Page 73 of The Wolf Queen

I’d do it all again.

Not taking their strength, I couldn’t allow for that. Every time I blinked I saw the lesions forming on their skin, heard their grunts of pain. Never that. But that intense need to protect them? With it came something else. A need to hide what Callum had told me.

This was all my fault.

That woman who’d thrown her dead baby at me the way someone might rotten food at a person locked up in the stocks for the day, it made sense now. Somehow she’d known. There would be no Reavers if I wasn’t born and Callum wouldn’t have brought them to Strelae if I hadn’t crossed the border. Every death, every rape, every act of destruction, it lay so heavily on my soul, staining it black, blacker than the fur of the wolf I’d seen in my dreams.

Which begged this question.

“How did we get out of Snowmere?” I asked, but while my mates went to answer, I focussed on Bryson. Something glittered in his gaze, and it took a little for me to recognise what it was. Satisfaction. That small smirk of a smile, it said everything.

“My men and I got the lot of you out,” he answered.

“No, that’s not the whole story,” I said. “You wouldn’t have been able to carry four men and one woman through the entirety of Snowmere without being torn apart by Reavers. It would’ve been hard enough to do if we were all functioning, so I ask again, how did we get out of Snowmere?”

My mates shifted as one, clustering closer and staring at the king, as if that would force an answer from him, but Strelans didn’t have much luck getting Granian kings to do anything they wanted. Bryson merely stiffened, those golden eyes glowing brighter.

“Rest now,” he insisted. “I’ve been holed up in this room for too long. The council is awaiting word from me and the longer I spend not answering their questions, the more time my brother has a chance to recast himself as hero of the story. This is my chamber. No one will disturb any of you while you stay here. But…” I hung on that word. He knew I would. “When you are ready to find out how the Granians really won the war against the Strelans, then come and find me.”

I was crawling towards the end of the bed as soon as he said the words, but Bryson paid me no mind, sweeping from the rooms, every inch the king. I didn’t get far anyway, my mates grabbing me and pulling me back, but for the first time I had to stop myself from fighting free.

“What happened?” I asked in a hoarse whisper. “What happened?”

“We don’t know, Darcy.” Dane pulled me to him, setting me across his lap and holding me close, my eyes falling closed on automatic. He stroked his hand up and down my body. “We don’t know.”

This should’ve been reassuring, feeling him against me, hearing his heart beating slow and true, but as soon as I closed my eyes the darkness was summoned and there he was. A massive wolf the size few had ever seen. Big enough to stride across plains in seconds, large enough to swallow the world.

Chapter42

“Darcy!”

Some time later, my head jerked up off the pillow with a start, and as I did, I saw a small person appear. Jan launched herself at us, then clambered over each one of my mates, groans marking each place she shoved her knees or her elbows, right before she nestled down in a space she created beside me.

“I know you need your rest,” Selene said, appearing at the end of the bed, “but the little princess was insistent.”

“You didn’t make me breakfast,” Jan said, listing my sins. “Nor my lunch, and you didn’t make me have yet another bath.”

“Terrible lapses of judgement, each and every one of them,” I said, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “Can you ever forgive me?”

“If you tuck me into bed and tell me another story of the princess with the swords,” she said, because she knew her worth. Jan had no issue with asking for what she wanted and I smiled against her hair at that. I barely asked my parents for anything, knowing the answer would always be no.

“So what should happen today?” I asked her as I rolled out of bed. My mates moved too, though I caught the moment each one of them winced or required extra effort to do so.

“She should become queen,” Jan said decisively.

“But if she’s queen, she can’t have any more adventures,” I said with a smile.

“I will have adventures when I become queen.”

Jan stared at me then, her eyes sparkling with mischief, so why did I see more than that? Something else, something—

“You’re not still going on about that?” Del appeared at Orla’s side, looking freshly washed and combed and ready for bed. He shot me a long-suffering look, something I’d seen a lot of on his face. “She used to drive us all mad, prancing around the village with her mother’s best tablecloth as a cloak. Ordering everyone around, being a proper little madam, she was.”

“Did you, young wolf?” Axe asked Jan and she giggled when he tapped her nose.

“You knew you were a queen before we even met you, huh?” I asked her, wiggling my fingers, ready to tickle her.

“Yes, I saw it in my dreams.”

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