by Megan Crane
“All this talk and all these threats, and yet here I stand. If you are so sure that I’m alone here, that killing me would be nothing more than the work of a moment and would have no consequences, then again, I invite you to stop boring me.” That shimmered there between them, hot and lethal. And Wulf was close enough to see the king’s nostrils flare. “Or,” Wulf murmured, “we could negotiate. I am a far better ally than I am an enemy.”
He was prepared for any outcome, he told himself. He welcomed it.
But it was at that point that a servant appeared in his peripheral vision. The obsequious man hurried past Wulf and headed toward the king, climbing up the great gold and silver edifice to put his mouth to the king’s ear.
Wulf studied his adversary, watching the strangest expression move over the king’s face. Fury, white-hot and unmistakable. Then something far more disturbing. The servant straightened, then stood there before Athenian as if waiting for a reaction. And Wulf didn’t think he was the only one who expected the king to haul off and cuff the servant upside his head.
But he didn’t. He sat there a moment, clearly turning something over in his head.
“Bring her before me,” Athenian said.
The servant flinched, then darted a glance toward Wulf where he stood at the foot of the throne. Still waiting. “But . . . sire . . .”
The king only slid that dark, dead gaze to his servant. And that was all it took. The servant swallowed audibly, bowed hurriedly, and then removed himself from the throne as quickly as possible. Wulf kept his own gaze trained on the king, but he was aware of the sound of the servant’s feet as he walked swiftly back over the marble floor. He heard the huge, gold-encrusted doors open at the back of the throne room. And then more booted feet to announce the arrival of more guards.
Wulf turned to look when the king shifted his calculating gaze from Wulf and directed his attention to the far end of the room.
He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t this.
Kathlyn. His princess.
And maybe there was a little too much emphasis inside him on the fact he really, truly believed she was his. He ignored that.
She was still dressed the way she had been when he had last seen her. She was flanked by two guards who gripped their guns tight but didn’t touch her. What was more extraordinary was that she held her head high, too, still dressed in her courtesan clothes, and Wulf did not need someone to catch him up on the rules of palace life here at ground zero for compliant bullshit to know that no good could come of her appearing before her father like this. That this was bad all around.
They marched her down the length of the room. Kathlyn kept that elegant chin of hers tilted up like a weapon, and he saw the exact moment that she saw him standing there. She didn’t pause. She didn’t trip or noticeably catch her breath, which was good. Her eyes darkened, that was all, and she kept walking.
And Wulf could not have said why that felt like her soft hands all over his body. In all the ways he’d wanted them before. In all the ways he planned to have them before his time here ended.
“I see you’ve decided to whore yourself out, daughter,” King Athenian called jovially from the throne, sick fuck that he was, and it lit a new fire inside of Wulf, dark and possessive and all the more dangerous because he’d never experienced anything quite like it before. “And what luck. I have here a savage, barbarian raider who, if the tales are true, loves nothing more than availing himself of the talents of the nearest available slag.”
7.
Kathlyn thought that she’d gone numb, and that was a good thing. She wanted to be numb. From the top of her head to her bare toes. As numb as humanly possible, frozen solid and wholly untouchable all the way through.
Numb was a gift.
Numb had allowed her to stand there, with as much dignity as she could muster, when the guards had responded to Lorna’s screams. When too many of the other women had crowded into the back hall to see her there, dressed in these clothes that branded her as surely as if they’d all watched her give her innocence away to some random man in the shadows.
The clothes accused her. They made her a whore whether she was one or not, and as everybody knew, that was a change of circumstances that only ran one way. There was no coming back from it. Innocence could have a number of variations, especially in the western highlands, but a whore was a whore was a whore.
Dressed the way she was, the truth didn’t matter.
The guards hadn’t known what to do with her, of course. If any other woman from the wives’ quarters have been caught like this, dressed in such a way that clearly indicated some sort of assignation with a man not her husband and certainly not allowed, they would not have hesitated. They would have hauled her away, thrown her in a jail cell as they determined the severity of her sins, and no doubt amused themselves with her as they liked. After all, it was a very fine line between a respectable woman and any old courtesan the guards could use as they pleased. A thin, blurry line, as all the women pretended not to know. It only took one mistake, and once that mistake was made, there was no going back. Ever.
But Kathlyn was not just any woman.
The guards ordered the clamoring crowd of women back into the courtyard, and Kathlyn had known better than to watch them go. She didn’t want to see speculation in all those eyes. She didn’t want to see the glee or the malice, or the proof of something she’d always suspected—that she had far fewer friends here than she’d liked to pretend. And she knew that if she so much as looked at that spiteful, hateful Lorna again, she might lunge for the other woman’s throat.
Kathlyn had never had a violent impulse in her life. She hadn’t dared, not in this cold and brutal place where violence hung heavy from all the ceilings and dripped inexorably down the walls. But tonight, she thought she might have turned over a brand new, bloodthirsty leaf.
Like father, like daughter, she told herself. And that notion was horrifying enough to keep her still.
