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“I hate you.”

A bell jingled as the shop door opened, but I ignored it to turn the tattered page of my book , even though I knew the next sentence by heart. I knew every paragraph in this book. Neither that nor the potential customer was a good enough reason to hunt down a ribbon.

In three months, none of this would matter anyway.

“Hate me all you want, Karra. It doesn’t make you any less mine.” Azaras released my chin, trailing his hands down my throat past my collarbones—

“Nessa!”

I yelped and dropped the book. My tabby cat, Beans, hissed as the leather-bound hardcover nearly smacked into her. In a flash of brown-black stripes, she disappeared between the shelves. The book skittered across worn wood and bumped against the cerulean skirts of a petite woman with plaited red hair. Her hand rested over the curve of her rounded belly.

I stared. My brain reluctantly pulled itself out of The Soulborne Queen and took in my pregnant sister.

Aislin raised her eyebrows at me expectantly.

It took me a second, but I figured it out.

“Shit.” I pushed from the chair and nearly tripped over the blanket I’d thrown over my legs for warmth. “What time is it?”

“Time to go.” Aislin tried her best to appear stern with me, but a grin cracked her heart-shaped face. “When you didn’t show up for breakfast, I knew I’d find you lost in a book. Thank the godstars I convinced Donal to come check on you.”

“I would’ve remembered.”

“The harvest starts in ten minutes.”

“Well... yes.” My hands went straight to my head. My hair was in a simple braid instead of a neat plait, but I didn’t have time to change it. “I might have been late.”

I lowered my hands. It would do. Patriarch Meallán might be aghast, but he already kissed the star on his pendant every time we crossed paths. I couldn’t compete with Aislin anyway, not in piety and certainly not in beauty. Being four months pregnant had somehow only enhanced her glow.

“We’re definitely going to be late if we don’t leave now.”

I grabbed my shawl off the peg by the door leading upstairs to my tiny loft. “Yes, ma’am.”

On the counter, a days-old loaf of half-eaten bread and a block of nearly molding cheese lay wrapped in an old cloth. It would have to last until my next stipend in two days. Some weeks, I had enough. Others, I stretched what little I had, trading meats and cheeses for porridge and stale crusts. I only ever had enough to feel full. Not that it made a difference. My body clung to every ounce, a cruel joke played by flesh that reveled in betrayal.

I tucked the bundled food into one deep pocket of my shawl, my book into the other. The coarse wool scratched at my neck as I pulled it over my shoulders. My hand drifted down the fabric, fingers snagging on a rip near the hem. My throat tightened. I prodded the tear’s frayed edges. Another hole. Another patch to sew. As if the thing wasn’t already more stitches than cloth.

Aislin looked away, her thumb rubbing the taffeta cloak that brushed her shoulders like a cloud. My stepmother had always stitched a jewel into each of her children’s cloaks, as all the richer Maboni did with harvest clothes. Since marrying into the Milligan merchant family, my sister probably carried a year’s earnings in her linings alone.

Mine carried old cheese.

Before pushing into the outside air, I twisted and cooed into the shop, toward a pair of slitted, yellow eyes peeking between a shelf. “Bye-bye, Beanie.”

“Goodbye, Beans,” Aislin called, waving at my cat. The glow of her eyes disappeared. My sister snorted. “She’s never forgiven me for leaving.”

I’ve never forgiven you for leaving. But I forced a laugh and linked arms with my sister as I stepped through the doorway.

Sunlight flared into my eyes. I blinked and squinted. Red-bricked row houses with shops on the ground floor and lofts above twisted to my left and right, a maze of streets in the town’s center. Everything had a slight white tinge to it as my vision adjusted. Godstars, it was bright today. I hadn’t noticed from inside our—no, my —shop. A narrow sliver served as the only window, but I still hadn’t bothered lighting the hearth or the lamps this morning. There was no reason to waste wood or oil on a day no one shopped.

It helped that I had grown used to the chilling gloom years ago. My stepmother used to warn me I’d be as blind as my father if I spent too much time reading in dim rooms, but she’d stopped chastising me the day I moved out of her house. Just like she stopped commenting on my weight, my quiet personality, or my nonexistent marriage prospects.

We didn’t really speak much at all anymore, truth be told.

