Edge of Power

by Megan Crane

  But in between those highlights, it had been a lot like these days with King Athenian.

  That the king was toying with him was as obvious as it was boring. King Fuckface clearly considered himself quite the intellect. And a great wit. Wulf smiled lazily at him, mostly pretended he didn’t understand a word the man said, and fantasized about chopping him up into very small pieces with the blade he kept in his boot.

  Today Athenian had made Wulf attend him in a great, formal dining room that sat at the base of his heavily guarded wing. He sat at one end of a giant table that looked like whole forests had died to create it, and made Wulf stand at the other end like he was playing grab ass with his betters. Then he very slowly and very painstakingly ate an unappetizing meal of dried fish dressed in a pungent jam, then washed it all down with wine.

  The breakfast of champions, Wulf had thought. When that champion was staring down the end of a long winter and they were breaking into the weird shit to get them through to spring, that is.

  When he was done, Athenian strode into the adjoining sitting room—in the sense that it had a number of sitting areas and could have handled a city or two—and gestured for Wulf to follow him. A bold move for a man who barely came up to Wulf’s shoulder. Athenian settled himself into a suitably dramatic chair and pointed Wulf into a matching one across from him, his lips twitching in a way that meant he found something about that deeply amusing.

  Ever happy to help, Wulf had sprawled out in the chair as if he was considering nodding off to sleep, and had smiled back at Athenian like he thought they really were buddies.

  A little pack of aristocratic fuckers came to join them shortly after, under the guise that they were eager to prepare Wulf for the big mounting ceremony that he was supposed to care about. It was clear that what they were really there for was to see for themselves how horrifying the barbarian was and spread that story to all their twittering little friends.

  But all Wulf cared about was that if they were still talking about that dumbass ceremony, Kathlyn had to be alive. And maybe not hurt too badly besides.

  Mounting a girl is not something to be taken lightly, the most smirky of the aristocrats told him, when he stopped tittering and fluttering around in those weird clothes they all wore. Strange suits like tapestries that locked them into layers of stiff clothes that could only impede their movement—and get them cut down fast and first in any battle.

  It’s sex, Wulf had murmured. Somehow I’ve been managing all this time without your help.

  That had been cause for great hilarity.

  It’s not only sex, one of the other men had said in a braying voice that instantly made Wulf want to remove his ribcage and shove it down his throat. It’s a ritual of great importance.

  Then creepy-ass Athenian had chimed in. It is up to you to make sure that the first thrust does its job. Nothing is sadder than watching a man flail around and somehow fail to pierce a girl’s innocence.

  Wulf couldn’t really get past the fact the fucker was talking to the man he’d lined up to perform said piercing on his own daughter. He reminded himself that meant Athenian hadn’t killed her.

  Does that happen to you mainlanders a lot? Wulf had asked mildly. You have my condolences.

  No one expects a raider to get it right, the smirky man said, while the king sat in his chair like some kind of baleful, beaming spider. It’s always better to concentrate on a quick, hard initial thrust, to start the whole endeavor off right. Otherwise it’s easy to lose the crowd and succumb to stage fright. It happens to the best of us.

  I have an idea, Wulf said then, still lounging there in his chair as if he might have gone boneless during this conversation. How about you don’t tell me how to fuck?

  That had sat out there, tense and aggressive, until he forced himself to let out a laugh. Loud and hearty, as if any of this was funny.

  Because Wulf had to suck it up. Every day. No matter how much mayhem roared inside of him, looking for an outlet. Looking for any fucking reason to introduce these assholes to the sharp end of his blade.

  So far, the king had confided today after he’d made Wulf trail around after him so he could show Wulf how out of his depth he was supposed to feel, I’m finding my first encounter with a raider very entertaining.

  Even if Wulf hadn’t been a trained warrior and a king, he would have found that condescending. Yet all he’d allowed himself to do was smile. Because if he released the grip he had on himself, he’d go a little bit insane.

