Chapter 1 The Spare

They told me at four in the morning.

Not gently. Not with apology. My father walked into the room where the seamstress was already pinning me into my sister's wedding dress - a dress I had spent three weeks ironing on my knees - and said seven words.

"Mira refused. You leave at first light."

That was it.

No explanation. No sorry. He didn't even look at me when he said it - he spoke to the space slightly above my left shoulder the way he always did, as though direct eye contact with me required an effort he preferred to spend elsewhere.

I had nineteen years of practice absorbing that particular brand of dismissal.

So I stood still and let Hana drive her pins into the waist of a dress built for my sister's body and I did not make a sound.

Mira was waiting in the corridor when I walked out.

She held out a small silk pouch. "Sleeping herbs", she said. " For the journey."

I looked at my sister - really looked at her, which I rarely let myself do because it cost too much - and I saw it before she could hide it.

Relief.

Not guilt. Not shame. Pure, clean relief that it was me in this dress and not her.

I walked past without taking the herbs.

The carriage was black with no insignia.

I climbed in alone. The door shut like a lid closing over a coffin.

I knew what waited at the other end of this road.

Alpha Caius Dravhen. Cursed. Feared.

The man whose last bride candidate had been found at the forest's edge three days after arriving - breathing, eyes open, but completely hollow.

Whatever had made her herself had simply been removed, the way you remove a flame from a candle.

She had been one of the most powerful she-wolves alive.

I was nothing. The spare daughter. The one nobody looked at.

I told myself that was fine. You couldn't be afraid of losing a life that had never really been yours.

I was three hours into the dark when the carriage stopped without warning.

Not slowing. Stopped abruptly. A hard lurch. Silence outside that didn't belong to nature.

Then the curtain moved.

And a voice - low, unhurried, the voice of a man who had never needed volume to command a room: "Ashveil sent me the wrong sister."

I turned.

He was on a black horse just outside the window. I couldn't see his face clearly in the dark - only his eyes.

Gold. Cold. And the curse markings on his hands, black and cracked and faintly glowing, climbing his forearms like something alive.

He wasn't asking. He was stating a fact, the way you note an error in a ledger.

Every instinct I had told me to look away. Submit. Make myself small.

I met his eyes instead.

The look on his face changed. Something that looked almost like surprise - the kind that only happens to people who stopped expecting anything unexpected a long time ago.

He let the curtain drop.

The carriage moved again.

I pressed my fingers to the side of my neck without thinking.

The skin there was warm.

Burning, almost.

As though something had already begun.