When My Mate Tortured Me Before Discovering I’m Royal

Three days after I saw Giselle smiling at my tray, I stopped being able to lift the big stockpot.

My arms felt like wet sand. My tongue felt thick. When Martha asked me to pass the salt, it took me a full breath to understand the words.

"Sit down, girl," she muttered. "Before you fall down."

I didn't sit. Sitting got you noticed.

I was wiping the long prep counter when the jasmine came. Heavy. Sweet. Too much of it, like always.

Giselle walked past me without a word. That alone should have warned me. She went straight to the stove, where a silver sauté pan sat on the back burner. The pack used silver pans for one reason. Wolves couldn't steal from them.

The pan had been heating for ten minutes. Empty. Smoking a little at the edges.

She looked over her shoulder at me.

Then she pressed her whole right palm flat against it.

The hiss filled the kitchen. Her face twisted. Her lips pulled back from her teeth. But she held it there. One second. Two. Three. Long enough to make it count.

Then she tore her hand away, clutched it to her chest, and ran for the dining hall.

"Help me! She burned me! Sydney burned me with silver!"

I stood there with an empty rag in my hand. My brain moved so slowly. *What did she just do?* I thought. *Why did she just do that?*

Then I understood.

Under pack law, attacking a wolf with heated silver is not a fight. It is attempted murder.

The dining hall exploded. Chairs scraped. Someone shouted. A plate shattered. Pip backed into the corner by the sink, white as milk. Martha set down her ladle very carefully, like any sudden move might set something off.

The door crashed open.

Callahan didn't walk in. He came in like a storm. Gold eyes. Shoulders swollen. Ash so close to the surface that the air around him felt hot.

Giselle stumbled in behind him, sobbing. She held up her hand. The palm was blistered and black in the center, a perfect red circle around the edges.

A perfect circle.

I made myself speak. My voice came out thin and slow, like it was traveling through water.

"Look at her hand, Callahan."

He didn't.

"It's the palm," I said. "Flat. The whole palm. If someone pushed silver at her, it would hit the back of her hand. Her arm. Her face. She pressed it. She held it there."

"Cal," Giselle wept. "She grabbed my wrist. She was so strong. I couldn't get away."

"My hands are empty," I said. "Look at them. Look at the pan. It's still on the stove."

For one second, his eyes moved. Toward the stove.

Then Giselle cried out, high and broken, and he snapped back to her like a dog on a leash.

He walked to the hearth.

The long silver poker hung on its iron hook. The one Martha used to stir the coals. He took it down and pushed it deep into the fire.

The kitchen went dead silent.

"Alpha," Martha said. "Alpha, please—"

"Out," he said. Alpha tone. She flinched like she'd been slapped. But she didn't leave. None of them did. They couldn't. He hadn't told them where to go.

I watched the rod turn red. Then orange. Then a white so bright it hurt to look at.

I thought about running. My legs wouldn't even shift my weight.

He pulled the rod from the coals and crossed the kitchen.

"Callahan." I looked straight into his eyes. "You know me. Five years. You *know* me."

His jaw jumped. Ash howled behind his eyes. I saw it. I saw his wolf throw itself against him.

He grabbed my right arm and spun me around. He hooked my collar with two fingers and tore it down off my left shoulder.

The heat touched me before the silver did.

Then the silver did.

The sound was the worst part. A loud, wet sizzle, like meat dropped in a pan. Every wolf in that packhouse heard it. I knew they did. Upstairs. In the hall. In the yard.

The smell came next. My own skin. Burning.

My jaw locked so hard I heard my teeth creak. My whole body jerked. My knees buckled. My vision went white at the edges, then black, then white again.

I didn't scream.

Over his shoulder, I saw Giselle. Her wet eyes were wide and waiting. Hungry. She wanted that sound. She wanted it more than anything.

I gave her nothing.

Callahan pulled the rod away. Some of my skin went with it.

He was breathing hard. His hand shook. He dropped the poker on the stone floor, and it clanged so loud that Pip jumped.

"Cellar," he said hoarsely. "Lock her in."

"Should I get Clara?" one of the guards asked.

A long pause.

"No."

---

The cellar door slammed. The bolt slid home.

It was black down there. It smelled of potatoes and wet earth. I crawled until my good shoulder hit a sack of onions, and I curled around it.

My left shoulder screamed for me. It throbbed with my heartbeat. Every pulse was a new burn. I didn't touch it. I knew better. Silver wounds don't close. They just eat.

I waited for the tears.

They didn't come.

I waited for the grief. The heavy, aching grief I had carried since the night of the ceremony. The one that sat on my chest every morning before I opened my eyes.

It was there. But something was happening to it.

It was going hard. Like wet clay left out in the frost. Like a wound scabbing over with ice.

For five years, I had loved a man who could do this.

No. He wasn't the man I loved. He never had been. I had loved a story I told myself while I stitched his bracers and cleaned his blood.

I pressed my cheek to the cold dirt floor and stared into nothing.

*Remember this,* I told myself. *Remember the sound.*

Far below the pain, far below the wolfsbane, in the deepest dark of me, something cold opened one eye.