by Megan Crane
She doubted very much that he was unaware of his own danger. She could sense too much of it on him, as obvious to her as all those long, lean muscles and the marks that covered them. He had to know. It was just that he didn’t seem to care very much that he was in peril.
“And friends share, do they not?” Athenian shifted his attention back to Kathlyn, and she held her breath because she thought if she didn’t, she might sob out loud. “My daughter is the most sought-after female in the western highlands. Because she is mine, of course, but it is more than that. Her beauty is unparalleled, as you can see yourself. As was her innocence, before now.” He waved his hand to Kathlyn. “Do not make me ask you again, daughter. Remove that cloak and show me if you have disgraced me as utterly as it appears you have.”
Kathlyn couldn’t keep herself from shaking, though she hoped she could conceal it from him. It didn’t occur to her to disobey, because there was no point. If she did, he’d simply have the cloak cut from her body, and that would make everything worse. And though there was no way that this was going to end anything but badly, she couldn’t help thinking that the longer she held on to what remained of her dignity, the better.
Kathlyn pushed the hood back from her head and set her fingers to the knot she’d tightened at her throat. She didn’t dare sneak a look at the man who stood there beside her, exuding so much lethal menace and brooding might that she was astonished all over again that a guard didn’t have a gun to his throat.
Then the knot was undone. And there was no reason to stall. There was no amount of time that was going to make this any better. She pushed the cloak back over her shoulders and let it slide down the length of her arms. Instead of letting it drop to the floor, she caught it there on her wrists and held it.
And she knew she should have cowered in shame. In abject humiliation that her father should see her like this. That anyone should see her like this. That the guards who stood at the back of the room could see even what little they could glimpse from their angle.
You chose your death, she reminded herself. She’d done it when she’d decided to visit Wulf’s rooms, as surely as if she’d impaled herself on a blade. Now you must choose how to live out what’s left of your life.
Kathlyn did not shrink from her father’s dark glare. From the condemnation she could feel like a blow. On the contrary, she held her head high, and while he glared down at her—at her exposed breasts and that gauzy thing she knew clung to her hips and hid nothing—she lifted up her chin as if she was daring him to climb down off that throne and strike her.
It had never been so quiet in the throne room before. Kathlyn felt frozen into place, barely able to breathe. Crafted of the same stone beneath her feet. She not only didn’t want to look away from her father, she couldn’t. She could see her death there, lurking at the back of his grim, hateful eyes. She knew without a shred of doubt that he was thinking through all the various ways he could hurt her. Hurt her, shame her, and make her pay. All before he got around to the business of killing her—maybe right here in the same place where he killed her mother.
Maybe tonight.
“I thought you said this was a disgrace,” Wulf murmured in that powerful voice of his, lazy and amused at once. “You must have a different definition of that word on the mainland than we do back in the eastern islands.”
King Athenian took his time shifting his gaze from Kathlyn’s. When he did, when he glanced over at Wulf, Kathlyn let out the breath she’d been holding. But she knew she wasn’t safe. Far from it.
“I have no doubt in the well-appointed caves where you gnaw on bones and congratulate yourselves on the refuse you’ve scavenged from honest men,” her father said to Wulf, “a daughter turned whore is a reason to celebrate. But not here, I’m afraid.”
“Father, please. I’m not a whore,” Kathlyn whispered, but her voice got caught in her throat. She doubted anyone heard her—except the powerful raider who still stood there with such recklessness to her right. His tumult of a blue gaze swept over her, leaving her reeling, then returned to her father.
“I don’t have a daughter.” Wulf’s tone was light, but there was a strange, sharp edge beneath it that made her glance at him, expecting to see something on his face. But there was nothing. And still, Kathlyn was surprised her father didn’t seem to have heard what she had. “But I don’t keep pussy on a leash. For one thing, that shit has claws. And sooner or later those claws are going to end up on your dick, friend. You can count on it.”
