The king hurled a crib across the nursery, and it smashed against the far wall with a deafening crash. I stood frozen, two weeping princes clinging to my skirts, their screams matching the roar of the man I’d once believed was my savior. A year ago, I was just a wolfless servant girl up to my elbows in filthy dishwater. They said I was worthless, cursed, less than nothing.
But when the queen abandoned her newborn sons and no nurse, healer, or wet nurse could stop their relentless crying, it was my hands that calmed them. My voice that soothed them. The twins, Veto and Theon, chose me over everyone, and for one perfect year, I felt chosen. Now King Tristan was dragging them from my arms, his eyes filled with rage and disgust.
“Get your filthy hands off my sons,” he snarled. The boys screamed for me as I was dragged away. Three days later, I snuck back to comfort them, and he had me thrown in the dungeon. At dawn, I was to be hanged for treason.
I was thirteen years old. I curled up in the corner of my cell, waiting to die, wondering how I’d been so stupid. The king had never been kind. He’d never saved me.
I’d built a fantasy around a man who didn’t exist, and now I would die because of it. Then I heard it—soft padding and tiny whimpers from the shadows. Two small wolf pups, impossibly young, had found their way into the dungeon. They were the princes, my princes, shifted into their first forms far too early, and they had come to save me.
I can’t explain how they knocked the keys from that stool. I can’t explain how they dragged them to my cell. But they did. And with their help, I escaped the palace and ran north with the pups in my arms, hunted by the king’s wolves and guards.
I thought I was taking them to their mother. I had no idea that I was about to discover who I really was. “Those are the king’s sons? ” the old rogue wolf asked after he saved us from the trackers.
He was huge, scarred, dangerous, and I had no reason to trust him. But he hated the king almost as much as I’d begun to. His name was Bram. He promised to walk us to the river crossing.
He ended up staying for weeks, teaching me to hunt, sleeping curled around us to keep us warm. When the king’s soldiers found us, he took a poisoned blade meant for me. We stumbled into the queen’s army camp with Bram bleeding out and the pups whimpering at my heels. The queen herself ran to us, fell to her knees, and gathered the twins into her arms.
“My babies,” she sobbed. “You’ve come back to me. ”
Then she looked at me. Her face went white.
She cupped my cheeks and asked my name. When I told her, she pulled me into an embrace and kissed my forehead, weeping harder than she had over her sons. I didn’t understand. I was just a servant.
I didn’t understand why the queen looked at me like I was precious. But she did, and she promised I was safe. Later, when I snuck out to check on Bram, I hid by the tent and heard her voice. Bram was demanding to know what would happen to me.
“She’s just a kid,” he said. “I could take her. Take care of her. ”
The queen’s answer stopped all sound.
“That’s very kind of you to offer, truly. But it’s one I cannot accept. Josie will stay here with me. ”
“Why?
”
“Because she is mine. Josie is my daughter. ”
The world tilted sideways. I sank against the tent wall, unable to breathe as she told Bram the truth.
I was born without a wolf. King Tristan was my father, and when he discovered I couldn’t shift, he called me defective and demanded I be killed. The queen begged for my life, offered to give him pure shifter pups if only he would let me live. He agreed, but he took me from her, hid me away in the palace kitchens, and made her a prisoner in her own home for twelve years.
For twelve years, I lived floors below my mother, and she wasn’t allowed to speak to me. She endured one miscarriage after another. She gave him the twins. And still he refused to let her see me.
When she tried to flee with all three of her children, he arrested her for treason and sentenced her to death. Loyal servants helped her escape. She gathered an army and declared war—not for the throne, but for her children. For me.
“Is it true? ” I asked her when I finally emerged from the shadows, tears streaming down my face. She nodded. “You have to stop him,” I said.
“For Paula, for everyone he’s hurt. ”
“I will. I promise. ”
Then she opened her arms, and I fell into them.
In the days that followed, Bram healed slowly. The twins finally shifted back into their human forms, and I watched them play in the grass outside the queen’s tent, chasing butterflies and tumbling through the sunlight. Bram and the queen grew closer, exchanging quiet looks over the pups’ heads that made me smile. One evening, we sat together as the sky turned gold and pink, a small, broken, impossible family finally whole.
Bram held Veto against his chest. Theon slept in the queen’s lap. I lay on the blanket, watching the stars wheel overhead. The war for the throne would come tomorrow, and King Tristan wouldn’t surrender easily.
But tonight, for one perfect moment, I wasn’t a worthless servant or a rejected princess. I was exactly where I was meant to be.
