by Megan Crane
Because it was proof.
11.
The first assassin came alone.
It was sometime after midnight, and Wulf had not yet taken to the halls for his nightly attempt to find a way into the king’s wing, where he was certain the tunnels had to be located. He’d left his fire going in the outer room and was training in the cold stone bedroom, practicing his bladecraft and interspersing it with exercises that used his own body weight to stress and shape his muscles. Captivity was no excuse to let himself slip.
And if he was using exercise as much to keep his princess out of his head as to improve and hone his skills, well. That was between him and his unruly asshole of a cock.
This time he heard no approaching footsteps out in the hall. His first inkling that he had a visitor came when he heard the outer door to the hallway open, that faint little scrape that he’d taught himself to listen for. And his first thought was not an attack—it was Kathlyn.
Who had spent a whole lot more time cluttering up his thoughts than he liked. Or was prepared to entirely admit to himself.
But his surprisingly fierce and dangerously soft princess did not have a heavy, measured tread against an unforgiving stone floor. And she did not creep up into places. She would not have closed the door behind her almost soundlessly, and he was sure he would’ve heard her breathing—or not breathing—just as loudly.
Or being her usual princess-y, imperious self even when she thought she was dressing down and blending with the peasants.
Wulf was on instant alert, despite the smile that threatened to overtake him at the thought of Kathlyn. The way it kept doing. Even though he wanted it to stop.
Focus, fucker, he growled at himself. It was all fun and games until some sad little mainland bitch took him down with a lucky shot because he wasn’t paying attention. And Wulf had no intention of going out like that, thank you.
Not like that. And certainly not here.
His boots made no noise as he moved across the floor to stand to one side of the wide opening into his bedroom. He knew he had the advantage, because whoever was coming at him would have to wait for their eyes to adjust as they came in from the firelit outer room to the dark bedroom. Wulf had already prepared his bed, as he did every night, with enough bulk beneath the furs to suggest that he was lying there.
As if he would sleep soundly in a prison.
He went still as the stone behind him. Then he waited.
The lanky punk bitch who tiptoed—not all that quietly—into his room a moment or so later was an insult. Wulf watched in outrage as the remarkable dumbass crept up to the foot of the bed, never bothering to look around. Not even pausing to check out the shadows, so certain was he that his quarry was lying there on the bed like he was wearing a glowing fucking target on his ass.
Wulf held the weight of his favorite blade in his right hand. He felt that same connection he’d always felt, from the tattoos that wound down and around his right arm, to his grip on the hilt of his blade, to the long, sharp, gleaming blade that did his bidding as long as he treated it with the respect it deserved. He felt connected to all the generations of raiders who had gone before him. The men who had started the raider clans after the Storms, when the ancestors of mainland pansies like this one had worshiped whatever gods the rich assholes and corrupt priests had put in front of them, hoping that might fix things. The drowned world. The endless winters. The wolves and the seas and all the rest of the things that had already wiped out most of humanity and their pissant civilizations.
The clans had taken a more active approach to beating back the darkness.
But Wulf could see at a glance that this was not going to be a situation that required the use of his blade. A little mainlander bitch who looked as if his balls hadn’t dropped yet didn’t deserve to die by Wulf’s hand. He didn’t deserve a level of distinction reserved for epic battles or true enemies of the clan.
He made himself wait. He watched as his would-be assassin slid around the foot of the bed and down one side, somehow failing to notice that there were no sounds of breathing from the pile of furs and wool towels on the bed. No snores, nothing. The dumbass went to the middle of the bed and then . . . just stood there. And kept standing there. And stood there some more, so that if Wulf had actually managed to sleep through an uninvited entrance into these rooms, he would have woken long since and filleted the bitch.
And Wulf didn’t have all night, the way this guy apparently did. He had shit to do.
“Are you going to stand there and stare until dawn?” he drawled from his position against the wall. Wulf had been staring at this idiot’s back for what felt like three new ice ages, and had somehow managed to refrain from cutting him in half. So far. “Or are you going to make a move?”
The other man jumped. A foot or two in the air, at an estimate.
This did not endear him to Wulf, who would have knocked him out for that kind of punk bitch response if the fool had been one of the prospective brothers who wanted to defend the clan one day. He reminded himself that he wasn’t here to teach assholes how to attack him.
The pathetic fuck made a noise that Wulf decided, because he was such a good guy, not to mock since it sounded a whole lot like something a little girl might do. A very wimpy little girl, unlike all the solid, tough raider girls Wulf knew. But he didn’t punch down that far. This idiot was literally beneath him.
More to the point, it was boring.
The little punk pulled out a ridiculous-looking blade from a cheap-ass harness, held it in a grip that a toddler could have disarmed, and rushed at Wulf.
“Tell me you’re kidding,” Wulf said, shaking his head.
But he didn’t think the other man heard him. He kept coming. And Wulf didn’t even push himself away from the wall to meet this supposed attack the way he would have if it had been anything to worry about. He watched, bored and a little offended, as the man kept coming for him. And then, astonishingly, swung out wildly with that blade of his as if he really thought he might hit something.