Her father’s eyes lit up with a kind of glee that made Kathlyn’s spine ache with the horrible chill of it.
“The apocalypse must be upon us,” King Athenian said, as if he deeply relished every moment of this. He likely did. “Savages spout philosophy before my throne while my daughter drags my name through the filth of the palace stews. What will be next? Will the sun drip blood?”
Next to her, Wulf turned, and Kathlyn could feel him studying her, but she kept her own eyes on her father. And yet, for once in her life, while standing in her father’s presence, she didn’t actually know if he was the most frightening person in the room.
“I don’t understand the problem,” Wulf said after a moment. “She looks like a camp girl. That’s only upsetting if you’re not really a man.”
“Congratulations, daughter,” King Athenian replied, that oily smugness in his tone, as if he hadn’t heard Wulf’s insult. “That’s raider for whore.”
“It’s raider for a valued member of the clan,” Wulf corrected him. His voice was mild but a quick glance showed her that his gaze was not. At all. “Clan is everything. Without clan, we would truly be savages, tempted to cut down our own blood and call it just. Who could live under such conditions?”
Her father actually chuckled in his mirthless way at that obvious dig.
“Father,” she said again, hoping to divert her father’s attention from the raider king, who was clearly setting his own kamikaze course with such recklessness. Then she wondered what the hell she was thinking, trying to save this man. When she had no hope whatsoever of saving herself. “I am still intact. I haven’t been ruined. Have my attendants check me right now if you don’t believe me. You’ll see.”
“Who saw you like this?” Her father sounded kind then, which made everything worse. “How many guards? How many of the women in the courtyard?”
Her stomach sank. She knew what he was getting at—it was already too late. She was thought ruined, so she was ruined. That was how it went. No one would care that it was unfair. That she could prove her innocence. No one listened to the complaints of a girl who’d allowed herself to be ruined.
“It was your wife Lorna who started this confusion, sire,” she told him, struggling to keep her voice even. Smooth. Serene at all costs. “I only wanted to see what it was like.” She gestured at herself and tried to pretend that she wasn’t essentially naked. “I see these women creeping down the hallways. Hiding in the shadows right here in the palace with the rest of us. I wondered who they were.”
Up on his imposing throne, the king shifted in his chair and fixed her with that eerie, evil smile of his that had never failed to make her feel cold and alone. It was the same today, but she kept talking anyway.
She could choose this, she reminded herself fiercely. She could choose how she ended. If she could do nothing else, if she couldn’t save herself, she could make herself proud.
“There’s such a vast gulf between the women in the shadows and the women in the wives’ quarters,” Kathlyn continued resolutely. “I thought if I tried on the clothes they wore, I might understand them. And then maybe when I found myself in my permanent marriage, at your convenience, I could find a way to help them.”
“Help them.” Her father laughed at her. “You want to help them.”
“I never intended to take this experiment outside my rooms,” Kathlyn told him resolutely, as if she’d been planning it for months, along with a campaign to aid courtesans. Instead of sneaking off to offe
r herself to prisoners. “And I certainly never intended for Lorna to run into me and call the guards on me.”
Her father only shook his head at her. “I had no idea you had such a flair for storytelling. Yet one more missed opportunity.” He made a faint clucking sound. “And now what am I to do with you?”
Again, Wulf moved beside her. Kathlyn couldn’t help thinking of how still he’d been back in the stone tower. And then how he’d burst into movement with such focus and intent. She was certain that he wasn’t shifting around like that involuntarily or restlessly. That it was on purpose—and she didn’t know why she kept wanting to think that he was trying to help her. That wasn’t what men did. She’d learned that a thousand times. In as many ways.
“Is this where you plan to enact a father’s discipline?” Wulf asked, sounding even more bored than before. “Because once again I must remind you, I’m not a member of your family. This does not concern me.” He let out a laugh. “Though it does amuse me that a king of such might as you claim to possess cannot seem to keep a mere woman under control.”
