by Megan Crane
She had to believe that mattered.
Once Wulf fastened his trousers, he looked over to where she still sat, her dress tugged over her knees to conceal the extent of her “bleeding” until the very last moment. Someone must have told him what to do, she thought when he extended his hand to help her to her feet. This was the little moment of feigned courtesy after all that rutting and supposed pain. This was when a girl smiled as brightly as she could to show how unaffected she was by what had just happened, no matter if she was a little woozy and teary, while the gentleman acted as if he hadn’t been the one to hurt her with such glutting delight. This was what made everyone so comfortable about such a time-honored ritual—that and the fact so many of them had suffered through it themselves, since as far as Kathlyn could tell there were no greater supporters of something unpleasant than those who’d already survived it.
Kathlyn took Wulf’s offered hand, and it wasn’t lost on her that such a simple little thing rocked through her like another explosion. He lifted her to her feet, something else he did entirely too easily, and then he guided her off the high mattress.
And she knew she’d prevailed before she turned around to see for herself. She heard it in the crowd. There was that muttering, but it grew louder. A sharper buzz. As if they didn’t know whether to cheer or rage.
When she turned back around, there were healthy rust-brown stains marking the pristine white sheets. Bold and unmistakable. Taking the ruin everyone had assumed and showing it right back in their faces, just as she’d wanted.
And it wouldn’t change her future. It wouldn’t change the next week. The gossips would battle over it and tell their stories however they liked, and none of that would alter a single thing about the life Kathlyn’s father had promised her or, worse, its inevitable end.
Kathlyn ignored the crowd. She looked up from the stain that declared her virtue, that made her mounting ceremony what it always should have been and would have made Lady Gertrix proud had she been here to see it—sitting tall in the front row of the women’s section where she belonged—and found her father in the crowd.
For once, he wasn’t smiling.
But she discovered she was.
Wulf had spent a lot of time having sex with a lot of women in his time, many of them in full view of the better part of his clan, and it had never been like that. He didn’t know if it was the particular, fucked-up circumstances. The fact that at least half—maybe more—of the assembled audience probably wanted him dead. Actively. Or worse, had been rooting for him to cause Kathlyn serious damage, mostly so they could see if that finally managed to rattle her cage.
He didn’t know why the whole thing had seared through him like that, white hot and wild, when once again it hadn’t been anything crazy. Straightforward, compliant fucking with no deviations should not have turned his crank. It should have been harder to get himself off with all that missionary boredom on a woman who was pretending she didn’t respond to him. And more, that he was hurting her.
But that wasn’t what had happened. He couldn’t think of anything hotter than Princess Kathlyn biting down on her lip, her sweet little cunt trembling around him with every thrust, her brown eyes glowing gold and her fingernails digging into him, hard, as he made her come. And come and come, all over his cock, so hot and wet and creamy he wanted to shout down the whole damned building.
Restraint had never been Wulf’s thing. But tonight he’d decided he needed to consider the possibility that a little restraint went a long way. His head was still buzzing. His cock had been up for a second round the minute he’d stood up—and saw her sitting there, her gaze still way too gold and dreamy when she’d looked at him.
Maybe it wasn’t restraint that got him off. Maybe it was just his princess.
He kept ahold of her as they walked off the stage, and told himself he was just trying to play his cards right. Confuse these idiots by showing off his chest and all his tattoos, but hold on to Kathlyn the way he saw these assholes escorting their women, all pretending a few seconds of courtesy was the same as actually respecting them in some way.
Kathlyn surreptitiously did the leading, only sliding him a glance as she quietly steered him before her father’s raised chair. Wulf had to bite back a smile. There were many, many men who thought their very masculinity hinged on their domination of every moment they drew breath, but he was not one of them. If someone was dumb enough to mistake him for a pansy bitch? That would only make what Wulf was likely to do to them more satisfying.
His princess sank down into a long, graceful curtsey. And Wulf was sure he was supposed to bow down and make his own gesture toward obeisance, but that wasn’t how he rolled even when he didn’t actively despise the person in front of him. Wulf was the king of his clan. He bowed his head to no one. And this time he couldn’t even make himself sag a shoulder. He merely stood there beside her as Kathlyn treated her father to the most elegant form of stylized respect he’d ever seen, especially when the douchebag deserved so little of it.
King Athenian wasn’t smiling, for once. His black eyes glittered. His mouth flattened as he stared down at them, but he said nothing as Wulf continued to stand there, holding on to Kathlyn’s hand as she slowly rose up.
He didn’t know what was supposed to happen, but he heard Kathlyn release a breath when her father merely nodded. She curtseyed again, shallow and less dramatic this time, and then she once again led Wulf away without seeming to do anything of the kind. Wulf didn’t spare the asshole a second glance, and not only because it amused him to show the mainland scumbag king his back. But because he was fascinated by the way Kathlyn was doing this. Leading him into the party that sprawled all over the main courtyards on the ground floor of the palace while managing to make it look as if he was the one leading her. As if he was the one who knew where they were going.
