If there was one thing that I’d get out of if I could, it’s the annual Claiming ceremony.
When I canceled last year’s, I gauged the reaction of the society. If no one gave a shit, maybe there wouldn’t be another Claiming ceremony next August or the one after that. The Owed could get hitched if they wanted, and the Offerings could choose their own partners instead of being picked and chosen and Claimed in some twisted ceremony.
The branding-in I understood. If you don’t get the Order’s mark on your palm, are you really a member? That part I could deal with. Watching young women line up like cattle, hoping someone would select them and that I would fuckingblesstheir union… I hated it.
I couldn’t get around it.
The Order of the Owed was founded around two hundred years ago by Bas’s great, great, I don’t know how many greats, great grandfather, Samuel Reynolds. Back then, the bigoted assholes were worried about shit like ‘good breeding stock’. They wanted the powerful families in town to intermarry, and whenthe society began to grow, the women were raised from the cradle to be doting brides. It’s one of the main tenets of our charter. The Owed get the Offerings, and only a year into my reign as King, I wasn’t changing that.
So here I am. I tell myself that my stomach is churning due to the August humidity and the stink of burning skin surrounding me as a new crop of members accept the Order’s brand on their palms. The truth is that I see too many fresh-faced eighteen-year-old kids prepared to enter an arranged marriage with an Owed. Some of them are new members; others are older Owed who waited to make their choice before the thirty-year-old deadline. Whenever an Offering’s name was called by the officiant of the ceremony, it was up to me to approve a pairing—with the understanding that, unless I needed to pick a suitor in the case two Owed went after the same Offering, I would—and I wanted nothing more than to come up with an excuse to wrap the ceremony up so that it was over.
And then, as it was finally drawing to an end, my phone rang, and the world as I knew it was never going to be the same again.
The hospital smellslike industrial cleaner, burned coffee, and the undeniable scent of sickness. It thrums with fear and worry, and my back goes up the second I step off of the elevator on the fifth floor.
I’m not surprised. I fucking hate hospitals. They’re where people come to die—or to find help so that theydon’t. The fluorescent lights are too bright, the floors too shiny, and every other person I pass looks like they’re holding their breath, waiting for the universe to decide if it’s going to ruin them today or tomorrow. No one here expects miracles.
Except for me.
I shove my hands into the pockets of my hoodie and keep walking like I belong here.
Because today? I do.
Because her name is on the tip of my tongue like a prayer I don’t deserve to say out loud, though it’s been reverberating around my skull from the moment that Loni called me as I was plotting how to escape the Claiming ceremony, asking me if I knew a Ms. Wright.
Lucy Wright.
I didn’t believe it at first.
Not when Loni’s voice came through the phone, controlled and careful as she explained that the Fortress had received a call from a patient advocate at St. Luke’s. Not when she said the wordhospitalandMs. Wrightand the rest of what she explained to me started to blur. Not when I stumbled away from the ceremony, holding my phone in my hand as Sebastien and Annaliese tried to flag me down while they were standing near his Porsche.
They’d been there to watch me agree to let Annaliese’s sister, Miranda, be Claimed by her high school sweetheart, Colton. Bas called out to me as I passed them by, but I was too stunned to answer.
Luckily, Iwassmart enough to find the basic two-door sedan I used when I didn’t feel like showing my upgraded truck off. Once my ass hit the seat, I called Adrian, giving him a heads up that Lucy…
Lucy…
She was hurt.Hurt. She needed help, and I called the number that Loni took down from the patient advocate to get as much of the story myself as I could.
She was hurt because shefell, and even if it’s been five years since she lived in Harmony Heights, she married an Owed.Women tied to the Order don’t just fall. They’re pushed, and the similarity between Lucy’s accident and what happened to my mom all those years ago… yeah. It’s probably a good idea that Adrian’s no-nonsense voice cut through the noise in my head, ordering me to head to the Fortress instead of driving straight to St. Luke’s.
The last I knew, Lucy was living in Grandview, a small town in fuckingCalifornia. Across the country from Harmony Heights, Julian Fairchild took her as far away from me as he could. On Jack’s orders, of course. He claimed that there were business opportunities on the West Coast, that he wanted to establish a satellite office for the Order in California, and he just so happened to pick Lucy’s husband to head that project.
For my own sanity, I had to let her go. I’m not Adrian. When Loni left, he knew he would one day get her back. He plotted and he waited and he worked for that moment. Me? Lucy rejected me and I… I let her go. I had to.
It was the biggest fucking regret of my life.
Compared to Cali, St. Luke’s is local to Harmony Heights. About forty minutes away, nearby the largest airport in the state, I have no idea what Lucy was doing so close to home.
Unfortunately, neither does she…
I parked my car in the parking deck a block over from the Fortress. The Order owns the lot, and I claim two front spots: one for the sedan, one for my truck. Leaving them behind, I paced the lobby until I saw Adrian’s ride idle at the curb. If I was going to the hospital, so was he, and here we are.
I bark out Lucy’s name when I reach the reception desk. A nurse points me toward a hallway without even looking up. The clipboard in her hands is more important than my face, and that’s fine. We might be in Harmony Heights, but we’re close enough that there’s a chance someone in this place might recognize the King; the black spade tattooed on my neck and thebrand on my palm makes it hard to hide who I am. I don’t want that. The less attention, the better.
So I’m wearing my boots, jeans, and a black hooded sweatshirt. Not my cousin. Adrian walks beside me in one of his crisp thousand-dollar suits.Unlike me, he appears calm. Professional. Like this is a business meeting instead of the moment my entire life either claws itself out of the grave—or I prepare to join my Dandelion in one.
“Room’s not far,” he says quietly.