“We’re going to be late, Aislin,” Donal said the instant we stepped outside. My sister’s husband returned his pocket watch into the blue of his waistcoat, his handsome face twisted into the usual grimace he wore in my presence. I bet the man had noted the time to the second when my sister ventured inside Books & Bows to find me.

“How are you, Donal?” I asked, trying to smile pleasantly at him.

Trying being the operative word.

Donal’s family was wealthier than most, but he walked around with the pride of a prince. I had disliked him instantly and grown to hate him more during his short courtship with my sister.

When they were newly engaged, Aislin had invited him to see her latest creation. The elaborate wedding gown had a gossamer chiffon train, just as the mayor’s daughter requested. His only reply was that she’d wear something far nicer at their own wedding.

Aislin hadn’t sewed or embroidered anything since then.

She didn’t need the income, but the sister I remembered always had a needle in hand. It was why I had turned the bookshop into a hybrid dressmaking boutique for her fifteenth birthday. The joy in her smile at the realization was seared into my mind.

I missed that sister sometimes.

“Not well, Nessa.” Donal stepped closer and wrapped his arm around my sister, tugging her from my grasp. Aislin went with her eyes downcast. “We risk joining the harvest if we’re late.”

I stared down my nose at my brother-in-law, but tried my damnedest not to make it a glare. He already hated that I was two inches taller than him.

I failed miserably.

With a sharp look, Donal set a brisk pace toward town hall, practically pulling my sister along with him. “Unlike you, some of us care about the purity of our bodies and our souls.”

I flinched. I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t looked directly at my shop’s front window, but with Donal’s words, my gaze drifted back. While I had inherited the shop from my mother’s aunt, my father managed the property as I had no husband. He had placed the ‘For Sale’ sign in the window a week ago without word or warning.

I had closed up early that day and lost myself in a book. Anything to push the dread from my mind of the path I’d chosen.

Not that anyone chose to become an Azarasian blood thrall.

But I hadn’t tried to avoid it.

Even if I had, I wouldn’t have succeeded.

As if summoned by the thought, a spike of agony flared through my core. I had grown used to the dull throb of my ailing body over the last decade, but stress always made it worse. Sweat beaded on my brow instantly, my skin going clammy in response. I clenched my fist, but kept pace at my sister’s side as we weaved through the shop-lined streets to town hall.

If I ignored the pain, I could almost forget it was there.

“How are you feeling?” I asked my sister, my voice perfectly level.

“Well enough. My feet and my back ache, but every time she kicks, it makes it all worth it.” Aislin rubbed a hand over her belly, a soft joy in her eyes. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

“I’m sure she’ll be perfect.” I squeezed her hand. I’d never meet my nephew or niece. Aislin wouldn’t deliver for at least four months and I turned thirty before the next harvest in three.

“We don’t have time to chat,” Donal snapped.

“Even if we arrive on time, Donal, we could still end up in the harvest,” I said. “Your cousin was never late.”

Donal shot me a glare with his beady eyes. “Don’t talk about my cousin.”

I repressed a scoff. Since his cousin was selected for the harvest last year, Donal acted like he was the only one who had ever lost a family member. Every human in Mabon was haunted by a loved one who was neither dead nor alive, their fate forever unknown. According to rumors, some of the harvested survived decades, but a vast majority did not.

Half didn’t survive the first week.

I shuddered. It was easier not to think of it. I’d spent too many nights wondering if my mother lived. Two decades after she was harvested and sometimes I still found myself asking the question.

Thankfully, the stout brick building that was Corraidin Town Hall came into view at the next intersection. I did not want to continue this conversation. I counted down the seconds until I could return to my shop. There wouldn’t be any customers even after the harvest. Everyone would either be at home celebrating or at church mourning. It was one of the few afternoons I allowed myself to curl up in my chair and dive into a good book without guilt.

I had read The Soulborne Queen countless times before, but I would devour it again today. Once I became a thrall, I doubted I would read another book again.

The town hall’s clock tower struck twelve.

I stiffened. Each strike of the clock kicked my heartbeat up a notch. A cold sweat drenched my neck. My lower belly flared in pain. I’d attended dozens of harvests, one a quarter since long before I could remember, but I’d never overcome the fear. No one in their right mind could.

“Come on, Nessa,” Aislin said, grabbing my hand and dragging me into the crowd before the stairs leading to town hall’s front square.

