Page 11 of Roar of the Wild

"The human's no use to me," I said, and it cost me something to say it lightly, to look at her and dismiss her with my voice while the bond howled. "Skin and bone, and I've cooks enough. But I'm short of wolf-stock, and I dislike sending a trader off empty over one unsold female. Let me take the pair together off your hands and I'll make it worth the walk."

Sawa's head turned a fraction. She knew me too well, my sister, andworth the walkfrom a king who haggled over everything was a wrong note, and she'd caught it; I didn't look at her. I named a price that was lavish and climbing, hides and rendered fat and a cache of good flint blades. I watched Karik's scarred face do the greedy arithmetic and land, as I'd known it would, onyes. He'd have haggled a wiser man up further. He took the overpayment for a fool's generosity and a king's whim, which is exactly what I needed him to think it was, and within the span of a hundred heartbeats the thing was done. The two women were mine in the eyes of the pride, and Karik of the Broken Ridge was being walked back down through mysettlement toward the edge of my land with his profit on his back.

Only then, with his back going away through my settlement, did I breathe properly for the first time since she'd stepped off the wolf.

Mine,said something in me, warm as a hearth, and I distrusted it even as it filled me, because I distrusted everything that felt this good, having learned the hard way that nothing given to me freely ever came without an invoice. But she was here, on my mound, and she was safe now in a way she hadn't been a hundred heartbeats ago, and whatever this bond was, however impossible, whatever game the goddess was playing with a king who'd stopped believing in her, the woman was out of the slaver's hands and under my protection. That, at least, I did not regret.

Now I only had to tell her.

I got up off the earth and came down the mound toward her, and I watched her track my every movement, her bound hands coming up a little, her body angling to keep herself between me and the tall one, guarding the woman wolf shifter even now, wrists tied, worn to nothing. At the lowest hour of her own life she was standing watch over someone else's, and the rope round my sternum pulled so hard I nearly laughed aloud, and I covered it with the easy warmth I covered everything with.

I stopped a careful distance from her, closer than a stranger and further than a claim, and I did the thing a king does. I turned to the pride, to the gathering crowd, drawn by the trade, watching their golden king with the fond hunger they always watched me with, and I told them, in the lion tongue, in the rolling formal cadence of the mound, that the goddess had this morning sent me a fated mate. That the small dark human before them was mine, chosen by the bond itself, and that she was to be honoured as the king's own from this breath forward.The crowd made the sound a pride makes at good news, a warm rising rumble, delight and astonishment braided together, because their lonely, untethered king had at last been given someone, and they loved me and were glad.

Then I turned back to her, this woman who understood not one word of what I'd just told my people, and I dropped into the trader's wolf-tongue that a road-worn wolf-pack captive might just have a few words of, and I gentled my voice, and I gave her the gift. I told her she was safe; that she'd never be sold or bound or handled again. That the goddess had made her mine and me hers, that she was mate to the king of this place, and that everything I had was hers now, and no harm would ever come near her while I drew breath.

I said it as a gift; the best gift I had ever had to give anyone. I braced, absurdly, for gladness, for the relief and the wonder I'd have felt if someone had lifted me out of a slaver's hands and set me down safe and wanted in a warm place at the end of the world.

She stared at me. The clever dark eyes went from warm to something cold and blazing, her bound hands curled into fists, and her worn-thin body drew up to the whole unimpressive height of her. Then she gave me my answer in the wolf-tongue, low and shaking with a fury I felt in my teeth, and it was not the answer a king expects.

"No, I am not yours, I will not be given, not to you, not to anyone."

A handful of broken words in a language she barely had, and I understood every part of it, because refusal needs no fluency. She would not be given, not to me, not to anyone, not as any king's gift or prize. She'd been handed across the world by men totting up her worth over her head, she had reached the absolute end of allowing it, and she'd sooner stand there bound and starving, blazing with defiance on a stranger-king's mound, thanaccept one more man arranging her life for her, however golden he thought his intentions.

And the goddess help me, in the ruin of my beautiful gift, in the total wreckage of every gracious thing I thought I was offering, for the first time in my golden, worshipped, unbearably lonely life, I felt something crack open in my chest that had nothing to do with the bond at all.

Because no one, in thirty years, had ever told me no. They'd wanted me, flattered me, needed me, worn me smooth with their wanting, and not one of them had ever once cared enough about anything but my favour to refuse me to my face. This ragged furious little human, who had nothing, who I could have taken with a word and didn't, had just looked the king of the mound in the eye and denied him. I stood there in front of my whole astonished pride and felt, of all the mad things, the first clean spark of joy I'd known in years.

