Knotting Sleeping Beauty (Knotty Fairytales #6)

PROLOGUE

Once upon a time, because all the best stories start that way, a princess was born.

She came into the world screaming. Her parents, King Alaric and Queen Elara were overcome with joy. The kingdom celebrated for seven days and seven nights. There were feasts and fireworks.

Her name was Rosalind. Rose, to those who loved her. And everyone loved her because she was perfect. My warrior princess, her father called her, beaming.

Everyone loved her except one.

Isadora had been many things to King Alaric before she became his enemy.

His lover. His confidante. The omega he kept hidden away in the west wing for years while his advisors scoured every noble house on the continent for a suitable queen.

She’d warmed his bed. Whispered in his ear.

Rearranged her entire existence around a man who treated her like a secret.

When he chose Elara, younger, noble-born, sweet-faced, perfect Elara, Isadora didn’t scream, weep, or cause a scene.

She smiled. She curtsied. And she walked out of that palace with her back straight, her chin high, and her heart rotting black behind her ribs.

Then she waited.

Patient as poison.

On the night of Rose’s naming ceremony, Isadora walked into the great hall uninvited. Draped in black silk. Smelling of burned roses and old fury. The kind of anger that had years to fester into something thick and toxic.

The guards reached for their swords. Alaric stepped in front of the cradle. Elara clutched her daughter to her chest so tightly that the baby cried in protest.

Isadora didn’t touch the child. She didn’t need to.

She simply spoke.

When the princess presents as omega, and she will, Alaric, she has your blood coursing through her veins, her first heat will swallow her whole.

It will burn her from the inside out, a fire no alpha can quench.

She will fall into a sleep so deep that not even your armies, your gold, your pathetic kingly powers will wake her.

And there she will stay. Forever. Burning and sleeping and never finding relief.

Consider it a taste of what you did to me.

The silence that followed was absolute. You could hear the candles flicker. The only sound was Elara’s tearful breathing and the baby’s confused whimpers.

But Isadora hadn’t counted on Miriel.

The old woman stepped forward from the crowd. Small, silver-haired, wearing a cardigan that had seen better decades. Miriel had been the royal family’s fairy for three generations. She couldn’t undo Isadora’s curse, but she could bend it.

The princess will sleep, Miriel said, her voice calm. But not forever. There is one alpha, her fated mate, who will be able to reach her. His scent alone will call her back from the dark. And when she wakes, the curse will shatter.

Isadora’s evil smile turned into a sneer. She stared at Alaric with eyes that could melt steel.

Then I hope he exists, darling. For your daughter’s sake.

She vanished into a cloud of smoke and the lingering scent of burned roses.

And for the next twenty-one years. Rose was kept inside the palace. No unmated alphas were permitted within a mile of the grounds. Her food was tested, her rooms warded, and her every move monitored. She lived in a beautiful, suffocating, golden cage.

And on the morning of her twenty-first birthday, her heat hit like a boulder.

She made it two steps toward the door before her legs buckled.

The last thing she heard was her body hitting the marble floor.

The last thing she saw was the gilded ceiling of her bedroom, spinning.

Then darkness came. Warm, thick, endless darkness. And a burning that never stopped.

The king sent out the call. To every unmated alpha in the kingdom, in the neighboring kingdoms, on the goddamn continent who thought he might be the one, who’d heard the legend, who wanted glory or the crown.

They came in droves. Princes. Warriors. Dukes.

Second sons with ambition. Commoners with delusions.

They climbed the tower, opened the door to her room, and all staggered back out within seconds, shaking and wrecked.

Her scent of omega in perpetual heat, concentrated by years of sleeping in a sealed room, hit them like a storm.

It overwhelmed their senses, scrambled their brains, and drove them to their knees.

Not one of them could get within ten feet of her bed.

Because none of them were him.

Years passed. The thorns grew. No one planted them; they erupted from the base of the tower one morning, thick and black, with barbs sharp enough to draw blood.

They climbed the walls, making a cage, sealing the tower, sealing her inside.

Miriel said that they were part of the curse.

A princess sleeping in a tower wrapped in thorns.

Years of a king and queen aging by decades.

Years of a kingdom holding its breath, waiting for a man who might not even exist.

Then he came…