Hazel
I have always wanted Varder since I was thirteen years old.
I know how that sounds but we can't help when love happens.
I knew Varder.
Not the way the court knew him. Not the way the pack leaders knew him or the elders or the servants who watched him ride out of these gates six years ago with his jaw set and his eyes already somewhere else. I knew him the way you knew someone you had been watching since you were old enough to understand what watching meant. The way he moved through a room. The way he spoke — rarely, deliberately, each word placed like something valuable. The way his eyes assessed everything and revealed nothing and made you feel, when they landed on you for even a second, like you were the only thing in the room worth assessing.
I had dreamed about those eyes.
I am not ashamed of that.
I had spent years dreaming about the man those eyes belonged to and planning and waiting and positioning myself with the careful patience of someone who understood that wanting something was not enough. You had to make yourself into the thing that thing wanted. So I had done that. Quietly. Methodically. Over the years I had made myself into exactly what a prince returning from war would want to come home to, I had kept my virginity for him, rejecting all the other losers who asked me out.
I was beautiful. I knew how to move and how to speak and how to enter a room. I had cultivated relationships with the right people and distanced myself from the wrong ones and I had watched the royal family with the focused attention of someone studying for the most important examination of their life.
I had done everything right.
And then my sister stumbled over a tray of goblets and Varder stood up from the royal table and everything I had years building collapsed in a single afternoon.
She was a destiny -spoiler, one would think that with all of her misfortunes, things would go bad for her, but it only went better, when everyone knew ava was wolfless you would think she would be abandoned, you thought wrong, everyone gave her more attention and looked upon her with compassion and pity. And now she spills a drink and gets all the attention once again? Not on my watch.
I want to be clear about something.
I love Ava.
I know that is a complicated thing to say given everything. I know what I did and I know what it cost her and I am saying this without apology because apology would require regret and I have examined what I feel very carefully and regret is not what I find there. But I love her. She is my sister and I have loved her my whole life and those two things — loving her and doing what I did — exist in me simultaneously without contradiction because love and want are different countries and I have always been better at want.
Ava is good. She has always been good in the specific way of people who absorb everything and complain about nothing and keep their spine straight while the world uses them as a surface to wipe its feet on. I have always admired that about her and been faintly irritated by it in equal measure. There is something almost accusatory about that much quiet dignity. It makes everyone around it feel their own deficiencies more sharply.
She cannot shift. She has never shifted. She is twenty years old and wolfless and she has carried that the way she carries everything — quietly, completely, without letting it show on her face.
And Varder claimed.
Varder, who could have had anyone. Varder, who had just returned from six years of war radiating the specific dangerous energy of a man who had been remade by something enormous, stood up from the royal table and crossed that arena and killed a man and claimed my wolfless, disgraced, tray-carrying sister. I was crestfallen, was he blind or something? I had shifted since I was fifteen years old, a rare age to be a shifter and he didn't once gaze upon me.
I stood near the royal table and watched it happen and I felt something move through me that I am going to be honest about because dishonesty at this point would be pointless.
It was rage.
Not the hot impulsive kind. Something colder and more total than that. The specific rage of someone watching years of careful work be undone in sixty seconds by someone who didn't even know she was undoing it. Ava had not positioned herself near the royal table. Ava had not cultivated the right relationships or studied the royal family or made herself into anything deliberate. Ava had been carrying a tray of goblets and stumbled and Varder had stood up and that was all it had taken.
Six years against a stumble and a tray of spilled goblets.
I stood near the royal table with my hand pressed flat against my sternum and I watched my sister be claimed by the man I had spent six years making myself into the right woman for and I breathed through it and made my face neutral at the people around me who were watching my face and I filed everything I was feeling into a place where it could be dealt with later.
Instead of the bitch to"Instead of being grateful for the honor of being claimed by a prince, she cried. She stood there and cried like it was a tragedy instead of the greatest fortune that could befall a girl from a disgraced family.
she snatched away the man who has given me wet dreams since I was a teenager, the man whose thought made my panties drenched with love juices.