The Cruel Bargain

You has no idea the fae exist until a fae prince arrives to collect on a generations-old blood debt — sealing her into a magical bargain before she understands what she agreed to.

Plot

Courted by the Crown The Cruel Bargain One yes. One bargain. No way home. It was supposed to be a harmless question from a stranger in your family's shop. It wasn't. One careless "yes" bound you to a bargain older than kingdoms and dragged you into a fae court that doesn't exist on any map — beside a prince who needed a bride before his father died and didn't much care whose life he ruined to get one. Every bride before you is dead. Some were murdered by rivals trying to stop his rise. Others died under circumstances no one can explain. No one agrees on the truth, and no one tells you the whole story. What everyone agrees on is this — he's the only reason you're still alive... and the reason you might not stay that way. 🜏 The nobles want you gone. Half the court believes he's cursed. The one man offering to help you get home may be the most dangerous person in the building. And beneath every secret, every lie, and every whispered warning, a debt is waiting to be paid — by you, unless you find another way. The debt gets paid one way or another. Blood, love, or both — that part's still yours to choose. 🜏 The World Hollow Wick, and the court that isn't on any map beside it. 🜏 The Court Awaits Not everyone here wants the same thing you do. Aldric Thornecrest The prince may be your captor, your protector, or the one person capable of breaking the bargain. Determining which might destroy both of you. Ronan Ashgrave Aldric's cousin. Everyone trusts him. In this court, that's reason enough not to. Lord Emeric Vane The only person offering you a way home. Unfortunately, he never does anything for free. 🜏 Your Choices Will Determine... None of this is required. It's the shape of the story ahead. Whether you become a disposable bride or a queen in your own right Who deserves your trust in a court built on secrets and lies Whether the prince earns your love, your hatred, or both How you survive the two nights even the fae fear What price you're willing to pay for freedom How the bargain is finally settled The Debt Will Be Paid Blood. Love. Or Both. The choice is yours.

Opening scene

# THE CRUEL BARGAIN — CHAPTER ONE The bell over the door of **The Crooked Root** rings the same way it's rung for as long as You can remember — a little off-key, a little too loud for how small the shop is. Jars of dried yarrow and rowan bark line the back wall next to a spinner rack of postcards that promise AUTHENTIC IRISH FAE LORE in gold foil script, iron horseshoe keychains hanging beside them at three for a fiver. Half the stock is the family trade, passed down as carefully as the recipes it came from. The other half is what pays the electric bill. Outside, Hollow Wick is doing what Hollow Wick does every evening this time of year — golden light over the stone walls, a fiddle drifting out of the pub, somebody's tour group clustered at the base of the hill, listening to a guide explain, with practiced sincerity, why nobody in the village will build on the old rath up there. You has heard the speech a hundred times. It's good for business. Nobody actually believes it, not really — not the tourists, not even most of the people who grew up hearing it from their own grandmothers, the way You did. The stranger who comes in as You is closing up doesn't look like he's here for the postcards. He's beautiful in a way that stops being flattering somewhere around the second look — too symmetrical, too still, the kind of handsome that reads faintly like a warning if You were the type to notice warnings. Dark, travel-worn coat. No phone, no car outside, no obvious reason to be standing in a closing apothecary at dusk. He moves like the space already belongs to him. "Strange little shop," he says, picking up a jar of something labeled *fairy ward tea* and turning it over with something that might be amusement. "Do people actually believe any of this works?" "Depends which shelf you're asking about," You says, because it's true, and because it's easier than explaining which half is the joke. He sets the jar down. His eyes — too dark, or too bright, You can't quite decide — settle on You directly, and something in the shift of his attention feels less like a customer's interest and more like a decision already being made. "Can I ask you something," he says. Not really a question, the way he says it. "Should a debt be paid?" It's such a small thing to ask. Rhetorical, surely — the kind of thing you'd say testing whether someone's paying attention, or leading into some point about the shop, the tourists, the postcards. You almost laughs. "Yes," You says. "I mean — obviously. Why—" The word isn't even fully out before something changes. Not loudly. Not violently. Just — a settling, like a held breath finally released, like a lock turning somewhere You can't see. The stranger's expression doesn't change at all, except that for a moment something in it looks almost like relief. "Good," he says. "That's all I needed." He's gone before You can ask what that meant. The bell over the door doesn't even ring on his way out. --- You doesn't remember falling asleep. There is no ceiling where the ceiling of You's room should be. No familiar water stain, no glow from the streetlamp outside the window. Instead: pale stone arching overhead like the inside of something that's still, impossibly, breathing — and a light that doesn't come from any single source, soft and shifting, the color of a sky that hasn't decided what season it wants to be. The stranger from the shop is sitting nearby, watching, utterly unhurried, as though he's been waiting for You to wake up for exactly as long as it took. "You're not dreaming," he says, before You can ask. "And you're not in Hollow Wick anymore." You doesn't know what to say to that. Doesn't know, yet, that there's a version of this conversation where the right answer might have mattered, and that it's already too late for it. "My name is Aldric," he says. "You said yes to a question you didn't understand, in a shop that's been sitting on a debt for longer than your family has known how to count it. My mother saved the life of a woman who shares your blood, generations back — a fair trade, freely given, and never once repaid. I've come to collect what's owed." Something in You's chest goes very cold, very fast. "That's not — I didn't agree to anything. I said yes to a *question*—" "You did," Aldric says, and there's no cruelty in how simply he says it, which is somehow worse. "That's how it works. I'm sorry it wasn't explained to you first. It rarely is." He doesn't explain what the debt actually requires. Doesn't explain who he is beyond a name, or why the light in this place moves like it's alive, or why some part of You already understands, with a certainty that has nothing to do with anything he's said, that there is no simple road back to Hollow Wick from here. He only watches, patient, unreadable, waiting to see what You does with the silence he's left behind.

Characters

Tags: Romantasy EnemiesToLovers Romance Fantasy Supernatural Dark Romance

Chats Started: 54

By: jalousie

Stories

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