Isokle’s eyes glittered, she get what she wants.

Our attention…

“Do you think she told me that?” Sheughed, a low, cracked sound. “I don’t need the story, Luna I only need the instructions.”

“Which were?” Alfonso again, relentless.

“Touch the Lycaon’s blood to the fen,” she said, calm as a prayer. “Bring me a drop, a handful, a summer’s river if you can. The more you bring, the more beautiful you will be. The longer you will wear your borrowed skin.”

“Did you- Monica began, then stopped, breath catching.

Isolde looked almost bored. “No,” she said. “Not then. Not at first. I did not need to bring her blood to pay the first bill. I paid with errands. I paid with lies. I paid by standing in a library with the Executioner and making him believe a story about himself that he wanted to believe.”

I felt the blownd where it always did in me–on the tender ce that still grieved for the man he had been, the boy who had knelt on winter stone. “Franco knew,” I whispered.

“Franco did not know how deep the fen is,” Isolde said. “He thought he had hired a pretty knife. He did not realize he had hummed a witch’s name to the air and the air had a good memory.” She looked past me, as if seeing around me the shape of the man we both knew. “I did not, either. Not at first.”

Audrey exhaled, a hiss of air. “So you seduced a king to pay a witch.”

Isolde’s lip curled. “Don’t tter me or him. I seduced a man who hadn’t been looked at without fear in ten years. I warmed myself at his fire and told myself I was the one feeding it.” She shrugged, and for the first time I believed she truly did feel a small, sour pity—for herself, perhaps, for the girl she had been. “And then the war came. And then Totti died. And then the boy with the gold eyes cut the mirror’s throat and went home alone.” She lifted her chin. “Séverine did not ask for blood then. She is not impatient. She said a feast tastes better the second day.”

Alfonso’s jaw tightened. “So when did she ask? Because she did ask, or you wouldn’t be here. You don’t still look twenty, and you don’t smell like spring.”

That almost made meugh, the ugly humor of truth. Isolde took it without a flinch.

“After,” she said. “Years after. The Lycan had be a king and a ghost. The wolves had learned to tell their children two kinds of bedtime stories–one where he saved them, one where he came to eat them when they lied. I left. I chased other rooms. I learned that nothing tastes like the table you left behind. The dress began to pinch.” Her mouth went hard. “I went back to the fen.”

“And she sent you again,” I said softly.

“She sent for me,” Isolde corrected. “That is different. The water peeled back like lips and the reeds whispered my name. Séverine smiled. She said: Now. She said she would make the youth fit again if I brought her my

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original price. A drop. A mouthful. A cup. A bowl.” Isolde’s gaze burned. “I told her I would bring her a river”

“Francesco,” I said, and the sybles were ash and vow and love.

Isolde’s face did not soften. “Lycaon,” she said. “Names change, blood does not.”

“So you came back,” Audrey said. “You came back to finish the debt.”

Isolde turned her head and looked at Audrey the way a cat looks at a sword. “I came back because I wanted the dress to fit again.” She paused, and something flickered across her mouth–faint as gnats, gone before I could swat it. “And because…” She stopped herself, shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Want is a hallway with too many doors.” fne982 This content belongs to find?novel/fne982

“Because what?” I pressed.

For once, the mask slipped without calction. She looked at me, woman to woman, cruelty subsiding into something like truth. “Because it is hard to leave a ce where you were almost loved,” she said, very quietly. “Even if the person was a fiction you built.”

Silence. Even Audrey did not breathe.

Isolde blinked hard, annoyance at her own softness snapping the mask back into ce. “In any case,” she said briskly, “I came. I made a mess. I paid part of what I owed. Not with blood–that trick with the wolvesbane was mine, not hers. Mother Séverine prefers cleaner lines.” She tilted her head. “But she is impatient now. She can smell his blood even when he is not in the room. Your King has made himself conspicuous again.”

“How?” Alfonso asked.

“By being seen,” Isolde said. “By eating with his wolves. By opening windows.” Her mouth twisted. “By letting his Luna put flowers on a table in a house that was cold for so long it forgot how to breathe.”

Monica looked at me then, eyes wide, as if to say your rosemary woke the old things. I shook my head. “No,” I said aloud. “My rosemary told the living toe back. The dead are angry because they have to make room.”

Isolde shrugged. “Dead, not dead–words. Séverine is neither.” She leaned forward slightly, expression sharpening. “Do you want to know the worst of it?”

Audrey’s de whispered a warning against its scabbard. “You’re still here to gloat. That is the worst of it.“”

Isolde ignored her. She spoke only to me. “The price for youth was not just Lycan blood,” she said. “That was the crown jewel. The rest…” She smiled, terribly calm. “The rest was feeding Séverine the girls who wanted to be me.”

“Gods,” Monica breathed, hand to her mouth.

I felt the cold all the way to my teeth. “The missing girls,” I said. “The ones Henri’s pack whispered away and called runaways.”

Isolde looked bored again, as if the conversation had run out of toys. “Some ran. Some were taken by rogues. Some were swallowed by fen. It’s all the same from where you sit, isn’t it? They’re gone.”

