Chapter 2: The Cage They Sold Me In

TEN YEARS EARLIER. I was thirteen the day I stopped being a person. The rogue market ran out of a canyon in the badlands, and I was chained to a post in the dirt with a collar so heavy I couldn't lift my chin. The slaver who owned me was fat and slow and cruel, and he decided that afternoon that a girl who covered herself was a girl putting on airs. "Take it off," he laughed, and grabbed my shirt. "Please—" I screamed. "Please, don't—" Every other slave in that pen covered their eyes. Nobody covers their eyes for a stranger. They do it because they can't watch it happen again. Then a hand closed on the slaver's shoulder. Kael Blackthorn kicked him thirty feet into a produce stand. Draven Blackthorn crouched in the dust in front of me, in a coat worth more than my entire life, and pulled off his gloves. "Elara." He said my name like it was already precious. "Look at us. You're safe." "No one is ever going to touch you again," Kael said. "Take our hands." I did. They told me I wasn't a slave. They told me I was the lost daughter of the Alpha King, stolen as an infant, and that they had been hunting for me for years. I believed them the way drowning people believe in air. My father took one look at me — bare feet, borrowed cloak, the collar scars still on my neck — and curled his lip. "I hear you were a slave. Disgraceful." He didn't come down from his chair. "Someone like you doesn't deserve to be a princess of the North." Selene sat beside him in red silk, thirteen years old and already smiling at me like a cat with a wing in its mouth. "Educate her," my father told the elders. "Have her study Selene. Let her learn what a highborn female looks like." Then he left me alone in a hall the size of a cathedral. Kael came and put his hand on my hair. Draven opened his palm, and violet light braided into a chain, a single blood-red gem hanging from it. "We had this made for you," he said. "From today, we're your family." I cried so hard I couldn't speak. I just nodded and nodded. They pulled me out of hell. For ten years I thought they were my salvation. Then I turned seventeen, and my father told them the truth: to be King, one of them had to marry me. And everything soured. There was a night I still can't say out loud. I woke to Draven's hand around my throat, slamming me into my own bedpost, his eyes black with rage. "You drugged us?" he snarled. "You drugged us, Elara?" "It wasn't me—" I choked. "It was Selene, she was afraid of being sent away, she set it up herself—" "ENOUGH." Kael's voice cut like a blade. He caught my chin, turned my face up, and looked at me with a contempt so total it hollowed me out. "Don't drag her name into your filth." Then, softly: "You want us that badly? Fine. We'll give you what you want." He threw me onto the bed. "A girl who was owned should be used to sharing a bed with more than one man." I screamed that I hadn't done it. Draven put his hand over my mouth. The candles guttered. The bed curtains fell. They never believed me. And I never fought them — because as long as I was useful to them, they'd keep me. Even like that. PRESENT DAY. I stood in the great hall the morning after my ruined wedding, and across the floor Selene held court with a ring of highborn females, all of them looking at me and giggling behind their rings. "No wonder they've always loved me best," Selene said, pitched perfectly to carry. "She used to be a slave," one of them said. "Goddess. Filthy." I dug my nails into my palms until my hands ran red. Nothing had changed. Nothing would ever change. To Kael and Draven I would always be the barefoot girl in the dirt, and Selene would always be the pure, precious, untouchable princess. That night, the summons came anyway. Two words, in Kael's handwriting. The cabin.