  And in the hours he’d spent back in his cozy cell, waiting for his guards to embarrass themselves out in the hallway, he thought about his princess. She’d grown up with that sorry excuse for a king. She hadn’t even looked particularly scared when she’d walked into the throne room, when she couldn’t have had any doubt about what her father’s response would be to her courtesan’s outfit.

  Wulf was starting to wonder if this mounting ceremony crap was going to be him in a ring of these jeering, tittering assholes with his princess laid out before him, all broken bones and blood. He wouldn’t put anything past these people. Raiders liked to do what the fuck they wanted, which often led to excess. But these assholes were straight up depraved.

  She wasn’t in any of the rooms he checked tonight, and neither were there any gold dresses that might indicate he’d found her room but they were holding her somewhere else. He knew where the real jail cells were. Ditto the stews. If he couldn’t find her here, he’d start looking down there.

  He’d finished checking all the rooms that ringed the courtyard. That left a handful that lined an offshoot little hall that led toward the back, almost as if the rooms had been deliberately set apart from the others. Wulf eased open the first door, then stuck his head inside.

  And just like that, he knew he’d found her.

  After spending all this time wandering around the palace into this or that cloud of the scent the ladies liked to douse themselves in, he’d almost forgotten that his princess smelled of sugar. Sugar and butter and something deeper, that reminded him of the green things he grew on the roof of the Lodge back home, to stave off the worst of the winter.

  Hope, something inside him whispered, but he didn’t know what the fuck that meant—except that this place was obviously getting to him. He ignored it. But he still took a deep breath as he eased himself inside.

  There was a gold dress laid neatly over the back of a chair pulled up near the fire, in case he’d needed further proof. He let the door swing shut behind him and looked around the small living area before him. Now that he’d found her rooms, he allowed himself to think in a lot more detail about the kinds of things that could have happened to her in the past week. The kind of things he’d seen gleaming there in her father’s eyes, a grim promise he’d recognized all too well.

  He thought it was fairly likely that he would find her bleeding in her bed, broken and battered, and here it was thirteen days before he could kill her father. He steeled himself.

  There was the faintest whisper of sound and Wulf whipped his head around, pinpointing it instantly.

  But it wasn’t a guard. It wasn’t an enemy. It was Kathlyn.

  She stood in the doorway to her bedchamber, and the first thing he noticed was that she appeared unhurt. No visible bruises. No obvious broken bones. Nothing he could see, though the only light in the room came from her fireplace and it danced over her, lighting her up and leaving her in shadow at the same time. She wore a loose cloud of a microwool sleeping dress that cascaded to her knees, exposing one soft brown shoulder and the delicate line of her collarbone, then those sweetly shaped legs. Wulf’s head felt odd, suddenly. As if it was ringing—the way it would feel if he’d sustained a hit. When all she was doing was standing there.

  “Oh,” she said quietly. “It’s you.”

  As if it was the most normal, everyday thing in the world to have him appear in her rooms in the middle of the night.

  She let out a breath. “I thought it might be the guards.”
>
  “Do the guards make a habit of letting themselves into your rooms at this hour of the morning? Or at all?”

  Her smile was brittle. “Not yet. But it feels imminent. They’ve made it clear that they want to make sure I’m eagerly anticipating every step of this new change in my circumstances.” She shifted, and the firelight fell over her face. And something deep inside his chest tightened at the bleak resolve he saw in her dark gaze. “It can only be a matter of time before they take the next logical step.”

  Wulf moved further into the room. He looked at the fine tapestries on the walls, the rumpled furs thrown over the small sofa. The plush, deep rug on the floor. All the evidence that a princess lived here and she was used to the finest of things. Not the terrible stews down below, all drafty and wet and dirty. Filled with desperation and despair. He couldn’t imagine her getting thrown down there, the way he’d heard more than one of the king’s acolytes suggest she would be eventually. Everything inside of him revolted at the thought.

