her eyes filled. Ajax made a small sound.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

The door opened. The Alpha King came in. Hector came in behind him.

Hector’s eyes went to her at once — to the bindings, to the gag, to the wet on her face. And Dia watched something pass across his face. She could not read.

“Ajax.” The Alpha King’s voice was mild. “What are you doing here?”

Ajax rose at once. “I was making sure she’d come round. Sire.”

“The girl is a prisoner of war,” the king reminded. “One you were right to insist on taking, my son.”

The pale eyes turned to Dia.

“Sit her up.”

Hector moved before Ajax did. He crossed to the bed and slid an arm beneath her shoulders and lifted her up against the pillows — with a care that did not match anything else in the room. His hand brushed her cheek once, briefly, as though by accident.

“Princess.” The Alpha King came to the foot of her bed. He was very calm. “Your sister has declared herself Queen of your kingdom. As of dawn this morning, she has raised an army out of the southern provinces. And she has sent terms north on a fast rider. She wants you back.”

Dia’s eyes widened.

Fana had declared herself Queen. But she couldn’t — why?

Hector said very quietly, “Do you look surprised?”

She looked away.

“Answer him,” the Alpha King said.

Dia flinched.

“Father.” Hector said. “Scaring her is not going to make her speak any faster.”

The Alpha King’s pale eyes flicked to his son. They did not soften. But after a moment, he inclined his head. And Hector went down on one knee beside her.

His hand lifted to the knot of the gag at the nape of her neck.

“Dia,” he said softly. “Why are you surprised?”

She thought of Fana’s smile. The way her sister had orchestrated everything — the auction, the choice, the dinner, the test. The way she had pushed Dia toward the wolves again and again.

“Because Fana never wanted me to have a slave,” Dia whispered. “She wanted me to have those two. Specifically. From the beginning.”

Hector’s hand stilled on the gag.

“She pushed you toward him,” the Alpha King said slowly. “Toward my son.”

“She pushed me toward both of them.” Dia’s voice was hoarse. “She said I should have one. She said I should pick. And when I picked both — she let me. She helped me.”

The Alpha King was silent for a long moment.

“Your sister,” he said, “has been playing a longer game than any of us realized.”

He turned to the painting on the wall — the one of Fana and Dia in the garden. He stared at it for a long time. Then he paled.

“Father?” Hector asked.

The Alpha King did not answer. He stepped closer to the painting.

“Is that her?” he asked. “The sister.”

“Yes,” Hector said.

The Alpha King said a word in another tongue. A short, low, ugly word.

“Father — what is it?”

The Alpha King turned. He looked at Dia — and there was a kind of grim, sorrowful comprehension on his face.

“Yours have hunted mine,” he said quietly. “And yet your father adopts a shifter child.”

Dia stared at him. His words did not arrange themselves into any meaning at all.

“What?”

“Of course she is.” The Alpha King said. “I knew her mother. She looks exactly like her — down to the green of the eye.”

“I do not understand.” Dia whispered.

The Alpha King straightened.

“Hector. Ajax. With me. Now.”

“Father —” Hector looked at Dia.

“Now, my son. We have miscounted the board badly. The girl on this bed is not the prize — she is the bait. The new Queen is not riding north to rescue her sister. She is riding north to draw us out — where she can finish what her mother started.”

His voice hardened.

“Is that clear?”

A long pause. “Yes, Alpha,” Hector said — very low.

He looked at Dia the way he had looked at her across the orchard last night — when the door in her chest had opened.

“I will come back,” he said. Barely audible.

Then he was gone. And Ajax was gone. And the Alpha King’s footfalls were gone. And the door closed behind them with a small, dry click.

Across the room on the back wall, Fana smiled down at her.

EPILOGUE

Dia awoke to a cold hand stroking her hair.

For one warm, half-dreaming moment, she thought it was Hector. Then she smelled something sweet — that did not belong in their tent — and her eyes flew open.

Fana sat on the edge of the cot.

“There you are.” Her voice cracked. “I have been so frightened. I have not slept since they took you. I raised half the South in a fortnight, Dia.”

Dia’s throat closed. Then she noticed — beside her, despite the noise, despite the intrusion — Hector did not stir.

He lay deep and still. His breathing slow.

Cold dread closed over her heart.

“What did you do to him, Fana?”

“Nothing he will not wake from.” Fana’s hand found Dia’s face. “Come home with me. I have a horse. A clear road south. A kingdom that is yours.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I cannot lose you too. I have lost everyone. Mother — father — everyone I have ever loved.”

Dia took her sister’s shaking hand in both of hers.

“I cannot,” she whispered.

Fana flinched. “Because of them? They are monsters, Dia. They killed our father.”

“Our father was gone long before they came.” Dia made herself say it. “I know what you did to him, Fana. I know what you are. I know about your mother — and the war.”

She watched her sister go white.

“He destroyed my people.” Fana’s voice broke. “I was five. I watched them burn.”

“The wolves did that,” Dia said. “But they are not monsters.” She pressed her sister’s hand to her wet cheek. “You loved Father — the real one. The one who took you in. Who read to us. Who was kind — before either of us understood what your powers did to him. I know you loved him. Stop chasing war, Fana. Choose kindness instead.”

For a long moment, her sister was utterly still. Behind the green of her eyes, Dia saw the frightened child who had decided revenge was the only safe thing left.

“At least talk to me,” Dia said. “Meet with me. Let us see if there is a way to peace. Please — I am still your sister.”

Fana looked at her a long time. Then her gaze drifted past her — to the sleeping man on the cot — and the way Dia’s body curved protectively in front of him.

“You love him?”

“Yes.” It was the easiest word Dia had ever spoken. “With everything I am. I love him. He is mine.”

Something in Fana’s face went soft and sad and almost glad. Then it changed. All at once, the grief tucked away like a blade going back in its sheath. She tilted her head — and her red-rimmed eyes lit with something almost playful.

“And the other one?” she asked, light as anything. “The golden one — unconscious by your tent. What of him?”

Dia frowned. “What other one?”

Fana’s smile curved. “Don’t be coy, sister. I have eyes.”

Dia’s stomach dropped. “Ajax. Did you hurt him? Fana — did you hurt him?”

She heard how shrill it came out and could not stop it. Because if Fana had — there would be no meeting. No flag. No peace. Hector would tear the South apart stone by stone and never look back.

“Well, I did have to get past him, didn’t I?” Fana snorted. “Relax. He sleeps. He is far too pretty to kill quickly — that one.”

Dia did not like the way she said it.

“The meeting,” Dia pressed. “Will you come?”

Fana rose and drew her cloak around her.

“For you,” she said very low. “I will come.”

Then she was gone. And Dia stood in the empty tent with her face wet and her heart in pieces — grieving her sister.

She went out.

Ajax lay sprawled in the grass, fast asleep, entirely unharmed. She dropped down beside him and pressed her hand to his warm cheek and breathed.

Neither he nor Hector would wake for hours. So she sat between them in the gray hour before dawn and waited.

There was still a war. Still the old wound behind Fana’s eyes. But there was hope.

And for the first time in her life, Dia did not feel alone.

Some bonds were fated. Some were chosen.

Hers were only beginning.