That was a mistake. Kathlyn knew it was a mistake. It was a threat and a dare and there was no man on earth less likely to respond to either of those things well than her father—
The king watched them for a moment, his gaze shifting from Wulf to Kathlyn and then back again.
When he smiled again, it made Kathlyn feel sick.
“I’ve had the most marvelous idea,” Athenian said, sounding delighted. His cold eyes gleamed. “My daughter needs a mounting ceremony. It should have happened years ago, but I had high hopes that her innocence would command a high price. That is no longer a concern.”
Kathlyn’s stomach lurched, then seem to sink down to her feet. For a moment she thought she might actually throw up. She swallowed the urge back and somehow, somehow, managed to straighten her spine.
“You say ‘mounting ceremony,’ ” Wulf drawled, as if he’d heard the term before today. “But between you and me, I think you can admit that it’s just a big ceremony arranged around a little fucking.”
“Oh, yes,” the king said with great relish, nodding as if an abiding mystery had been solved to his satisfaction at last. As if he’d planned all of this himself and this was the outcome he’d always wanted. “You’ll do.”
He lifted his hand and motioned for his guards at the back of the hall. Kathlyn could hear them leap into action, their booted feet beating out a drumming sound against the marble floor. As if they were deliberately matching the panicked beating of her heart. Or the pulse rocketing through her veins, panic and worry at a fever pitch. She wrenched her gaze away from her father’s and dared to look at Wulf standing to her right, but she didn’t know what she expected. It wasn’t as if she could read him.
The raider king gazed back at her, cool blue and impassive, his lack of concern etched into every one of the fascinating planes and angles of his face. And it was as if she couldn’t keep up with the sequence of events, even though she’d lived them. Was still living them. They catapulted through her mind, one image after the next, until she felt as if she was on some sort of ancient carousel. Like that ancient one they had in Missoula, Montana, that her father had insisted she ride one summer as a gesture of his goodwill toward the king of the Bitterroot Valley. Round and round and round, until the world looked slick and misshapen. She remembered running down that hallway in the stone tower earlier, pushing through Wulf’s door, throwing herself inside and still imagining that somehow this was the choice that she was making. That this was what she wanted when she’d learned at Wulf’s first touch that she’d been woefully naïve about a great many things. Raiders. Men. Sex itself.
And the consequences of all of those things.
But now her father had taken all of it, the way he took everything. And all she had left was the carousel inside her head, images bleeding one into the next, and the certainty of her own doom. Drawing closer by the moment.
Kathlyn pulled in a quick breath, horrified when she was unable to conceal the small sound she made as she did it. As if she was in pain. She didn’t think her father heard her, so high above her on his throne, but she knew that Wulf did. Because something blazed in his frigid gaze then, deep inside all that icy blue. It was hot. It felt like a punch. And more, she felt it deep in her belly and even lower again, as if he was still touching her.
She reminded herself that she had chosen this. All of this. Maybe not this way. Maybe not involving the great cruelty that her father had just decided to make them both suffer, on a whim. He wasn’t giving her to Wulf out of the goodness of his heart. If he’d had the slightest idea that she wasn’t as terrified by that prospect as she should have been, he’d call the whole thing off in an instant. The reality was that he expected her to be sickened and shamed by the fact he was giving her to a barbarian. He likely hoped she would be literally torn to pieces on the mounting stage, with all the stronghold as witness. And he obviously wanted to insult Wulf, who could not possibly know the importance of the ritual or the fact that it was already an insult for one king to give another a daughter who was now damaged goods.
But she’d chosen to put on these clothes today. She’d decided to sneak out of the wives’ quarters. Unlike that nauseating carousel in Missoula that had given her a headache, she’d chosen this ride. Sight unseen.
