Nana Esi

My father sold me to the Dragon Academy for the price of one dead wolf, tossing me into a hall full of monsters who wanted to eat me alive. "She has no shift. She has no use. The dragons will take her," he said, leaving me in heavy iron chains that bit into my bone. The beautiful, cruel dragon students laughed. "Prey," one of them dropped the word at my feet. "Maybe it's lunch." I was property. A broken wolf girl meant to cancel out a debt. But then the hall went dead quiet. The Dragon King's son walked in. He didn't look at me like I was a price tag. He looked at me like a predator realizing the floor beneath it wasn't solid. His pale gold eyes snapped to mine, and the temperature in the room skyrocketed. "Who brought her here," his voice was low, dangerous. He crouched in front of me, his fingers closing tight around my forearm. He turned my wrist toward the light, exposing the faint silver tracery under my skin—the mark my father swore would get me killed. The breath went out of the prince. His hand tightened until it bruised. "That mark," he whispered so only I could hear, "belongs to the bloodline my family slaughtered."

The night they came for my sister, I cut my own palm and offered the Devil a better bride.

I did it in front of the whole city. I thought I was just a substitute, a disposable girl thrown into the fog to save the sister I loved. But when the Devil appeared—tall, dressed in black that drank the light, with eyes like pale, cold coins—everything changed.

He didn't kill me. He reached out and closed his freezing hand around my bleeding wrist. That was when he saw it. The old silver mark I had carried since birth, hidden under my skin. The moment his thumb pressed against it, the mark woke, blooming with blinding silver light. His stillness wasn't that of a monster choosing his next meal. It was the shock of a man who had just found the one thing he prayed never to see.

"You are not the one they chose," he said, his voice carrying into every frozen corner of the square. The cold rushed out of the air. He turned my hand toward the dying light, his face cracking open to reveal something far worse than cruelty.

"You were never meant to be mine," he whispered softly, his grip tightening like a vise. "And now I cannot give you back."