Chapter 8

ELLIE

The word left my mouth before my sense of self-preservation could get a hand over it, and then it was loose in the cold morning air in front of several hundred strangers, one small furious syllable there was no calling back. I want to be able to say I refused a king out of courage. The truth was uglier and simpler than that. I refused him because some final inner brace had comprehensively broken, and the break came out as defiance instead of tears, and I couldn't have stopped it if my life had depended on it. Which, for all I knew, it did.

Because I'd understood exactly what was happening, even without the words. I'd stood on that mound of packed earth with my wrists still bound and my legs shaking under me from five days of being carried like meat, and I'd watched the golden giant turn to his people and say something in that rolling warm language. I'd watched the crowd light up with delight, and I'd known. You don't need fluency to recognise the shape of a man announcing that he's decided to keep you; I'd seen it donebefore. I'd stood in a different crowd, in a different beautiful place, in a green silk dress worth more than these people would see in a lifetime, and watched a man I loved stand up and dispose of me in front of everyone who mattered.

The settings could not have been less alike, a smoky ice-age settlement at the edge of the known world, a chandelier-lit ballroom at the Savoy, and the transaction was identical. A man, deciding my life out loud, in front of an audience, in a language of his choosing, while I stood there and was disposed of. Nathan had rejected me publicly and called it efficient. This one was claiming me publicly and clearly considered himself generous.

So when the beautiful golden king turned back to me and dropped into halting wolf-tongue and started to give me his gift, I caughtsafe, I caughtmine, I caughtking, the Savoy rose up in me like bile, two years of swallowed humiliation and my father's boardroom and every room I'd ever been sold in. It came out of me as one small furious word in a language I barely had.

"No." My voice shook. I hated it and kept going anyway. "I am not yours. I will not be given, not to you, not to anyone."

The crowd's warm rumble cut off like a snapped bone.

For a moment I wasn't on the mound at all. I was back at the Winter Ball with the chandeliers throwing gold across five hundred upturned faces, in the green dress I'd chosen so carefully, wearing the bracelet Nathan had given me in Paris, believing right up until the last possible second that the reason he'd asked me onto the little dais was to announce something wonderful. I could still feel the exact shape of the moment his face changed. That look he'd given me, a kind of tidy regret, the expression of a man returning a coat that hadn't fit, when hatred would have been cleaner to survive. He'd said the words that broke the bond in a voice pitched to carry, so the whole room heard my fated mate decide I wasn't worth keeping, and I'd felt the tearing in my chest as the bond ripped loose, a painso physical it dropped me to one knee in front of everyone. The worst part, the part I'd never told a living soul, was that some small mad hopeful part of me had kept waiting for him to laugh and say he hadn't meant it, and he never did. I'd knelt on that polished floor with my chest on fire and understood that I had been, all along, a transaction that had simply stopped being profitable.

Two years I'd carried that. Two years of numbness dressed up as recovery, of telling myself I was fine, of a hollow ache under my ribs that flared whenever anyone got too close to the ruined place where a bond used to be. And here it was again, the public dais, the deciding voice, the crowd, and something in me that had spent two years being quiet and small and agreeable had simply refused to kneel a second time.

The silence rang, and I stood in it with my heart slamming against my ribs, braced for what came next, because I knew how this went. God, did I know how this went; you did not refuse powerful men in front of their people. Nathan would have gone cold and quiet and made me pay for it slowly, over weeks, in a hundred small deniable ways. My father would have smiled for the room and taken it out of me in the car. And this one, this giant who could break me over one knee, who owned this entire warm enormous place and everyone in it, this one had five days of Karik's brutality behind him as a demonstration of what happened to women out here who proved inconvenient.

Well done, Ellie,I thought, with the gallows-calm that arrives when you've comprehensively ruined yourself.You've survived a river, an ambush, a slaver, and a five-day march, and you're going to die on a mound of dirt because you couldn't keep your mouth shut for one more minute. Mum always said it would get you killed one day.

I lifted my chin and made myself look at him, because if I was going to be punished for it I'd at least not give him thesatisfaction of watching me flinch. That was the one thing I'd salvaged from the wreckage of the Savoy, the discipline of not looking away, of not letting them see the blow land.

He wasn't angry, though.

That was the first thing that broke through the roaring in my ears. I'd braced for the cold, the flat contempt, the flicker of a man deciding how to make an example, and none of it was there. The golden king was staring at me with his lips parted and his gold-brown eyes wide, and the expression on his beautiful face wasn't fury at all. It was astonishment, pure and poleaxed, the look of a man who has just watched something happen that he had genuinely believed was not possible in the world.

And then, impossibly, insanely, he laughed.