Wulf sighed. Then he reached out and slapped the man’s hand, sending the blade soaring through the air to clatter across the stone floor, rebounding off the far wall and clattering some more. The fucker tried to land a desperate uppercut—or maybe he did land it, because really, what was the difference?—and Wulf simply let him flail. He reached down and wrapped his hand around the asshole’s throat. Then he lifted the shithead up until he was standing on his toes, or maybe just a little above the floor, eyes bugging out and his fingers clamoring at Wulf’s grip.
“What the fuck do you want?” Wulf asked. Nicely, he thought, all things considered.
There was nothing but sputtering and entirely too much spittle. Wulf grimaced in distaste and dropped him down a little bit. Just a little bit. Enough to get his toes back on the floor and maybe the slightest bit of air.
Though not enough to be anything like comfortable. Especially for someone like this punk, who Wulf could tell had never done any breathing exercises to prepare himself for moments like this one. If a man didn’t know how to handle panic, guess what? He fucking panicked.
“Who sent you?” Wulf asked, but he didn’t really care. And he already knew the answer. “And who did you piss off to be sent on such a ridiculous suicide mission?”
The man’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Wulf sighed. He could see, from that wild look in his would-be attacker’s eyes, like the lack of oxygen to his brain had convinced him he was a hero, how this was going to go. But hope sprang eternal. He released his grip on the other man, just to see.
“Don’t be a dick,” he advised his visitor. “I won’t warn you again.”
“Raider scum!” the man wheezed at him. “I’ll lay your head at my king’s feet!”
“Yeah? You going to saw it off with that fucking piece of shit blade that couldn’t cut through butter?” Wulf shook his head. Pityingly. “That might take some time. And while you’re busy working overtime to give me a pape
r cut, I’m going to kill you with a single blow and throw you out the fucking window.”
“Fuck you!” the man growled, and charged.
It wasn’t even any fun. Wulf took him down without trying hard, and gave him another chance, because that was only sporting. Same results. He held the wild-eyed shithead down, with a knee to his chest, and offered him yet another chance to straighten up and act right. But when the little turd was free again, he went full kamikaze and made a grab for Wulf’s blade.
And there were limits to Wulf’s charitable impulses.
He did it clean and fast, because there was no honor in this. The poor fucker was nothing but cannon fodder, and the only thing to consider here was whether his betters were testing Wulf’s actual prowess—trying to suss out if he was a plant, maybe, or throwing random shit at him to see what stuck—or whether they were trying to insult him outright with this low caliber of an attempt on his life.
He disposed of his visitor out one of the dead-drop windows, as promised, and then waited around a little bit longer to see if the shithead had any friends coming in behind him. When no one showed, Wulf stopped his killer push-up routine and set out for the far side of the palace. He still wasn’t making any progress getting past the king’s guard and it was starting to irk him. He spent time in the king’s wing during the day, with guns in his face and King Athenian always beaming at him like the fucked-up douche he was, but he couldn’t find a way around the bottleneck of guards who actually stayed awake all night to watch the single entrance on the main floor—the only way in and out no matter how many levels deep he went into the stews.
Wulf wasn’t used to failing at things. He didn’t particularly like the sensation.
Other things he wasn’t making any progress on: getting his princess out of his head.
When he finished his usual rounds and had seen more bad, sad, and upsetting mainland fucking than any man should be forced to witness in a single lifetime, down there in the lower levels of the palace where the courtesans brought their customers and suffered their strange desires, he was in the usual black mood the stews kicked up in him. He wasn’t getting anywhere. He was running out of time. And the things that went on in this palace that he was forced to witness while he was looking for the goddamned tunnels that his people were so sure led back up into the gorge to the big hydraulic dam that was the real source of King Athenian’s power . . . pissed him off.
He wasn’t exactly surprised when he found himself outside the women’s courtyard again, as if that could soothe him.
As if she could.
As if that was an urge that made any sense at all, after all these years of handling himself and his bullshit his own damn self.
He stood in the shadows and he stared up at the railing and the windows he knew he could crawl through entirely too easily. And the fact that he wanted that? That he wanted more from Kathlyn because the little taste he’d had wasn’t enough? That he woke up from his light naps here and there with his hand on his blade and one ear cocked toward the door, and she was the only thing in his head?
That there was this thing in him that just wanted to see her—as if it wasn’t simply about getting his dick wet conveniently, which was the only thing he’d ever wanted from a woman before?
All of that shit was what made him turn and head back to his room. It was what made him stand in the hallway outside his little cell for a while, watching the two dumbass sleeping guards, because he was strongly considering waking them up for a little head-clearing scuffle.
It was what made him lie awake in his cold-ass bed, hands beneath his head, playing and replaying the memory of her sweet, soft cries as she’d come and come and come all over him. . . .
And worse, the way she’d looked at him with her brown eyes, so worried and determined at once, and told him she knew how to suffer.
“Fuck this,” he muttered into the gray dawn.
But that didn’t help.
He repeated it all the next night. This time there were two fuckers trying to take him down, with a little more skill between them, but still no real challenge. Wulf deposited them in the same place as the first guy, went out into the palace, and refused to indulge himself—and his protesting cock, that giant asshole—with another visit to his princess on his way back.