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“No,” I said, and my voice was so steady it scared me. “It is not all the same from where I sit. It never will be” I leaned forward, every word a beadid on a string, “What does she want now, Isolde? A drop? A river? A sea?”

Isolde watched me for a long time, the me of something like respect guttering and ring and guttering again. Atst, she smiled like a woman watching a wave she knows will break.

“She wants a name,” she said. “True and old. The one that unlocks the promise your ancestors wrote and then hid.”

“What name?” Alfonso demanded.

Isolde shook her head once. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be in your pretty ward, Luna. I’d be at the fen wearing a younger face.”

“Then what do you know?” Audrey snapped, patience gone.

Isolde’s eyes slid to mine again, and the chill there was a hand around a throat. “I know she sent others when I failed,” she said softly. “Men with knives that don’t shine. Women who look like widows. Birds that are not birds. I know she will keep sending them until the window stands open and the blood spills like wine into her water. I know she hates your King because he reminds her of the first one who refused to kneel.”

“And me?” I asked, before I could stop myself.

Isolde’s smile sharpened. “She does not hate you. Not yet.” She cocked her head. “She is interested. She does not like new pieces on old boards.” Her gaze skimmed me like a hand finds a hidden de beneath fabric. “White Wolf.”

The room seemed to constrict around those two sybles. Audrey went as still as a statue. Monica’s fingers tightened on my sleeve. Alfonso’s gaze flicked to the door, calcting how sound travelled in this corridor, how fast a rumor could run.

I did not flinch. “Go on,” I said.

“Séverine thought Lycan was enough,” Isolde said. “She did not ount for a wolf like you. Old and bright. Youplicate the recipe.” A glint of malice lit her eyes. “She likesplications. They make better stories. They taste better when she eats them.”

I let the insult slide by; truth mattered more than her need to stick hooks in my skin. “What else?”

Isolde leaned back against her pillows, suddenly very tired. “That’s all,” she said. “For now. If I think of more, I’ll tell you. I like hurting kings.”

Alfonso’s mouth curled. “You like thinking you still matter.”

Sheughed, and it was an ugly, honest sound. “That too, Beta.”

I stood. The chair scraped stone, loud and human in a room that had held too much inhuman.

“Monica,” I said, never taking my eyes from Isolde. “Double the ward guards. Move two of Marlow’s men to the south corridor. No one enters without my voice or the King’s. No one.”

“Done.” Monica said, healer’s calm restored by orders she could fold into her hands.

“Audrey,” I said. She was already beside me. “We tell Francesco. Now,

Alfonso winced, a little theatrical. “You promised to protect me.”

“From his temper,” I said, and I couldn’t help the sideways smile that tugged my mouth. “Not from the truth”

We turned for the door.

“Luna,” Isolde called, sweeter now, the voice she’d used in a thousand rooms to make men look back.

I did not turn, but I let my head tilt enough that she knew I was listening.

“Ask your King,” she purred, “what name his father whispered when he died. Not his son’s…. The other one. The one that tasted like old storms. If he tells you, you’ll know where to find the fen.”

My heart tripped.

Damn it!

I walked out without answering–past Monica’s fierce set face, past Alfonso’s coiled readiness, past Audrey’s quiet boiling anger–and into the corridor, where the air at least had the decency to be ordinary.

We didn’t speak until the door was closed and thetch set.

Alfonso exhaled, long and low. “Mother Séverine,” he said, as if spitting out a thorn. “I had hoped that was a story.”

“Most of the dangerous things are,” Audrey said.

I pressed the heel of my hand to my brow for a moment, steadying the churn inside. Mika paced, not with fear, but with the restless need to move toward a threat you can smell but not yet see.

“Find Marlow,” I said to Alfonso. “Tell him everything you can without saying my name with Isolde’s in the same sentence. He’ll want to fold this into the border watch.”

“And you?” he asked.

“I find Francesco,” I said, already turning toward the training field, heart pounding not with dread but with a fierce, bright certainty. “He needs to hear this from me.”

“And the name?” Audrey asked quietly at my side as we walked. “What she said at the end?”

“The other name,” I said. The words tasted like iron and sea on my tongue. “We’ll ask him together.”

We stepped out into sunlight. The ng of steel rose to meet us, clean and honest. Across the packed earth, Francesco turned at the change in the air–he always felt meing–and the pride I saw in his eyes was a thing that steadied the world.

We will not be prey, I told the part of me that still remembered coldkes and rooms that locked. Not to

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witches. Not to rumors. Not to the past.

Behind me, in a ward that smelled of rosemary and iron, a woman who had made herself a lurey back and closed her eyes. Somewhere far south, water shifted beneath reeds, listening for a name.

And through it all, the old stories stretched, woke, and turned their faces toward us.

The dress of youth does not fit forever.

But truth–if you keep pulling its thread–always leads you to the hand that sewed it.

I took a breath, squared my shoulders, and went to my King.

Why was everything always involving magic?

I thought when Anastasia gone with Luca dark magic, there is no more magic, but now…. Seems like I am

wrong.