  “You’re a curious creature, princess,” he said. He kept his eyes on her and the way she clung with one hand to the doorjamb, watching him with those dark gold eyes that were not sleepy or half in a dream. Not Kathlyn. She knew exactly who he was. “Are you this welcoming to all your uninvited guests? Or just me?”

  “The difference between you and the guards is that you already had the opportunity to hurt me terribly and you didn’t take it.” Kathlyn lifted one perfectly formed shoulder, delicate and gleaming brown, and then dropped it. “It’s not that I’m not afraid of you, of course, but in the past week I’ve developed a brand-new hierarchy of things to fear.”

  Wulf found himself moving, and he didn’t stop until he stood before her in the doorway to her bedchamber. More important, this time she didn’t back herself up to the far wall. She stood her ground, and he felt that like heat. He gazed down at her and he didn’t know what demon it was that moved in him and made him raise his hands to place them on either side of the doorjamb as if he was holding himself back. She tilted her head back, and even in the shadow of his much larger body, she was so beautiful it made him want to break the things that might hurt her. So beautiful it made something in him go still.

  But not too still.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he told her, and he was surprised to hear that gruffness in his voice. “But if you’re putting me low in that hierarchy, you should probably think again.”

  “Good. I want you scary.” She shifted her body, pulling her other hand out from behind her back and that was when Wulf saw the dagger she held in it. It was tiny and ineffectual, with a blade he could probably snap with one hand and a dull edge besides. “I want to be scary.”

  He started to laugh, but then saw how serious her gaze was and thought better of it. Not because she might take issue with it, but because he didn’t want to be like one of the assholes that cluttered up this place, always so quick with a snide laugh and those patronizing sniggers.

  “Baby, what do you think you’re going to do with that? Scratch me?”

  “It wasn’t for you, necessarily.” She held her hand out toward him as if offering him the dagger, though he thought she was actually just holding it badly. “I don’t how to use it.”

  He took it from her. “No kidding.”

  “I think I should learn. And fast.”

  Wulf was used to commanding the raider brotherhood, the fiercest warriors in all the world. He was used to handling the clan and all their squabbles and complaints and troubles, many of which were sorted out with fistfights in the Lodge for all to see. But he didn’t know what to do with a tiny, helpless, pretty thing, maybe the softest creature he’d ever encountered, who wanted to learn how to grow a pair of fangs.

  And then she made it worse. She squared her shoulders as she looked up at him, her gaze still so determined. “And I want you to teach me.”

  9.

  He didn’t laugh in her face, which Kathlyn thought was a good start.

  Wulf stood before her in her bedroom doorway, his expression inscrutable, and she had a momentary pang of regret that he was wearing clothes tonight and no longer showing off that great, sculpted expanse of his chest. He appeared to be dressed like an off-duty palace guard instead of a reckless barbarian king, though Kathlyn thought that disguise would only work from a distance—and only if a person glanced at the sweatshirt and then away quickly.

  Because Wulf was clearly not a guard. He didn’t swagger, calling attention to himself as he moved. He didn’t need to call attention to himself—his very presence demanded it. He was too swift and silent, too fearsomely powerful, and Kathlyn had no doubt that if he didn’t want her to see him, she wouldn’t. Even here, in her cozy living room. It wasn’t lost on her that he hadn’t even tried to hide.

  Tonight he wasn’t barefoot or bare chested, and somehow, that made the punch of him hit harder. He was all in black. The trousers that clung to his muscled thighs and legs made him look even stronger and more dangerous, but it was that hooded sweatshirt—so very unraiderlike, and never particularly interesting when the guards stormed around wearing the same thing as if they needed to identify themselves at all times—that took her breath away. Because with the hood up the only thing she’d seen from across the room was the intense and stirring blue of his eyes.

  Closer, all that blue made her breath catch, tangling inside of her and turning into something a whole lot more complicated than mere heat.