When it was just sex, he told himself, the way it should have been in the first place. When she was nothing more than comfort pussy and he stopped having these weird, irritating flashes of exactly how soft she was. When he got over this bizarre notion that he needed something from her he couldn’t get from any other piece of ass he encountered. Then he could go back, but not before.
No matter how hard that was. Or how much it sucked.
It took about five days of nightly visitors, all of varying degrees of skill but none really any fun for Wulf, before King Douche condescended to mention his disappearing guards.
“It’s the strangest thing,” the king said into the oppressive silence of his absurd dining room. “Members of my guard keep disappearing.”
He was enjoying one of his solo meals, kicked back at the head of the table while insisting Wulf stand there at the foot. Like a manservant, he’d said once, through a broad smile. Only the fact that it was so clearly calculated as a bid for Wulf to lose his shit had kept him from it. Wulf had long since realized that these bizarre meals were meant to be a daily opportunity for him to faint away with envy, or maybe beg for a scrap of meat. Neither of which was likely to occur as long as he drew breath, even if he’d actually been envious. Or hungry.
Athenian’s power had everything to do with the dam behind this stronghold with its attached power station and nearby server farm—the last of its kind on the mainland, as far as anybody knew. And inertia. Wulf didn’t know if he was the sort of asshole who believed his own bullshit or if it had simply never occurred to him, after centuries of his family being just as rich and just as up their own asses, that there was any other possibility but the one where he was the great high ruler of all he surveyed.
“I’m sure you’re not the reason your guards keep bailing on you,” Wulf drawled, as if the fucker had asked him for staffing advice. “Everybody loves the threat of random executions. It’s great for morale.”
“Of course one can never depend on lesser men to fulfill their promises or vows,” Athenian replied, as if that was a common complaint amongst all the monarchs he knew. He studied Wulf. “Surely you have the same problem off in your islands.”
“Not so much.” Wulf crossed his arms over his chest. And reminded himself, for the nine hundredth time today alone, that he couldn’t rip the bastard limb from limb where he sat. He had to wait. He still had to fucking wait. “When a raider makes a vow, he keeps it. Or we keep it for him, and our interpretation is usually a little more strict.”
Athenian took a very long time spearing a tiny, unappetizing-looking shrimp and popping it into his mouth. Then chewing. And chewing. Wulf ordered himself to unclench his jaw. Again.
“These things usually occur more in the summer months,” Athenian said. Eventually. “Much more movement, thinning of troops, and so on. But it is still March. Not yet the equinox, so the gates remain closed and there is nowhere to go. Neither in, nor out. And still, every morning more men have gone missing.”
Wulf offered him a hard smile. “That’s the trouble with involuntary armies,” he pointed out silkily. “You never can tell what they’re loyal to, can you? Saving their own skin—or you.”
“I suppose you’ve circumvented this problem?” The king didn’t bother to conceal that scoffing note in his voice.
“Entirely,” Wulf assured him. “The warrior brotherhood that serves as the clan’s first defense is not chosen at random. It’s neither a duty nor a right. They have to want it. Then they have to earn the privilege to serve in it. There are no defectors.”
“What a renaissance man you are,” the king mused, sitting back in his chair and rubbing at his bare chin with two fingers. “So unex
pectedly wise and so willing to come all this way for the sake of a potential alliance.”
“What are we without our friends?” Wulf asked softly.
“I am more delighted by the day that you’ll be linking yourself to my family forever when you mount my daughter,” Athenian said then, another smile taking over his face and warring with his cold gaze. “I look forward to seeing how a man of your gifts acquits himself on the mounting stage.”
“You mean you want to see how a raider fucks,” Wulf said, keeping his voice even. He was not thinking about mounting Kathlyn in front of this pervert. And all the other assholes that would be watching her, hoping against hope he went berserk and ripped her up, because if his nightly wanderings had taught him anything it was that they were all ghouls who loved nothing more than a spectacle. But he had to shove all of that aside or go for the king’s throat. Those were his choices—and it wasn’t time to take this bitch down. Not yet. “I get it. That should be pretty educational for all of you poor, sad fools here in the middle of all this compliant bullshit.”
“Is that how you see yourself?” Athenian asked. His gaze was dark and grim, in contrast to that ever-widening smile. “A great educator? I confess I’m a bit surprised. I’ve always thought that raiders were primarily experts in two rudimentary areas. Sailing their boats around for maximum dramatic effect and attacking defenseless settlements in search of other men’s stores to steal in the dark of night.”
Wulf didn’t rise to the bait. Of course he didn’t. But it took more and more of his self-control every day—and despite what he’d believed his entire life, he was beginning to think that his self-control was a finite resource. Particularly here.
“You have no idea the lessons I could teach you,” he assured the king, allowing himself a smile that made the other man’s dark eyes gleam with malice. “No idea at all.”
“Wonderful,” King Athenian said after a long moment, threat and dislike so heavy in the air between them that Wulf was surprised he could still breathe. And astounded that he was allowing Athenian to do the same. “I can’t wait to watch you school my daughter. I’m sure it will be marvelously illuminating.”