Whatever happened now, it would be better than what would have happened if the raider king had never come here. She already knew how that ended. There would have been a different mounting ceremony. There would have been winter marriages like everyone else’s—though Kathlyn wondered, now, at all the stories she’d heard her whole life, because she hadn’t even had sex and she’d found the whole thing overwhelming. So . . . physical. And even once she’d been married off to an appropriate candidate—one of the two she thought her father would be likely to consider at all, given their wealth and territory, one in the Great Red Desert to the south and another on the Arizona coast—there was no escaping the same, inevitable end. Her mother’s crumpled body, unnaturally still, and a spreading pool of red on the marble floor.
The guards arrived on either side of Wulf then, but he took his time looking away from Kathlyn. And she couldn’t believe how unconcerned he seemed. As if he was the one barely tolerating her father instead of the other way around. He gazed up at King Athenian, looking nothing like a prisoner. He looked amused, in his particularly ferocious way.
“Did I imagine that you extended me an invitation to sample your daughter in front of all your friends and family while you all sit around and pretend that’s not weird?” he asked. “Because I’m happy to accept that great chore, if no one else in your kingdom can man up to the task.” He tilted his head toward the guard nearest him. “But this smacks of a return to jail. If this is how you treat all your visitors who selflessly volunteer to help you, you might want to consider that the reason the concept of ‘friends’ seems so foreign to you . . . is you.”
Athenian settled in his great chair as if he were watching the entertaining troupes perform one of their shows for him. And Kathlyn could see that he was in his element now. Of course he was. Nothing made the man happier than cruelty. Particularly if he thought the recipient was blissfully unaware of how very much he planned to hurt them.
“It is for your own protection, my new friend,” he said after a moment, that awful smile of his taking over his face. “I would not be able to sleep if I imagined my newest ally roamed the palace unprotected.”
Wulf’s hard mouth moved slightly in the corner. “I’m touched,” he murmured. “You’re a friend indeed.”
Athenian’s face was wreathed in smiles then. It was her father at his most dangerous.
“Night has fallen,” he said, nodding toward the small, high windows that only existed to make the gold glitter and bounce when there was sunlight. “And as you know, my people are predisposed to consider raiders the stuff of a child’s nightmare.” He shrugged. “I would hate to find you skewered to a wa
ll because a subject thought an old nightmare had come to life before his eyes.”
Kathlyn was sure she heard Wulf laugh, though if so, it was a low sound. Almost under his breath. “I am moved by your hospitality.”
Athenian nodded at Kathlyn then, still smiling. “We’ll plan the mounting ceremony in two weeks’ time. Best to get it over with as quickly as possible, so I can absorb the stain on my name long before the September equinox rolls around again.”
And Wulf didn’t know, Kathlyn understood, as her pulse seemed to drown out the world in her temples. Her throat. He didn’t know that scheduling a mounting ceremony so abruptly, much less at this time of year, was alone an insult to him. That what her father was offering was a quick, embarrassing ceremony of shame. Someone of Kathlyn’s stature would normally plan for a mounting ceremony at the June solstice. It would be announced as soon as the gates opened at the upcoming March equinox, and every noble across the western kingdoms would be invited. It would be a lavish affair and a great feast.
A hasty ceremony, conducted before the equinox, in the privacy of this palace with only the subjects who had wintered here as witness, meant that Athenian expected a bloodless mounting and all the whispers that went with it. And Kathlyn understood then that her father had not missed all that danger and power in Wulf. He’d seen it. And while he likely had plans to kill him for that—and with great relish—he was clearly planning to take enormous pleasure in humiliating him first.
And she wasn’t certain why she felt more sick about that than her own fate, at the moment. Or perhaps it was easier to think about someone else—because what was the point in thinking about what would happen to her? She already knew. No matter what steps there were along the way and how degrading or humiliating they might be, she already knew.
There was a part of her that had expected this since she was ten and had watched her mother die right here. Right in front of her. There was a part of her that had never anticipated living as long as she already had.