Fated to the Lycan

Rosalind Marlowe kneels against the apothecary wall at the Stone Gate and packs a gash in a Lycan boy's ribs. It is a crime. No human healer touches Lycan flesh without a writ from the palace, and she has watched what the patrols do about it. The boy whispers that they shot him with silver. Silver arrows are outlawed in Thornwood. His mother presses a pouch of coins into Rosalind's hand. *"Take it and forget you saw us."* Rosalind does not forget. She carries the silver straight into the conscription yard, where a guard named Harker is reading names off a list to a crowd of families pressed against the iron railings. One of those names is her younger brother's. Tobias Marlowe is standing in chains. *"His name is a mistake,"* she says, and holds out the pouch. The bribe almost works. Then a shout goes up at the palace gates, and the whole yard drops to its knees for Prince Sebastian. He asks her why a healer has silver at a conscription gate. She could lie. She looks at the raw marks the cuffs have left on her brother's wrists and doesn't. *"I did what was right. If that's a crime, then chain me next to my brother."* Sebastian releases Tobias to the palace forge under Master Ironwood. Then he takes Rosalind inside, where the Lycan council rules on what a human who bribed a guard and treated a Lycan without a writ is worth: one moon cycle serving as palace healer, at the end of which her brother's case goes to the full council. So a commoner with burn scars crawling from wrist to elbow moves into a palace built to eat people who are not careful. Morgause Ravenscroft, the king's counselor, wants her own daughter on the throne. The rogues raiding the border are her creatures, funded through shell accounts and her husband's old trade connections, and their leader has plans for Thornwood Palace that end with ashes. Every scrap of evidence Rosalind digs up gets turned around and driven into Tobias instead. And there is Sebastian, who tells her, quietly, *"I had a brother once. He died in the conscription camps."* What grows between a human healer and a Lycan prince in that palace is not safe for either of them. It gets less safe when he bites her to keep her alive, and something that was never hers before starts answering from inside her chest. A fantasy shifter romance of palace politics, conscription lists and a bond neither lead asked for. The romance is closed-door.