by Megan Crane
She knew the moment he found the place where her father had gripped her so hard she’d worried—for a brief, panicky moment or two on her knees in the throne room—that he might crush her cheekbone. Wulf’s thumb smoothed over her cheek, lingering on that cheekbone as if he could feel her moment of panic. As if he could see its mark, even though she knew that there was nothing there to see. Perhaps the faintest bit of leftover swelling, but she’d hardly noticed it herself in her mirror after a day or two. There was no way he could see a thing.
And yet.
“When I kill him,” Wulf murmured, his voice soft, as if he was telling a bedtime story to a child, “and there can be no other outcome, he will suffer for this, too.”
Kathlyn’s heart kicked at her. Hard. There was a riot inside of her, a spinning chaotic mess that she couldn’t seem to tamp down. She was lost somewhere instead—stranded between the intensity of his blue gaze, the way his warrior’s hands felt against her cheeks, and the dark rooms all around them. The dark that seemed to bind them together. The dark that seemed to make him that much more overwhelming, that much more powerful than he’d already been in her memory.
He rolled through her like a winter storm, frigid and powerful, as awesome as he was potentially destructive. She knew she should step back. She knew she should put some distance between them, at least until her head cleared—assuming that was possible.
But she didn’t know what she’d do if he let go. What would become of her.
This was what she wanted, she reminded herself. His strength. This ferocity that he wore as easily as he wore a hooded sweatshirt like one of the guards. That lethal economy of movement that she could feel so distinctly even as he stood still. As if he really was stone, but only on the outside, to conceal the pure, blue fire that burned in him like light.
The stone was what she wanted. She’d tried serenity. She’d tried politeness. She’d tried every way she knew to appear above it all, but that had been before, when all she’d had to do was survive long enough to escape into a winter marriage or two, then a permanent one somewhere far away from here. All of her escapes involved high status and the fear of her father, like a shield.
None of that applied any longer. That had been clear this whole week, as the details of her disgrace spread through the women’s quarters like a particularly vicious flu—spurred on, she had no doubt, by a gleeful Lorna. Women she’d counted as friendly no longer saw her. Women who’d always been polite enough, to her face, dropped the act. Her friend Yajaira had told her, with tears in her eyes, that while she wanted them to remain friends, she couldn’t afford to be seen with Kathlyn any longer. That it put her at risk and she couldn’t let that happen if she wanted to marry permanently after she got the hell out of King Athenian’s kingdom.
Still, Kathlyn had been certain that the attendants who checked her virginity each week would vindicate her. She’d been convinced that she’d be proven innocent and everything could go back to the way it had been.
I’m telling the truth, she’d told Dorothy, the more dour and matronly of the two. She’d been lying back on the waxing table in her bathroom the way she always did, her feet flat on the table so she was exposed. She’d kept her eyes fixed on the ceiling out of habit, and she’d tried her best to keep her hands from curling into fists. Despite reports, I’m as virginal as I ever was.
She had still been shaky on what, exactly, Wulf had done with his fingers up there in his stone cell. But there hadn’t been any blood. Or any actual mounting, assuming that was even possible in all those strange positions. She’d been fairly certain that she really, truly was the virgin she was supposed to be. Almost positive.
Dorothy had sniffed, but had performed the usual exam with her typical brusque swiftness. Kathlyn had looked down the length of her body when it was finished, to see Dorothy exchange a long glance with Terryl, the much younger attendant, who’d made a small noise.
Almost like pity, Kathlyn had thought.
You can tell my father, she’d said. To the ceiling again, because it was far off and couldn’t possibly sense that open, raw thing churning around in her gut. You can assure him that despite everything, I’m still pure.
Dorothy had patted Kathlyn on the thigh, a wholly uncharacteristic gesture that had made that raw thing inside Kathlyn yawn open wider.
It’s too late, she’d said quietly. You must know that. You’ve already been convicted and the palace is buzzing with the scandal. There’s no taking that back.