“Are you trying to help me out?” he asked her as she led them through the gathering crowd, the audience streaming in from their seats to help themselves to the food piled high on tables down the center of each courtyard. And for all that this was meant to be an embarrassing, shameful ceremony, the feast was anything but. It was a portrait of the king’s vast wealth, that he should have so much meat and fruit at this time of year, when so many people’s stores were seriously depleted after the long, cold winter.
It was her eyes, he thought when she slid a look at him. Those damned eyes of hers in that absurdly pretty face. Dark gold and melting, and they made him do shit he didn’t even understand.
“I see no reason to give them a barbarian just because they want one.”
Something inside Wulf seemed to hum a little bit at that. He rubbed at his chest. “I don’t care if they think I’m a barbarian.”
Her smile made everything worse. It was much too pretty. She should have faded a bit in this courtyard, marked as it was with the gold and silver and marble monstrosities that screeched out the kingdom’s riches and shimmered so bright against the dark night outside.
But if anything, Kathlyn glowed brighter than her surroundings. Drowning them out.
“You might not care,” she said. “But I do.”
“Does it shame the king’s only daughter to have lowered herself to this?” He remembered what that smirking tool had told him earlier, the dick. “A savage of a raider at a hastily thrown together ceremony?”
She didn’t quite frown. He imagined she didn’t allow herself a normal range of expression where all the circling vultures could see her. But her gaze turned something like impatient—once again, something no one else dared show in his presence unless they were actively trying to piss him off.
“It’s not about shame, it’s about strategy,” she told him coolly. “No one here has ever seen a raider before. The less you behave like a figure in a story told to deliberately scare children, the less my father can use those stereotypes to condemn you.” Her gaze was frank then, edged as much with something bleak as with gold. “Or me, of course, but I am already condemned. It�
�s you who might still make it out of here.”
And that humming thing in him got louder. So loud it began to feel like warmth.
“I have no plans to die here, princess,” he told her. That should have been the end of it, but he kept going. It was as if he had no control over himself, a prospect that should have horrified him. Yet didn’t. “And neither should you.”
But she didn’t answer him. Two women—without their hair gelled into ugly and nonsensical shapes, which he thought meant they weren’t as blue-blooded as the residents of the palace—stopped in front of her. They took Kathlyn’s hands and they . . . gushed. As if she was some kind of celebrity, and it wasn’t the mounting ceremony they were talking about. As far as he could tell, that was merely the latest in a long line of reasons these women adored her.
“You’re always so kind,” the smallest of the women whispered, her pale white cheeks stained red and getting redder as Kathlyn smiled at her. “No matter what, you’re always smiling. I think of that all the time. I tell myself, ‘Geraldine, try to act a little bit more like the princess.’ ”
“I’m sure you do it beautifully,” Kathlyn said, encouragingly. Wulf thought she even meant it.
“I doubt you remember this,” the second woman said. Her red-brown chin wobbled. “But last summer at one of the processions through the gorge a little boy fell and scraped himself up good. He was mine. Is mine.”
“Of course I remember,” Kathlyn replied at once. “Children are our blessings. I count them all.”
“He talks about you every day,” the woman said in a rush.
And that warm thing inside of Wulf sat there. Getting warmer and less comfortable by the moment as he watched her talk to these women who kept darting glances at him as if they were afraid he’d throw them over his shoulder and make for the eastern islands. But no matter how alarming they found him, they were clearly willing to push through that to talk to Kathlyn.
It was a pattern that repeated again and again throughout the evening.
The aristocrats—the women either wearing metallic dresses or pastels to indicate they were permanently married, the men in those brocaded suits they all seemed to like so much, all of them with questionable hair—were snide. They smiled, but every word they chose had six meanings and felt a lot like attacks after they’d moved on. Meanwhile the real subjects of the kingdom, the people who lived outside the palace down in those villages along the gorge, loved her. And they welcomed the opportunity to tell her so.
Over and over.
Wulf found himself in the unusual position of being largely ignored, when he wasn’t being baited by aristocratic douchebags who clearly didn’t know what a fight was if they thought they could beat him. At anything. That warm sensation inside of him remained, as if it was a part of him now, and he had no idea what the hell it was or what to do about it, so he ignored it. He found himself concentrating on strategy instead.
Because he could read this crowd as well as he read any other he’d encountered, and no matter how foreign so much of their culture was to him. Everyone was terrified of King Athenian. He sat in his corner and glared haughtily around the room, making servants crawl to him and members of his inner circle of aristocrats bend and cavort like clowns to please him. Not that he looked like he could be pleased.
All this when he wasn’t staring at Kathlyn, that is, who was very clearly the people’s favorite.
“Don’t you worry about the things that get whispered down hallways in this palace,” a grandmotherly type told her at one point, patting her hand vigorously while her curly silver hair shook around her. “They have nothing better to do than tear other people down to make their little lives feel better. And outside these walls, no one cares one way or the other about palace affairs.”
Kathlyn murmured her thanks, but the old woman shifted her wise green gaze to Wulf.
“I never thought much of raiders,” she told him, without a shred of healthy fear about her. “Always sneaking around in the night. I don’t like things that sneak, much less in the dark, young man.”
