SHE TOOK HER SISTER’S PLACE AT THE ALTAR—BUT THE MONSTER ALREADY KNEW HER NAME

Evelyn’s fingers shook violently as she reached up, unpinned the lace, and let the veil fall to the stone floor.

She braced herself for his rage. She expected him to strike her, to unleash his dark magic, to transform her into stone where she stood.

Instead, Alaric stopped dead in his tracks.

The glowing black veins across his neck pulsed softly. His singular visible eye widened, and the cold, terrifying demeanor he wore shattered. In its place was something raw, haunted, and deeply human.

Recognition.

"You should not know my name," Evelyn whispered, her voice trembling. "I have never left Briar Glen."

"I knew your name long before your village began calling me a monster," Alaric said softly.

He reached into his heavy coat. Evelyn flinched instinctively, but Alaric merely pulled out a small, tarnished copper object hanging from a thin leather cord.

It was a pendant shaped like a simple crescent moon.

Evelyn’s eyes went wide. The chapel around her seemed to spin.

Eighteen years ago, when she was just an eight-year-old girl exploring the outer woods, she had come across a terrible wreckage. A noble carriage had overturned and caught fire in the ditch. Inside, a young boy lay trapped beneath burning timber, screaming for help.

While the adults in her village ran away in fear of the dark magic surrounding the vehicle, little Evelyn had crawled through the shattered, burning window. She had pulled the boy out into the snow, nursing his burned hands and staying with him in the dark until heavily armed men arrived to retrieve him.

Before they took him away, she had taken her own cheap copper moon pendant—the only thing her grandmother had ever given her—and placed it into his bleeding palm. “Take this,” she had told him. “It will keep you from being afraid.”

The next day, her father had told her the boy died of his injuries.

"You..." Evelyn breathed, staring at the scarred man before her. "You were that child."

Alaric slowly closed his monstrous fingers around the copper moon, his claws clicking against the metal. "And you were the girl who walked into a inferno for a stranger whose face you had never seen."

Evelyn took a shuddering breath, trying to process the revelation. "Then why did you do this? Why demand my family's ruin? Why did you demand my sister?"

"I didn't," Alaric said.

He reached down and spun the ancient marriage ledger around, sliding it across the obsidian altar toward her.

Evelyn looked down at the glowing golden text.

Written at the bottom of the ancient parchment, dated eighteen years ago on the very night of the fire, were two distinct signatures in dark, unmistakable ink: her father’s elegant script and her mother’s precise hand.

“In exchange for the cancellation of the Hollowspire land debt, five thousand gold sovereigns, and total immunity from the mountain's wrath, we, Marcus and Sarah Vale, pledge our firstborn daughter, Evelyn Vale, to the Master of Hollowspire upon her twenty-sixth birthday.”

Evelyn felt as if the air had been violently sucked from her lungs.

"No..." she stammered, shaking her head in total denial. "No! The priest read Clara's name! The choosing ceremony—"

"The choosing ceremony was a farce created by your father," Alaric revealed, his voice darkening with quiet fury. "Your parents placed Clara’s name on every single slip of paper in that bowl tonight."

"Why?" Evelyn cried out, tears finally breaking past her dark eyelashes. "Why would they do that?!"

"Because they knew you," Alaric replied softly, taking a step toward her. "They knew that if they told you that you were sold at eight years old, you would fight. You would question them. You would run. But they also knew that if they made you believe your beloved younger sister was condemned... you would willingly lay down your life to save her."

The truth struck Evelyn like an physical blow.

Every piece of her miserable life suddenly clicked into place. Her father keeping her trapped in the apothecary. Her parents sabotaging every suitor who had ever tried to court her. The eerie calm in her mother’s eyes when Clara’s name was announced.

Forgive us.

They hadn't been weeping for Clara. They had been executing a plan eighteen years in the making.