Page 21 of Roar of the Wild

"Daska," she said, and her voice was careful now, the voice of a woman about to explain something difficult. She lookedbetween me and Rivik and the golden giant, and I watched her gather herself. I braced, because I'd spent my whole life bracing for the moment the good thing got taken away. "There's so much I have to explain, all of it, the bond and the claim and why I said no." She stopped, pressed her lips together, and I saw her decide to simply tell the truth, as she always did in the end. "His name is Tau. He's the king of this pride. The day the wolves sold me to him, a fated bond snapped into place between us, real, undeniable, the same as ours. He claimed me in front of everyone, I refused him, and he's been courting me ever since."

Somewhere behind us a child laughed, oblivious, and I stood in a king's settlement at the edge of the world with the woman I loved in the circle of my arm and a fated rival watching us with unreadable golden eyes. I understood that whatever we'd crossed six weeks of steppe to rescue her from, it was going to be a great deal more complicated than a locked door and a fight.

Chapter 14

ELLIE

The explaining took the rest of the day and left me more hollowed out than six weeks of captivity had managed. I'd forgotten how much harder the truth is to say than to live. Living it, you just put one foot in front of the other. Saying it, laying out for the two men who'd crossed the wilderness for me that a third man had a fated claim on me too, that I'd been claimed and courted and had, God help me, come to like the golden king who did it, that was its own kind of march, and by the time the sun went down I was wrung dry.

Tau made it easier than he had any right to, which somehow made everything worse. I'd braced for a confrontation, for the two great powers of my strange new life squaring off over me like dogs over a bone, and instead the king of the mound had measured Daska and Rivik with a long look I couldn't read, and then said, in careful wolf-tongue so I'd understand every word, that any man who'd crossed six weeks of open steppe to find a woman had already proved he valued her more than her captorshad. That they were guests of the pride for as long as they wished to stay. Then he'd given us a good shelter near my fire, and food, and privacy, and walked away into the dusk with his shoulders very straight and left me standing there with my chest aching in a way I couldn't name and didn't want to examine.

He's letting me choose,I'd thought, watching him go;That's what that was. He could have made it a fight and he chose to make it a choice instead.And I'd hated how much that cost him, and how well I could see it costing him, because a fortnight ago I couldn't have read that golden face at all and now I could, and being able to was its own quiet disaster.

But that was tomorrow's problem, and every day's problem after; tonight I had Daska.

He'd barely let me out of arm's reach since the reunion, never crowding me, because Daska had never once crowded me, simply staying close, as a man stays after six weeks with a frayed thread where his heart should be, needing the small constant reassurance of my nearness to believe I was real. He kept finding reasons to touch me. A hand at the small of my back as we ducked into the shelter. His fingers checking, again, the old scar on my palm as if it might have changed since the last time he looked. Every time he touched me, I felt the bond between us settle a little further back into place, unbreakable again, filling in the hollow the distance had worn.

We were almost at the shelter when Nathan found us.

He came out from between the fires alone, having waited, as he always did, until Rivik had gone with Dev and Tau had been drawn away by someone needing their king. His eyes went to Daska’s hand at the small of my back and stayed there a fraction too long.

“We need to talk.”

“Not tonight.”

“We’ve already lost six weeks recovering you. We cannot turn this into an extended stay while you settle whatever this is.” He made the smallest gesture towards Daska, reducing six weeks of terror and the bond warm between us to an inconvenience he was too disciplined to name. “You’re alive. You’re apparently unharmed. Tomorrow we assess the reserves and establish a departure date.”

“I said not tonight, Nathan.”

He took a step nearer. Daska moved before I could, not threatening, not even touching him. He simply placed his great body between us, as calmly as he might have closed a door against the cold.

“She needs food and sleep,” he said. “You can speak tomorrow.”

Nathan looked past him to me.

“The world hasn’t stopped dying because you’ve had a difficult month.”

Then he walked away, leaving the words behind him to do the work he’d intended.

For one old, familiar moment, guilt opened its mouth inside me.

Daska held out his hand.

I took it, and followed him into the shelter.

When the shelter's hide flap fell closed behind us and it was finally, truly just the two of us, the air changed.

I turned to face him in the low red firelight that came through the woven walls, and for a moment neither of us moved. He was so big he had to stoop under the shelter's frame, this gentle enormous bear of a man, and his dark eyes moved over my face with the careful attention I'd missed so badly it was an ache, and I watched him not reach for me, watched him wait, as he always waited, giving me the room to close the distance or not.

Two years ago I'd have found a reason not to. Two years ago I was so wrapped in numbness and the certainty of my own brokenness that I'd have made some small deflecting joke and turned the moment aside, because wanting something meant it could be taken, and I'd learned not to want. The old voice tried, even now;You can't do this. Not with a king's claim hanging over you, not with everything unresolved, not when you're this much of a mess.It had a hundred reasons and every one of them was really just the one reason, the old one, the fear.

I crossed the space between us and kissed him anyway.

He made a low sound against my mouth, part relief and part something rougher, and his big careful hands came up to frame my face like I was something he'd been terrified he'd broken, and he kissed me back with a tenderness that undid me. There was no rush in it; there was never any rush in Daska. He kissed me like the kiss itself was the whole point rather than a toll on the way to somewhere, and I felt two years of frost and six weeks of terror start to melt out of me under the patient warmth of it, and I pressed closer, greedy for more of that melting.

And then, right on cue, the guilt arrived, because it always did. Some traitor part of me flinched at how good it felt, whispering that I hadn't earned this, that a woman who'd been discarded by her own fated mate had no business feeling wanted, that pleasure this pure was a thing that got noticed and then taken away to teach you not to reach for it. For two years that voice had won every time. It had turned every kind touch into a threat and every good moment into a debt I'd have to pay, until I'd stopped reaching altogether and called the numbness peace.

But Daska's mouth was gentle on mine, and his hands were shaking with how carefully he held me, and the bond between us hummed with a wanting that had nothing of ownership in it, only a bone-deep gladness that I was here, that I was whole, that I'd let him close. And I made a choice I hadn't been able tomake in two years. I chose to believe the good thing was real, and mine, and allowed. I chose to let it in.