But I didn’t do anything, Kathlyn had whispered. And I can prove it.
No one cares about proof, Dorothy had said then, with a mirthless little laugh. They wouldn’t care if they examined your hymen themselves. You’re ruined. That’s the end of it.
She’d left the bathroom suite then, and Kathlyn had been too busy staring up at the ceiling, trying desperately not to cry, to notice that Terryl hadn’t left with her.
I’m going to help you, the other woman had said in a low voice. She’d stepped between Kathlyn’s legs, and when Kathlyn focused on her, she saw what looked like that same pity she’d expressed earlier all over her white, freckled face.
You’ll tell my father? Kathlyn had asked, hating herself for the hope she could hear in her own voice. When she should have known better.
Terryl hadn’t answered that question. She’d held Kathlyn’s gaze, her own compassionate.
You should assume that as a ruined girl of your rank, the goal of your mounting ceremony will be to punish you. Hurt you, she clarified quietly. The higher the rank, the harder the fall, Princess Kathlyn.
But Kathlyn had been caught on that word she’d used. You mean he wants to hurt me emotionally, she’d said. While her cheek was still swollen from the very physical grip her father had had on it, which should have been her clue. Or maybe it had been and she’d just wanted, desperately, not to believe it. Humiliate me.
You must know why your father has picked that raider. The attendant had shaken her head, her gaze filling with pity again. It isn’t only because giving you to a barbarian will dishonor you and, yes, humiliate you. It’s because he thinks that man will hurt you. Badly. Surely you’ve heard how raiders are. The things they do.
Then he will do those things and I will bleed, proving my innocence the old-fashioned way, Kathlyn had replied, sounding far more sure of that than she’d felt.
You can’t prove your innocence once they’ve decided it’s lost. Terryl’s gaze had been too frank. Too certain. The only thing you can do—that I can do for you—is help it hurt a little less.
She’d waited until Kathlyn had nodded, stiff and quick and embarrassed at how full her eyes were, and then she’d performed a quick little procedure. Two sharp tugs in a place Kathlyn didn’t want to feel anything, ever, and then a strange stinging afterward.
After Terryl had left her—still wreathed in pity—Kathlyn had rolled herself up from the table and found that she was bleeding a little. There in her bathroom. All alone. Her virgin’s blood just another casualty to her father’s decision that she’d been ruined, instead of what it had been supposed to be all her life: a gift to the man who bought it and a credit to her father’s name.
She’d hated herself for the sense of deep grief and loss that had swept over her, but that had only made it worse.
And now the intense and objectively terrifying raider, who even her attendant had told her was a savage who would rip her up, was touching her far more gently than her own father ever had. He didn’t even know her. She’d burst into his room and set upon him like a crazy person, and yet he hadn’t mentioned that salient fact when she’d been dragged before her father. Instead he’d sought her out in the middle of the night—and not to attack her, the way she expected one of the guards would do any day now.
She thought he’d genuinely wanted to see if she was okay. And not only that. He was the only person so far who hadn’t avoided her, pitied her outright, or taken entirely too much pleasure in her disgrace.
&n
bsp; On the contrary, he’d offered to kill her father himself.
“You’re staring at me like he deserves your pity,” Wulf said, jolting her back to her rooms. This night. The way this big, tough raider king held her face so gently between his hands when her father had gripped her in the same place, his only intention to cause her pain. “Hear me on this, princess. He doesn’t deserve shit.”
She shook her head slightly, unable to move much while he held her—and, somehow, not minding that the way she perhaps should have. There was something about how hard his hands were, how obviously capable, that seemed to seep into her. Changing her, she thought, from the inside out.
“I want to be like you,” she told him. “I want to fight back the way you do.” That blue gaze of his changed, and she hurried on. “I don’t mean like a warrior. I couldn’t be a warrior, I know that. But maybe I don’t have to be helpless, either.”
