Enemy Walls

They gave us the Alpha's own chambers, because the law that bound us also expected us to behave bound, and a mated pair did not sleep in separate rooms where a watching pack could count the distance.

The room was bigger than the whole longhouse I'd grown up in, all dark fur and stone and a hearth you could have roasted a stag in. One bed. I looked at it the way I'd look at a snare.

“You can have the bed,” Kane said, from the doorway. He hadn't crossed the threshold. “I'll take the floor by the fire. The pack needs to believe a great many things about us. What happens behind that door is yours to set.”

“Then here are my terms,” I said, because I would rather draw the lines myself than be grateful for his. “You don't touch me unless the pack is watching. You don't ask me about Saltmere's strength, our numbers, our stores. And you don't pretend, when it's just us, that this is anything but what it is.”

“And what is it?”

“A leash,” I said. “With both ends tied to a wolf who hates the other.”

Something moved at the edge of his mouth, not a smile, he didn't seem to have those, but the ghost of where one might go. “Agreed,” he said, and that was the worst of it. I had braced for a tyrant. I kept finding a man who simply did the next reasonable thing, and it made him so much harder to despise.

The nights were the war I hadn't been warned about. The bond did not care about my terms or my brother or my knife. It pulled, low and constant, a hook behind the breastbone that drew tighter every hour he was near. I would lie in that vast bed listening to him breathe by the fire and feel my own wolf strain toward him, whining, furious, wanting to cross the cold floor and curl against his back like she'd done it a thousand years. I dug my nails into my palms until the wanting passed. It always came back.

I made myself say it, the third morning, because not saying it was cowardice. “You killed my brother. Bram. At the Fording.”

Kane went still in the way I was learning meant he felt something and would not show it. “I know whose sister you are,” he said. “I knew before they offered you.” He did not say it was war. He did not say Bram had come for him first, though I would later learn it was true. He did not reach for a single one of the excuses that would have let me hate him cleanly. “I won't tell you it was nothing,” he said. “It wasn't nothing. I carry every wolf I've had to put down to hold this pack. Your brother is one of them. I won't pretend the weight off my own back to make you feel better.”

I had wanted him to lie. A lie I could have used. The truth just sat there in the room with us, unbearable and clean.

That was the day I met Garrick. Kane's war-second, his cousin, broad and grinning and watchful, the kind of wolf who learns your name like he's filing it where it'll cut. He kissed my hand in front of the hall and murmured, low, so only I could hear, “Saltmere green looks well on you. Let's hope it's not the only thing you brought down the mountain.” His eyes went, just once, to the line of my thigh, and then up, smiling, to see if I'd flinched.

I didn't. But I understood, then, that the bond was not the only thing in Vornhold getting tighter by the night, and that if anyone in that hall ever found my mother's knife, it would not be my death alone. It would be the war, back again, and my people in the mud beside Bram.