No one touched her. No one would dare, she knew, but that was because she’d so long been protected by her father’s interest in preserving her virginity. How long could she expect that to last now that her virginity was assumed to be gone? Women disappeared all the time in the kingdom. Princesses became the wives of kings, failed to give them babies, and then were gone. Some thought the kings killed them. Others were sure the women were banished to the stews, in palaces where they’d once been pampered and adored, as punishment for the infertility that plagued the earth in these drowned years so long after the Storms.
Either way, where there had once been girls in gowns of bright colors, there were now only ghosts.
Kathlyn told herself there was no use thinking about those things. Not then. Not when it could only prick at her and threaten that numbness inside that she clung to.
Not until her fate was decided.
The guards talked amongst themselves for a while, debating how best to handle this unusual situation. They made no attempt to hide their conversation from her, but Kathlyn wasn’t really surprised by the substance of the debate. She could have predicted it. They weren’t particularly concerned about what might happen to the most famous virgin princess in the western highlands now her true moral character was known. Certainly not. She had no doubt that they’d already made a list of which men could get a taste of her first now that she was no longer the squeaky clean untouched virgin who no man dared touch upon pain of death. That wasn’t something that needed arguing; it was only a question of the order in which they’d sample her. What they were debating right there in the hallway was who would take the risk of informing on her to her father. Because every single one of the guards who crowded there behind the women’s courtyard and made no attempt to look away from her bare legs justly feared that, in this case, her father would kill the messenger of this bad news. He’d killed other messengers for far less.
And he might kill Kathlyn on the spot, too, which the guards agreed would be a terrible waste. Bu
t she couldn’t let herself think about that then. It would let in a little fear and she needed ice. She needed to stay frozen solid. Numb all the way through.
Eventually they moved her. She was gruffly ordered to put the hood back up over her head, and it was almost sad how grateful she was for that kindness. She knew it wasn’t for her—that there was no possibility that these gruff, cruel-eyed men were attempting to spare her feelings or preserve whatever was left of her modesty—but she was relieved all the same. They took her in a circuitous path through the back halls of the palace, once again protecting her even when she knew they were really only trying to safeguard themselves from any potential backlash.
Her father was in his throne room, the headache-inducing shiny chamber where he indulged his worst impulses. They stood outside a moment as one of the aides who stood at the door to preserve the king’s privacy while he ran roughshod over anyone unlucky enough to be called before him ran to tell the king what had happened. When the servant returned, he was pale. Which could as easily mean the king was in a fine mood as it could mean there were entrails at his feet.
The doors were thrown open and the guards hustled her inside. As ever, the throne room made her dizzy. A little bit seasick. Light bounced off light, gold and silver laced together and far brighter than they should have been, because her father loved the idea of blinding the unwary with his eminence, but all Kathlyn ever saw when she came here was blood.
By now she knew it was nothing but a phantom memory, a ghost, but it didn’t seem to matter. She was sure every time she set foot in here that she could smell that coppery scent on the floor where her mother had once stood. Her mouth felt flooded with salt the way it had been then. All those tears she’d choked down and buried with the screams she’d kept inside of her, in case her father saw and cut her down as well.
Even her numbness couldn’t protect her from that. Too many ghosts. Too many memories. Copper and salt, whether she liked it or not.
But tonight there was the gold whirl she expected, that dizzy shower of too many gleaming things, and then in the middle of the sick spin there was Wulf.
Wulf.
For a terrible instant, all the shields that Kathlyn kept in place around her shattered. She didn’t hear whatever awful thing her father was saying in his friendliest, deadliest voice. And she was nothing like numb. She was blindingly, breathlessly raw. And she ached, everywhere, because after all these years and all the thousands of ways she’d learned to keep herself safe by wanting nothing, she wanted. She longed. She yearned. She could feel Wulf’s mouth on hers as if he’d tattooed her with it, so commanding and wild. As if he’d changed her that profoundly and everyone could see it.
And she knew that the man who stood there on the other end of the room, barefoot and bare chested with nothing but a pair of skintight black trousers clinging to his narrow hips and an unholy fire in his icy blue eyes, saw it. More than simply saw it. She felt the room clench its raucously gold fist around her, and she was certain that he didn’t simply see her—he saw every single thing she was trying so hard not to feel in that searing moment.
Every single thing. Things she’d never felt before in her life. Things she’d have thought she didn’t know how to feel. Things she should have hidden—that she would have hidden if she could.
Her father was speaking in that disturbingly fake friendly way of his that always made her blood chill. Kathlyn jerked her gaze from Wulf’s and concentrated on walking across the gleaming marble floor toward her certain doom without tripping or giving away the faintest hint of what she might be feeling inside. She concentrated on her balance so that the panic that hovered all around her couldn’t get its red-tipped claws beneath her skin. Panic would not serve her here, it would only delight her father and make this worse.
If it was possible for this to be any worse.
