Chapter 7: The Taste of Forbidden Blood

The combat ring dissolved into chaos. Men shouted, guards surged, and somewhere a horn blared a victory note that felt like a lie. I stood in the center of it all, my borrowed sword dripping with the blood of the last challenger—a hulking brute who had laughed when I’d drawn steel. He wasn’t laughing now. Neither was I.

The crowd’s roar was deafening, but all I could hear was the ragged, wet sound of Aric’s breathing from the royal dais. I didn’t wait for the formal declaration. I shoved through the press of bodies, past the stunned councilors, and up the steps to where the King lay slumped in his throne.

“Out of my way,” I snapped at the royal physician, who was already dabbing at Aric’s gray lips with a cloth. The man flinched but didn’t move.

“My Queen, the King’s condition is—“

“I said *out*.”

My voice cracked like a whip. The physician stumbled back. I dropped to my knees beside Aric, my bloodied fingers finding his wrist. His pulse was a drumbeat gone wrong—stuttering, skipping, fading. The poison was deeper than I’d thought. It was eating him from the inside, wrapping around his heart like a vine.

“He has hours,” I whispered. “Maybe less.”

The physician’s face went pale. “We’ve tried every antidote in the royal stores. Nightshade, viper’s bane, even the elixir of the moon priests. Nothing—“

“I didn’t ask what you tried.” I looked up, my eyes cold. “I asked you to leave.”

The command in my voice was absolute. The physician fled. The guards shifted uneasily, but no one dared defy the woman who had just killed three of the realm’s finest warriors in single combat.

Aric’s eyes fluttered open. Even in his agony, they found mine. “You… shouldn’t have.”

“I had to.”

“No.” His hand, trembling, reached for my face. His fingers were ice. “You should have let me die. The contract… it binds you to a corpse if—“

“Shut up.” My voice broke. I caught his hand in mine, pressing it to my cheek. “You don’t get to die, Aric. Not after you saved me. Not after you gave me that blade.”

His lips curved into a ghost of a smile. “A weapon… doesn’t make you a warrior.”

“No.” I leaned closer, my forehead nearly touching his. “But love does.”

I saw the shock in his eyes before they rolled back, his body going limp. The monitors in the room—enchanted crystals that tracked his vitals—began to flicker. The light was dying.

I made a decision.

“Guards.” My voice was steel. “Clear the hall. No one enters the King’s chambers until I say otherwise. Understood?”

They hesitated. I rose, and even though I was smaller than all of them, I had blood on my face and death in my eyes.

“*Understood?*”

They moved.

I dragged Aric’s body—no, *his living weight*—down the corridor to his private chambers. The door slammed behind us, the lock clicking into place with a sound like a tomb sealing.

I laid him on the bed and looked at the dagger he’d given me. It hummed with a strange energy, the blade glinting in the candlelight. The spell he’d cast to save me had been blood magic. Forbidden. Ancient. And it had cost him nearly everything.

Now it was my turn.

I pulled the dagger across my palm. The pain was sharp, clean. Blood welled up, dark and thick. I pressed my bleeding hand to Aric’s chest, over his heart, and I began to whisper the words I had never spoken aloud. Words I had learned in secret, in the shadows of my father’s library, in the margins of books that were supposed to have been burned.

*“By blood and bone, by shadow and stone, I call the poison forth. What was taken by night, I return to light. What was sown in hate, I reap with fate.”*

The air grew cold. The candles guttered. Aric’s body arched off the bed, a scream tearing from his throat—a sound that was not entirely human. Black veins crawled up his chest, converging on my hand. The poison was fighting me. It was *alive*.

I gritted my teeth and pushed harder. More blood. More words. The pain in my palm was nothing compared to the agony in my soul.

*“I give my life for his. I give my breath for his. I give my blood—"*

Aric’s eyes snapped open. But they weren’t his. They were molten gold, burning with a light that was ancient and terrible. His voice, when it came, was not his own. It was deep, resonant, like the grinding of mountains.

*“You dare.”*

I froze. The words were not a question. They were a judgment.

“Who… who are you?” I whispered.

The thing inside Aric—the *presence*—stared at me through his eyes. “I am the last of the old gods. I am the wolf that howled at the first moon. I am bound to this line, and I am *dying*.”

My blood ran cold. “Dying? But you’re… you’re his wolf.”

“I am his curse.” The golden eyes flickered with something like sorrow. “And I have been dying for a thousand years. Every king who wears the crown, every Alpha who takes the throne—they feed me, and I drain them. We are one. And when I die, he dies with me.”

The candlelight flickered. The presence receded, and Aric’s eyes fluttered closed again. His breathing steadied. The poison was gone—purged by my blood, my sacrifice. But I had seen the truth.

The wolf inside him was a god. A dying god. And the poison that had nearly killed Aric… it wasn’t meant to kill him.

It was meant to kill the god.

I stumbled back, my hand still bleeding, my heart pounding. Someone out there knew the king’s secret. Someone wanted to sever the bond between man and wolf. And if they succeeded…

Aric would die. Or worse, he would become an empty shell, a hollow king with nothing inside.

I looked at the dagger in my hand, still slick with my blood. I had saved him tonight. But tomorrow, the poisoner would try again. And I didn’t know who to trust, who to fight, or who to kill.

I only knew one thing for certain.

I was the contract queen. And I was falling in love with a dying god.

The door burst open. Aric’s brother, Prince Dorian, stood in the doorway, his face pale with fury.

“What have you done to him?” he snarled.

I didn’t answer. I just looked at Aric, still unconscious, still breathing, and I smiled.

“I saved him.”

Dorian’s eyes blazed. “You’ve damned him.”

And in that moment, I realized—the poisoner wasn’t an enemy from outside the castle.

It was family.