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“Am I? Or are you ready to claw your own skin off if you don’t get a little relief?”

“If I don’t get a little relief fromyou, I’ll clawyourskin off,” Leif snarled. He felt petulant as a child…unmoored as a ship cut from its ropes. Adrift.

Ragnar chuckled, but his eyes gleamed, intense and humorless. “To be such a smart, book-learned lad, you sure are thick sometimes.”

Leif growled a warning that went ignored.

“I think you’re being thick on purpose this time, though. Fighting your nature again.Repressingyourself.”

Leif pushed his growl louder, let it spill up from his chest and out through his bared teeth.

Ragnar backed off – somewhat. He tipped his head back, exposing his throat, torq winking in the scattered shafts of moonlight through the branches. But he still grinned, and though his voice had gone soft and subservient, the words he spoke were anything but. “You defied your uncle, stirred us all up and marched us South, without a care for Erik’s wishes. Told us we were off to war, off to join a Dragon Duchess or some such. Got our blood up. Got us all boiling in our skins, and no way to let off the steam.”

Leif’s pulse beat an erratic tattoo against his breastbone, but still, he tried to cling to propriety – to the idea that Ragnar didn’t know what was happening beneath his skin, though he himself could sense Ragnar’s throbbing heartbeat, as quick and wild as his own. “We hunted just this morning.” He could still taste stag blood on the back of his tongue each time he swallowed; it had dried black beneath his nails and he hadn’t yet bothered to clean them with a knife.

“Yes, but there’s different kinds of hunting. Some prey we kill…some we don’t.”

The itchy, twitchy, restless feeling that had plagued him for days rose up in a drowning swell. His skin was hot and too-tight, his human clothes stifling. A heat kindled low in his gut, as Ragnar matched him, stare for stare.

With an effort, he unclenched his jaw and said, “You’re talking of women.”

“See? Not so thick after all.”

Leif massaged at the back of his neck, for all the good it did; he’d begun to sweat, hair sticking to the skin there, suffocating. “Ragnar, we can’t–”

“But we can, we can! See, that’s what I wanted to show you.” He surged in closer, shrunk down into himself to appear small, supplicating. His voice was pinched and pleading. “I’ve been into the village – no, don’t growl at me, I didn’t betray us. But this is aharbor town. This is atrade route.”

“You found a brothel, then.”

“Yes.” His eyes flared, pupils going wolf-narrow for a moment. “Yes, I found a brothel, and some of the girls aren’t even ugly. There’s enough of them, at least, and business has been slow, with the war on. The madam would only love to have a few gold marks to rub together. I’ve told her I work for a wealthy lord who can–”

Leif snatched him by the jaw, and squeezed until he earned a whimper of pain. “What did you do?” he snarled, and put the full force of his growl behind it.

Ragnar’s whimper became a whine. “Leif. Alpha.Please.”

Three words that reached straight into his chest and squeezed him back.

His growl cut off abruptly, unbidden, and for a moment he feared he might actually release the reassuring chuff that built in his throat. He shoved Ragnar roughly away instead.

The other wolf caught himself against a tree, and rubbed at his jaw, working it side to side. “You’re stronger than you realize, you know,” he muttered, and then ducked his head with a murmured, “Sorry, alpha.”

Leif wanted to scream.

He swallowed hard, and gritted out, “The brothel. Show me.”

Ragnar’s head snatched up, face slack with shock. Then, slowly, a grin sliced across it like the opening of a knife wound. A wound Leif felt echoed in his gut, a painful, sharp slice too much like desire.

~*~

The building proved to be a rambling jumble of timber, leaning out over the cliff face, boards scrubbed pale, and an actual tree growing in one of the gutters, a bent sapling struggling toward the ink-black sky.

Leif could smell the promise of sex outside; could smell the tang of wind-scraped wood, and, beyond, the heat of skin, of women, of prey. His breath hitched in his chest, and he curled his hands to fists and felt the prick of claws in his palm. This was a terrible idea.

“It’s not fancy whorehouse like yourSouthernerswould like,” Ragnar said, and Leif was too muddled to question the use ofyour Southerners. “But it’ll get the job done.” He sounded eager. “What?” he said a beat later, when Leif only stood rooted, and made no move toward the door.

Leif managed to move – to take a step backward. “We shouldn’t.”

Ragnar made an incredulous sound. “Gods, man. They’re whores. We’ll be paying them.” When Leif didn’t respond, he scoffed: “You’re not going to let some sort of honor get the best of you, are you?” He squeezed at Leif’s bicep until Leif finally turned to regard him: tangled hair threaded with bone in the moonlight, jaw working beneath the short bristles of his beard, throwing tendon shadows of aggravation up his cheeks. He was too thin, still; bore the marks of dungeon confinement that were taking too long to fade. The torq gleamed, an obvious display of wealth on an otherwise shabbily-attired man.