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“We’ve all judged him harshly for it, rest assured.”

Ragnar shook his head, wondering.Southerners, his expression said. Then he sobered. “In any event, none of you fuckers would die, so.” He shrugged. “Here we are.”

Here they were, alpha and beta. Master and thrall. Warrior and war prize.

Leif had gotten some answers…but been left with one pressing question. He said, “If it had come down to it, if you’d had the chance, would you have ever done it yourself? Would you have killed any of us with your own two hands?”

Ragnar, fingers dancing along the carved wood of the footboard, stared down at the coverlet. After a long beat, he said, “Maybe with Rune. I never cared for him.”

Leif wanted to shudder at that – at the admission that his own brother, his closest flesh-and-blood, held no meaning for the man he’d fucked – but suppressed it. “But not Erik,” he said. “And not me.”

A slow blink was Ragnar’s only response, but Leif read plenty in it.

He said, “What would your masters have said if they knew you’d turned me, rather than killing me?”

“They do know.”

“What if they knew,” Leif insisted, “and recaptured you? What iftheyheld you, instead of me?”

“They’d kill me,” he said, without hesitation. “But slowly.” A flickering dart of a glance, vulnerable and hurting beneath the screen of his lashes. “I would have at least done it quick. For Rune.”

Leif took a slow breath, and let it out. “Yeah.”

Ragnar turned away again, and moved to sit on the edge of the bed, facing the window, shoulders bowed, head bent.

Unable to deny the wanting of his wolf anymore, Leif steeled himself against the pain of it, and rose, slowly. He saw Ragnar stiffen, as he heard him get up, but he stayed where he was, which was what Leif wanted. The floorboards creaked beneath his weight, and then the bedframe, as he slowly, painfully, teeth clenched, climbed up onto the mattress on his knees, and shuffled forward, until he knelt behind Ragnar on top of the coverlet.

Ragnar tensed further, just before Leif’s hands landed on his shoulders, and beneath the thin leather of his tunic, and the thick satin of his skin, the muscles there were dense and rigid as those of an ox straining against a yoke.

Leif hummed low in his throat, and dug his thumbs in; massaged the flesh beneath his fingers until, with a deep exhale, and further bowing of his head, Ragnar relaxed into the touch all at once, and then arched into it like a cat asking to be petted. Leif brushed his hair off his neck and massaged the remaining tension he found there; lingered over the pulse in his throat for the pleasure of feeling it thud against the pads of his fingers. He followed the knobs of spine down past the neckline of his tunic, down between his shoulder blades, and then dug in with his knuckles, sweeping outward presses, painting invisible wings out from his backbone.

Ragnar whined, softly, and Leif’s thoughts shifted: toward the unraveling of laces, and the scrape of skin under his nails, and hot breath panted in his mouth. All in good time. He was too sore and tired to hurry.

He petted over him – his wolf, his packmate, his beta, hismatemate – until Ragnar finally tipped his head back against his chest, and gazed up at him, soft and hungry, his pupils drinking up the candlelight. “Alpha,” he murmured, and gripped one of Leif’s hands, and pulled it down to his chest, inside the open V of his tunic so it rested over his slow-thumping heart as it picked up speed.

Leif bent his head, so their lips met, upside down, but not awkward. Easy, so easy, and warm, and slick, and as simple as breathing. He murmured against his mouth: “Would you kill me now?”

Ragnar’s answer was immediate, and spoken with hushed reverence. “No. But I’d kill anyone who tried.”

25

High above the forest, on the warm updrafts, the females coasted with wings spread, heads dipping through the low, tattered-linen clouds to snatch at birds. Amelia glimpsed the jagged black feathers of a vulture, before Valencia’s jaws snapped closed over its body, and her sense of urgency heightened as a tightening of the knot in her stomach.

They couldn’t wait any longer. This, now, was the last chance for the Great Northern Phalanx to join them.

Last night, knowing she’d be too jittery to sleep for some time, she’d swung through the kitchens for a cup of water, then returned to the library, once Leif was gone, and settled down with a fresh candle, a map of the west half of the country, and every book she could find on the Bridelands and surrounding duchies. She’d pored over merchant accountings, and boring family histories, searching for the sorts of finer details not found in a general’s memoirs – especially not since the nation had been ruled by a peaceable line of kings for three-hundred-years. She wanted to know about secret tunnels that let out into hillsides; which farming families had hidden stores in underground vaults. They needed spider holes, and backdoor means of access to manors and chateaux. They could never beat the Sels with sheer numbers, but through ingenuity, memory, and attention to detail, they might stand a chance.

She jotted notes on a scrap bit of parchment, and when her eyes became gritty, and her vision blurred, she made tea, and then spent some time paging through the scant selection of books on magic. Oh, what she would have given for access to the hidden vaults in the king’s palace, where a young Connor had first learned of Drakewll’s dragon history. All she had at her disposal now was a collection of children’s stories, and two other slim books that called the magic “legend” and “myth.”

“It’s reality,” she’d muttered, and finally decided that she was too tired to be productive any longer.

The stairs had creaked beneath her feet on the way up, too-loud in the oppressive silence of the house.

But then she’d reached the top of the stairs, and though she’d stood still, the wood-on-wood creaking had continued. A familiar sound, but one that, in her state of fatigue, had taken her a moment to place. Then she’d recognized it as the rhythmic creak of a bed frame – a bed with two occupants, fucking.

Heat had flooded her face. The nearest room, the source of the sound, was the one Leif had been using since his arrival. There could be only one person in there with him, and the fact was confirmed when she heard a low, male murmuring of “alpha,” and a shudder through the whole of the floor, and a grunt of male effort, followed by a soft, barely audible lupine whine.

For a moment, she’d entertained the idea of creeping up to the door, and cracking it a fraction, and seeing what she could glimpse. But shame followed quick on the heels of that thought, and she’d hurried up the next flight of stairs to her own room…where she wound up lying for a long time in the dark, listening to the sounds of the two men below…enjoying one another.