She kept her head high, as if she were walking across a ballroom floor dressed in her gold gown, the envy of all the silly girls who looked at her and imagined a princess must have somehow transcended the grim lives they all led. When it had been clear to Kathlyn for far too long that there was no transcending any of this. There was only surviving it, if possible, unlike her own mother—and even that seemed more like a fantasy with every passing year.
Particularly today.
Kathlyn stopped when the guards did. They bowed to her father and then backed away—quickly, she thought, before they could be blamed for any part of this, the cowards—leaving her barefoot and exposed on the marble floor.
Barefoot, exposed, and entirely too aware of the raider king who stood several feet away, all that heat and power emanating from him in such a way that she was shocked her father was allowing him to stand there before him. That King Athenian hadn’t already killed him for the temerity of being so obviously and unmistakably more powerful than he was, at least physically.
But she didn’t dare so much as glance Wulf’s way. She kept her gaze trained on the jewel-encrusted arm of the throne, so it appeared as if she was looking at the king without her having to actually do it, a trick she’d perfected during those dreary years when he’d made her spend her days standing here in front of him—inches from where he’d killed her mother. To prove her obedience, he’d told her, time and again.
When she’d known full well it was nothing but torture.
All this time, Kathlyn had never been anything but obedient. Even while her father had tested her and tormented her, simply because he could. Because he found it entertaining. All this time, she’d endured. But none of that mattered, because she’d been seen in these clothes.
And maybe it was futile, and silly besides, but she could admit that she took some small comfort from the fact Wulf was so near. That whatever her father did to her tonight, there would be a witness. A fierce and powerful witness who might manage to land a blow or two on this kingdom on his way to his own death. Even if it was a raider king who could not possibly care that she was so doomed, it made her feel . . . Well. Not better. But less alone.
“Stand before me,” her father ordered in that deceptively cheerful way of his. She knew it was an invitation to peer into her own grave. She forced herself to look at him anyway, and it was far, far worse than she’d imagined. He was smiling, which was always terrifying. But worse than that was the rage she could see in his eyes, dark and frigid, with the death he’d always promised her gleaming bright in them. Almost drowning out the usual malice. “Remove that cloak. And show me just how far you’ve fallen tonight, in full view of the whole of the women’s courtyard.”
She had the stray thought that it was the public nature of this that made him furious—but she brushed that off. That was likely part of it. But it wasn’t as if her father needed an excuse to unleash his cruelty.
“Father,” she said then, quickly. It was a calculated risk. Sometimes he liked to be reminded that he was her parent. Other times, he wanted only to be acknowledged as her sovereign. The only constant was that she was almost always wrong when she picked one over the other. “There’s been a horrible mistake.”
“The only mistake that I can think of is that I didn’t lock you up years ago,” her father said. He smiled, sending a surge of frigid cold all through her, making her toes so numb she was afraid she’d fall over. “Not a mistake I’ll make again.”
“Father, please—”
His smile widened, and made her think of fangs. The sharp, sharp teeth of the wolves she was sure she could hear howling out there in the dark, even this late in the winter. As if they knew. Or maybe that was just what was happening inside of her, terrible and lonely and inevitable, all at once.
“Your king has given you an order.” His smile deepened and became all the more sickening in contrast to those dark and dreadful things in his gaze. “I suggest you obey it.”
Kathlyn took a breath and thought, now or never. But she didn’t move. She could picture it all in her head. A quick turn, the run across the floor, maybe a banshee scream to make her int
entions known and to force the guards to raise those guns and end all of this at last—but she couldn’t seem to move.
“As entertaining as this family drama is,” Wulf drawled into the thick, tense silence, almost as if he knew what she was trying to make herself do, “it should surely be something you conduct in private, should it not?”
It took Kathlyn a stunned moment to realize he was actually addressing her father. Directly. In that tone. He actually sounded bored. Bored. Not grateful to remain alive in this terrible room. Not in the least awed or overcome. Bored.
That was so astonishing—and made so little sense, so far outside the realm of her experience was it—that she found herself pulling in a deeper breath than before. She doubted she could find that numbness again, but she pushed back the misery and that sharp-edged horror that had almost swept her down. That had almost made her attempt a kamikaze run straight at her father’s trigger-happy guards.
She had no idea why Wulf had spoken and broken that tense moment. Kathlyn cautioned herself not to imagine that he’d meant to rescue her. He’d protected her from the guards earlier, but it must have occurred to him that no good could possibly come of being discovered with Princess Kathlyn, the king’s only daughter, in his rooms.
It suggested that he wasn’t specifically protecting her here, either. That he really was as bored as he sounded.
If she was numb the way she should have been, she chided herself, she wouldn’t have felt a thing. Certainly not that heavy weight that seemed to sink down and settle in her gut.
“I was so certain that we had become friends,” her father was saying in one of his more upsettingly affable voices. But at least it wasn’t directed at her this time.
Kathlyn snuck a look at Wulf, who was somehow managing to give off the impression that he was lounging somewhere—possibly on his own throne, or perhaps on a bed of furs somewhere—rather than standing there in bare feet he didn’t appear to notice should have been cold, hauled before a king who very clearly intended to kill him.