He stood over her, his face in shadows and his back to the fire with that hood still pulled over his head. But she was so close to him, her head tipped back so she could look at him full on and those extraordinary hands of his still holding her still. And the strangest expression moved over him then. It swept over his astonishingly fierce face and seemed to pool in the blue of his eyes. Rendering them somehow brighter. Bolder.
And if she wasn’t entirely mistaken, warmer.
“I could do nothing but tutor you in the art of battle,” he told her then, still in a low voice that seemed to shudder its way over her body and deep inside, where it glowed—or she did, the longer he looked at her that way—“night and day, until you breathed it. But you will never fight like me. I was born in blood. I was crafted in steel and hate, grief and loss. I am a weapon, I do not need to wield one.”
“Not like you then,” she managed to say, though there was a shaking thing within her. It rocked around inside, making her feel trembly. Fragile. And yet no less determined. “There has to be a happy medium between a raider king’s idea of battle and what I need to survive. Or live, anyway, a little while longer, and not as easily bullied.”
His palms against her cheek shifted then, though he didn’t let go. He ran his thumbs over her cheekbones, distractingly, as if he was tracing them. As if he was committing her to memory. There was that warmth lighting up his eyes, and she felt it pressing down on her chest like some kind of cool blue stone.
What was funny, she realized after a moment, was she welcomed the weight.
“There are too few soft things left in this world, princess.” And his gaze changed again then. Got even warmer, somehow. “You don’t want to lose that. Don’t give it away to a petty king whose reign is nearing its end. He’s not worth it.”
“The story of how you took your throne circulates the palace even now,” she argued. Panic and need and something that felt perilously like loss, though she couldn’t understand it, crashed through her. “It’s almost all anyone has talked about. They even talk about it to me, and I’m something of a pariah these days. You took what you wanted and made yourself a king. Why can’t I do the same?”
“For one thing, your father has a big-ass army.”
“And the king you deposed did not?” Her gaze searched his. “I don’t want his throne. All this time, when the fact he would probably kill me someday was theoretical, I thought I was prepared for it. I came to your rooms to lose my virginity because I thought making a choice along the way toward the same old inevitable end would feel better. It would be something, anyway, when I was used to a whole lot of nothing.”
“It was stupid.” His voice was flat. “He could have killed you on the spot.”
“Maybe part of me wanted that,” she admitted. “It would be done then, wouldn’t it? But instead, I get to wait just as long for the same thing to happen to me that was always going to happen to me, except this time there’s no hope that maybe it won’t.” She swallowed, her throat feeling much too dry. “And it turns out I was unprepared for all this . . .” She cast around for the right word to encompass all the things that were sloshing around inside of her. “Hopelessness.”
Wulf studied her, his mouth a hard line. He brushed his thumbs over her cheekbones again. This way, then that. And Kathlyn felt a sharp pain in her chest when he let go.
“And you think learning how to swing a blade will give you hope?” He reached down to the waistband of his trousers and pulled out the dagger she’d found in the bottom of an old trunk that had once belonged to her mother. “Even a little one like this?”
Kathlyn blinked at him, then the dagger. “Is it little?”
“It’s the kind of thing we’d give an infant back home,” he told her in that dark, sardonic way of his. “To aid in teething.”
She felt her cheeks heat. “Very funny.”
“Listen to me.” The way he said that reminded her—not that it was possible to forget—that he was a king. One who might look very different from the kings she knew, but clearly was used to ruling over a great many people. A great many raiders, who Kathlyn imagined were at least as tough and as fierce as he was. “Everything about you is soft. Your voice. Your skin. Your brown eyes. The way you walk. The way you talk.”
Her pulse went liquid in her veins, and she found herself clinging to the doorjamb again, but she didn’t know if it was because she needed help to stand—or if she was worried she might do something truly mad. Like toss herself at him, and no matter that he’d just called her weak. He made her feel weak, so perhaps he was right.
