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The Beast.My husband—

I could not finish the thought. When would thinking of him asmy husbandnot feel strange? Not untrue? When would it not result in this unremitting squeeze in my chest?

When would I no longer feel an intruder among these border warriors? Besidehim?

Despite his flash of anger on the night of our bedding, Fell was less transparent than his warriors. They treated me to cutting glares, but he never even looked at me as we rode. Just that brief meeting of our gazes in the village, in which I thought I’d read accusation in the gray frost of his eyes before I looked away.

There was no conversation between us. He was stoic, cold, and indifferent.

And that was perhaps worse. His anger would have been preferable to the icy silence.

He withheld his company, and I wondered if this was how it would be between us. Would we never get beyond our shaky start? Would we live as strangers forever? Would I live at all? I shuddered. That was Stig talking. The memory of his voice pushing through, angry and bitter.He could kill you and no one would do anything about it.

I swallowed against a lump in my throat. I could not help it. The doubt. The fear. They sank deep. Clamping teeth that would not release me.

Whenever we stopped, Fell disappeared, and Mari stepped forward, tasked with my care. I was grateful for her. She guided me into the woods to relieve myself and bedded down beside me each night. There were no tents erected. Indeed, they did not worry about such things as comfort. She saw that I ate and instructed me on rolling out my bedding at night and packing it away each morning. I took her grunts as approval that I was doing everything correctly.

A weary sort of monotony fell into place. A rhythm of waking, riding through air that felt like cold soup, eating food tasteless on my tongue, bedding down on hard earth. Repeat.

I would often look up and catch Arkin staring at me. His gaze was more than malevolent. His eyes felt faintly scheming and made the tiny hairs at my nape vibrate.

Whenever I searched out Fell to see if he noticed his man’s fixation on me, I found my husband elsewhere, paces away or with the horses or nowhere to be seen at all. Avoiding me. He had told Stig I was his, but he didn’t seem to care about me. Perhaps he had changed his mind and decided I was too much trouble and not worth keeping around.

He could kill you and no one would do anything about it.

No matter how I tried, in these dark moments—riding, plodding along—I could not get Stig’s words out of my head where they had burrowed deeply.

Fell’s indifference stung more than I would have liked to admit, and I began to consider something I had never dared.

I thought about it carefully in the silent hours, and there were plenty of those—hours during which I never spoke, hours during which no one spoke to me.

I toyed with the idea, testing it out cautiously, like it was a new pair of shoes that had not yet been broken in, experimenting with the notion that maybe, just perhaps, I should take my chances and run away.

14

Fell

MY FATHER WAS THE ONLY FAMILY I HAD EVER KNOWN. Inever had a mother. No brothers or sisters. No uncles or aunts. No cousins to love or hate, to wreak havoc with like wild things during periodic visits.

Balor the Butcher was well past middle age when he found me in that dragon’s lair and saved me, when he brought me out of that dark den and into the light. Me and the black opal—two prizes wrested that day from the clutches of an onyx dragon.

Onyx dragons were the foot soldiers of dragonkind. The most common dragon, black as winking charcoal. The biggest, the fiercest, the fastest, the strongest. Great slabs of muscle that served on the front lines. And Balor had defeated her, this outlier clinging to life eighty years after the Hormung. A she-dragon who shouldn’t have been alive, who held me captive, who had stolen me from my true family and likely killed them.ThatI would never know with any certainty. I only knew that when my father found me, I was lost. An orphan destined for the jaws and belly of a monster.

She had put up a valiant fight. She had survived a long time, when all the rest of her kind had perished, after all. But Balor had triumphed, hacking off her head with his axe... a piece of bone hewn from a dragon’s pelvic wing. That axe now hung on display in the hall of my keep, staring down at every meal and feast like a watchful eye, a symbol of the war waged and won.

Balor was not an easy man, but he took me into his hearth and heart—what he possessed of a heart, anyway. He was not sentimental. Not a scrap of tenderness or softness within him. I had few lessons from him that had not ended with a bloodied lip or nose.Blood is weakness, he was fond of telling me.Be strong and you won’t bleed.

A widower with no children of his own, he had sworn off marrying again, insisting that he was too old to pander to a wife. He claimed me as his son and heir in so bold and resolute a manner that no one dared challenge the decision.

Who would challenge him anyway? He was the warrior who beheaded the last dragon, an onyx dragon. Stern as he was, he had loved me. As well as he could love anyone. And I loved him as well as I could love anyone, which wasn’t to say I had loved him very well or fully or wholly. Not, perhaps, as well as I should have. I grimaced. That part of myself was lacking, as small and shriveled up as a plant left too long without water.

I respected my father. I owed him my life. He saw strength in me from the very start, something worth saving, and for that I would always honor his memory.

But what did I know of love and marriage and family? Those things had certainly never been included in my lessons of swordplay and hand-to-hand combat. All my life had been about battle and death—or rather beating death.

Oh, I had friends. Comrades. Lovers. Many times, with the battle sweat still beading hot on my skin, blood simmering through me like a stew, I had found release and comfort in another. There was nothing like a quick fuck to affirm your existence—that you still lived, while others did not.

But that was just fucking. It wasn’t meaningful. It wasn’t lasting. It was relief. A balm. Sweet wine to a parched throat. Temporary. In the end, I always returned to my bed alone. Slept alone. Woke alone.