Wulf was certain no one had ever addressed him in that tone, much less called him “young man,” in his life.
“I prefer not to sneak,” he assured her, “when walking right in will do.”
She sniffed, then leaned in. “You could have hurt her and you didn’t. That’s what the people will remember, whatever nonsense they cook up in this sick place, where up is down and right is left. But out there?” She nodded toward the windows. “We’ll remember that you took good care of our princess when you didn’t have to.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Wulf murmured, lazily. “I’m as vicious as they come. Savage to my bones.”
The old woman cackled as she left them, but it was that soft look in Kathlyn’s gaze that he thought might be his undoing.
“We have old women where I come from, too,” he growled at her before she could say something to make that strange warmth in him get worse.
Kathlyn only smiled.
And then one of the guards who’d been trailing around after them all night—keeping an eye on him, Wulf assumed, not the princess—cut in with a summons to join the king.
There was a time when Wulf might have questioned the fact it wasn’t couched as a request, but the interruption felt a little too much like a save to him. There was only so much of Kathlyn smiling at him that any man could be expected to take. And he was the only one who’d had her. He knew exactly how she tasted. He knew how she sounded when she came loud and how it felt when she came quiet.
How the fuck was he supposed to concentrate?
Walking around like a trained douche on a leash was driving him mental, and not for the right reasons. He should have been outraged as a raider. As a king. As himself. But instead, he just wanted to go lock them away somewhere and sink inside of her where no one was watching. He wanted her to sit on his face a while. He wanted to take her from behind so he could fully appreciated that elegant back of hers and the way he fully expected her tits to feel in his hands. He wanted to teach her how to take his cock into her mouth, how to ride him, and every other dirty thing he knew.
He wanted to finally get her naked. Completely naked.
And none of that was helpful right now. Because the last thing he needed with all these people staring at him, waiting for him to explode into barbarian mode and start hacking his way through the crowd, was a boner. He gritted his jaw, thought about unpleasant things like King Athenian, and beat it back.
“So it seems a man is just a man,” King Athenian said when Wulf and Kathlyn finally stood before him. Kathlyn bent her head demurely. Wulf stared straight at the fucker and didn’t do much to contain the murder in his gaze. “For all that raiders claim to be a different breed, put a man in front of a spread set of soft thighs and they’re all the same. Rutting beasts, every one of us.”
“To be clear,” Wulf murmured, keeping his voice easy and cool with a whole lot more effort than it should have required, “we’re talking about your daughter’s thighs, right? That’s not creepy at all.”
Athenian had found his smile again. “Now at last you teach me something interesting about yourself, after so long under my roof. I had no idea a raider king, who fancies himself a harbinger of death and destruction, could be so sentimental.”
“Is it sentimentality?” Wulf replied in the same tone as before, though he let a little laughter creep in for that dose of plausible deniability. “Or is it a little fucking weird that you keep talking about your own daughter like she’s a courtesan? Raiders like a good rut, I grant you. But we generally avoid our own blood when we want to get it on.”
Athenian’s grim eyes glittered as if he was about to break, and Wulf almost welcomed it, no matter that it was still days to the equinox. Five days, to be exact. He felt his body shift internally, getting him ready for any burst of adrenaline he might need. Getting him ready for battle. But once again he remembered where the fuck he was. And what there was st
ill left to do.
He’d never been a distraction before. It turned out, he fucking sucked at it.
“I imagined you might find our style of negotiation to your liking,” Athenian said after a moment, and beamed at him, his gaze oily with hatred. “My new friend.”
“She’s not my daughter,” Wulf murmured, as if Kathlyn wasn’t standing beside him. But because she was, he shifted slightly and held her hand out and away from her, as if he was showing her off to her own father. “But I keep hearing rumors she’s for sale.”
Kathlyn stilled, though her expression didn’t change at all. In his chair, not his hideous throne but a chair he had propped up on a little riser because he was a tiny man who needed that to feel better, King Athenian’s smile widened.
“She is,” he agreed. “Though that is a crass way of putting it.”
“And we’d better not be crass, of course,” Wulf said softly. “That might divert attention from your daughter’s virginal blood on display tonight.”
“You just sampled her,” the king pointed out, in a voice loud enough to encourage his simpering acolytes to move closer, which they did. Of course. “Broke her in well, it appeared. Why would you want a steady diet of the same meal?”
“Peace,” Wulf said, and he even smiled while he said it. As if he knew the meaning of that word. As if there was any such thing in this shithole of a world, where men like Athenian ruled freely and without a shred of honor. “You want your settlements. So do I. Give me your daughter and call us allies and we’ll make it work for both of us.” He let his smile deepen. “It will unite our kingdoms. Isn’t that the point of your royal princesses?”
He thought he felt Kathlyn’s fingers tremble against his, but he didn’t look at her.
“My daughter, the wife of a raider?” King Athenian said it as if Wulf had suggested feeding her to the palace dogs. Wulf imagined Athenian might find that more entertaining. “I hardly know where to begin with such a request. My daughter commands a high price.”