“You’ve seen me exactly two times. Tonight I’m in a nightgown because I was in bed when you got here. The other night I was basically in costume. I’m not sure you’re an expert on how soft I might be.”
“I knew you weren’t a courtesan the minute you walked in my room, princess.”
She stared back at him, unnerved as much by his matter-of-fact delivery as the unflinching way he was looking at her. Not to mention what he’d said. “You did not.”
“Baby.” He shook his head. “You’re soft from the inside out.”
Kathlyn couldn’t tell if it was temper or something just as dangerous that kicked through her then, thick and raw and a little too edgy. “I keep asking you for help and you won’t help me.”
His eyes glittered. “Am I required to help you?”
“I considered that, of course. Why would you?” She indicated her living room. “But here you are.”
He looked harder then. Colder. “Pretty little princesses playing dress-up and getting themselves into trouble aren’t my problem. I serve my clan, Kathlyn. Not you.”
But she’d survived hits a whole lot harder than that one. “I didn’t ask you to serve me. I doubt you’d know how. I asked you to help me.” She nodded at the dagger. “Consider it a teething emergency.”
He looked at her for a long moment, a muscle moving in his jaw. Then he turned away.
Good, she told herself fiercely. She needed a break from all that relentless blue. She needed to get her bearings.
Wulf prowled away from her toward the center of the living room, shoving the hood back from his head as he moved. And she could see all of him then. That fascinating braid, so blond and intricate, that proclaimed who he was at a glance. Not that there could be any doubt. He looked remote and lethal, as if carved from stone and rendered flesh, and there was no reason he should make her ache—but he did.
Beautiful, something inside her whispered.
He really was beautiful, that was the trouble. Fierce and untamed and indisputably, impossibly beautiful. Like looking over a high cliff at a far-off valley, remote and beautiful in the light, and feeling that half-scared, half-exhilarated sensation tear through her and lodge there, low in her belly. That was what it was like to look at Wulf.
It was as if she’d forgotten that, somehow, in the past few days.
Kathlyn drifted from the doorway. When she realized she was following him into the center of the room, she stopped and made herself stand still at the back of her couch. Wulf roamed over
to the fireplace, then stared down into the flames for what seemed like a very long time. And she didn’t know why the air between them felt so fraught. So tense. Or why her heart began to trip over itself in her chest, as if she was in a panic.
When panic was the last thing she felt. Or not all she felt.
“You don’t want to be hard,” he told her, not looking back at her. “It comes at a price.”
“Everything is different now,” she said, not sure if her voice was hushed or it was simply the room, dark everywhere except for the firelight. “I can survive anything. I mean, I have. But merely surviving isn’t going to work anymore.”
“The point of surviving is the survival. The end.”
Kathlyn pulled in a breath, then forced herself to let it out slowly, as if that might settle the clamoring things inside her. “I understand that this must seem silly to you. This is nothing but a family squabble, I know. And it probably all would have happened exactly this way anyway, I just wouldn’t have known about it in advance. There wouldn’t have been all this dread. And I’m well aware that it will matter to absolutely no one what happens to me.” She swallowed hard, and made herself say the one thing she was afraid to say, because it was far too revealing. Because it showed she cared about something, and that was the kiss of death and always had been. “But it matters to me.”
He turned to face her then, and her heart, still beating so furiously, seemed to miss a beat. Then another.
“I don’t want to die,” she told him, because she’d already gone too far, “but if I must, I don’t want to go out crying on a hard, cold floor. I don’t expect I can hurt my father in any way, but I want to try.”
Wulf’s gaze was so bright it should have left blisters, but Kathlyn couldn’t bring herself to look away.
“I don’t tell this story because everyone who matters to me already knows it,” he told her coolly, though that searing heat in his blue gaze wasn’t cool at all. “And I won’t repeat it. So pay attention.”