Donal strutted through the space like he owned it, leaving Aislin and me to scurry behind in his wake. I peered over the heads around me—the only benefit to being taller than most human men. I didn’t know where Donal was heading, but I searched for the red of my stepmother’s hair. She was likely near the middle. Any closer to the back and we’d be jostled by runners. Any closer to the front and we’d have too good a view into the harvested’s terrified expressions.

But when I spotted the flash of her elaborate red plaits, it was near the front.

Of course. A too good view into the harvested’s terrified expressions was exactly what my stepmother wanted. She wouldn’t look away from confirmation that her precious godstars loved her more than our neighbors. If They didn’t, surely she or a loved one would have had their name called by now.

Patriarch Meallán always picked a spot close to the front for the same reason.

Sure enough, the next family we wove around revealed the patriarch. The yellow thread in his white satin robes was a poor imitation of gold in the sunlight. It was much more convincing when the sky was its normal dreary shade. His hair had thinned from the last time I saw him, his beard more white than brown, but he wore both neat and trimmed. He spoke lowly with his eldest son while his wife listlessly bounced a toddler on her hip. She was heavily pregnant, dark circles under her lowered eyes.

Eileen. Or was it Eireen? I never remembered.

I never wanted to remember.

Familiar nausea twisted my belly at the sight of them. I couldn’t even blame it on my illness. Patriarch Meallán’s first wife of thirty-five years was selected for a harvest a couple of months before I turned nineteen. By then, my fertility results had long been public.

My stepmother framed it as if the patriarch would be doing the godstars’ good work by marrying me. He had already met the birth quota six times over and had only recently lost his wife, after all. It’s his godly duty to save your soul, Nessa, she’d claimed. The godstars will bless Their loyal servant’s union like They did mine with your father. If you pray, perhaps They’ll grant you a fourth or fifth child with the Patriarch by your thirtieth birthday. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

To this day, whenever he looked at me, I heard an echo of her words and had to resist hurling.

If I hadn’t adamantly refused the match, would that be me at his side instead of Eileen? Would my eyes be that dull and lifeless? Would I be nothing but a vessel for the patriarch’s children, the quota fulfilled but my fate just as miserable?

“Oh, Aislin, thank the godstars you arrived on time.”

Spine stiffening, I stopped when Donal and Aislin did, turning away from the patriarch and his wife.

My stepmother rushed forward and pulled her daughter into her arms. Deirdre Halloran never went outside without looking her best, and the harvest was no exception.

If my sister and Donal were one matching set, then my stepmother, my father, and their four younger children were the other. With her slight frame and bright eyes, Deidre looked like a doll in her yellow skirts. The matching doublets my father and teenage brother, Orrin, wore were a hideous mustard color that didn’t complement the reddish-brown hair the three of us shared. Saraid, Finola, and Urrick were in a brighter shade like their mother, though Urrick’s tunic was already mud-speckled.

I was the obvious outsider. In my patched shawl, deep green kirtle bodice, and off-white skirts, I looked more like their maid than they did my family. It didn’t feel right to call them my family, but there was no other word for them. They were mine and they weren’t. My stepmother hadn’t tried to hide the fact since I chose my doomed path and moved into the bookshop’s poorly insulated loft.

I quickly kicked the thought back into the crevices of my mind before it could settle and ruin this already-terrible day.

“ Books & Bows isn’t that far from town hall, Mother,” Aislin said.

“You know that doesn’t matter to the Azarasians.” My stepmother eyed me disdainfully. I loomed over her, wider in every way, from my shoulders and breasts to my hips and thighs. I was never more aware of my size than when I stood beside Deidre. “How selfish of you to risk your sister’s life, Nessa. Is that truly what you want your last act to be?”

Aislin flinched. “She’s not dying, Mother.”

“She might as well be,” my stepmother said. “Thralls will never see the godstars’ light, as marred as they are.”

“Mother.”

“It’s alright, Aislin,” I said. “Deidre speaks the truth.”

My stepmother flinched at my use of her first name, but she didn’t reprimand me. She likely counted down the days until she never had to see me again.

I was doing the same.

“I might meet my end on an Azarasian’s fangs in three months. I might live for decades, trapped within their castle’s walls. Either way, I’ll be thoroughly defiled.” A decade of anger rose in me, but I didn’t bother holding it back. Not anymore. “But there’s one benefit to dying a blood whore, stepmother, and it’s that I won’t have to spend my afterlife with you.”