  “You want me to teach you?” he asked, and there was something in his voice she’d never heard before. But it spun, warm and thick, around and around inside of her, complication on top of complication. “Do you think that if I teach you a few raider tricks that might help you take on your father?” He toyed with the knife he’d taken from her, flipping it over, tip to hilt and back again. Kathlyn didn’t know what was more mesmerizing: what he was doing with a knife right there in front of her, or him. Just him. “I’m not sure that’s wise.”

  “I don’t know if it’s wise,” she agreed. “I don’t know if it’s possible. But I do know that I don’t want to spend what little life I have left on my knees, waiting for the next blow.”

  Kathlyn could hear the passion in her voice, and her automatic response to that was a deep, ingrained horror. Passion had never been her friend. It had only ever gotten her in trouble. Whether it was about her lost mother, her precarious place in her father’s kingdom, her years and years in gold when she’d only wanted to be like everyone else—it had only ever showed those who wanted to hurt her that they were succeeding. She’d learned long ago to tamp it down, hide it, cover it in serene nonchalance, no matter how strongly she felt about something or the cost to her in concealing it.

  But it was the middle of the night and there was a raider king standing in her private rooms, very much as if she’d conjured him up from one of the disturbingly hot and vivid dreams she’d been having this past week. And it seemed that here, with nothing between them but firelight and shadow, she had nothing inside of her but an excess of passion.

  And worse, couldn’t hide it the way she knew she should.

  There was something in his gaze then, so breathtakingly blue. Or the way his hard mouth played with a smile, but never quite committed. She had that familiar, crazy feeling she’d had the other night that he knew every last thing that was happening inside of her. All these new and oversized and precarious things she’d never felt before and couldn’t quite name.

  “You don’t look hurt.” He tilted his head slightly to one side, that gaze of his assessing. “I thought it was entirely possible that I would find you in pieces.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “My father learned long ago that it’s better not to leave marks. No blood, very few bruises.” She smiled so brightly it hurt her cheeks. “It’s actually ingenious. It allows you to experience all the effects of a beating without any risk that others might be encouraged to find you sympathetic in any way. It can’t be that bad, they think. He can’t be that ev
il. Surely his reputation must be exaggerated by his enemies. And so on.”

  Wulf turned to stone right there in front of her. It wasn’t as if he shifted in any way, but still, she could feel the change. He stopped flipping the knife. Those astonishingly blue eyes bored into hers.

  “He beat you?”

  Kathlyn felt a shiver begin at the nape of her neck. It snaked down the length of her spine, then seem to curl around and find its way deep into the pit of her belly. She felt as if Wulf was gripping her, then. As if those battered raider hands were wrapped tightly around her chest, constricting her. But she couldn’t seem to look away.

  She didn’t want to look away.

  “More accurately, he held my cheek,” she whispered. “That’s all. Hardly anything to complain about.” He didn’t move, and the fact he didn’t seemed to expand inside of her, pushing words out of her mouth when she probably should have remained silent. When that would have been wiser. “Really, I’ve had much worse. One time he sprained my wrist at an equinox festival. I had to pretend it didn’t hurt in front of a huge audience of his subjects, and I was only fifteen and not as good at that as I should have been.” She shook her head. “That was much more upsetting.”

  Wulf shoved her dagger into the waistband of his trousers with a notable lack of concern for the possibility he might hurt himself—something Kathlyn was sure she would spend time thinking about later when she was alone and recovering from this visit—and then reached out. She stopped worrying about later. His hands were rough against her skin, just as she remembered, as he cupped her cheeks in his palms. Battered and tough. As hard as they were warm.

  And disarmingly gentle.

  He shifted so that the firelight fell across her face in full, and he moved her face this way, then that—studying her. Closely. Thoroughly. And Kathlyn had never experienced anything like it in her life. Wulf’s scrutiny was like another man’s blow. It was a living thing, the way his eyes moved all over her face, and she had no doubt that there was nothing he missed. Not one thing. From the shape of her eyebrows to her rapidly heating skin itself to the rush of reaction flooding her eyes that she was terribly afraid was far more revealing than she wished.