Whatever reason the other girl might have for coming here, Kathlyn knew that in a palace stuffed full of threats, she wasn’t one.
“You shouldn’t be in here with me,” Kathlyn had said gently. “All the reasons you had for staying away since my little topple from grace are still valid.”
“I know,” Yajaira whispered, and her face had crumpled in on itself for a moment. Only a moment, and then she’d smoothed it out. She’d stood straighter, taken a deep breath. “But he was in a special mood, Kathlyn. Very special.” There was a bleakness in her gaze that Kathlyn felt like icy fingers closing hard around her throat. “Stay on his good side, if you can.”
“If he has one,” Kathlyn had replied, her voice a little scratchy, “I’ve never seen it.”
And she knew a lot more now than she had on all those nights this past winter when Yajaira had crept into her room, just like this, to find a little solace after a session with the king. She knew how intimate sex was. How vulnerable and overwhelming and important it felt to have another person inside of her, moving in ways she couldn’t control. Doing things she didn’t entirely understand. Taking her places she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to go. Kathlyn couldn’t comprehend how that was never discussed in all the endless talk of doing one’s duty and winter marriages and what decent people owed the world. Their fertility. Their obedience. Their belief that together, doing these things no one talked about too graphically, they could save a world that had already been lost a long time ago.
And she was not a very good person, she told herself severely. Because she couldn’t tell if she was more worried about the things her friend might have suffered, or the things her father likely was cooking up for her.
Later, she’d stashed her dagger back beneath her pillows and had dressed in the silver dress her attendants had laid out for her. Silver at last. Silver, after all this time. Silver marking her as a woman. Finally.
She tried not to think too much about Wulf’s marriage proposal to her father at the party last night. Or her father’s acceptance of it. Kathlyn knew it would never happen. There was no possibility at all that her father would let her go. Much less to a man he couldn’t be absolutely sure would treat her the way he thought she deserved to be treated. Wulf hadn’t torn her up last night. He hadn’t left her walking stiff-legged and miserable through her own mounting party, her mouth twisted in a grimace of pain she’d had to pretend was a smile. He’d taken her, certainly, and dispensed of her supposed innocence for all to see, but that wasn’t enough for King Athenian.
He wanted her to pay. He wanted her to hurt. To suffer.
But Kathlyn hadn’t cracked.
She knew there was no way that the king would risk marrying her off to the same raider who had already failed to live up to Athenian’s brutal fantasies. So there was certainly no point imagining what marriage to someone like Wulf would be like.
But Kathlyn found she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She tried to picture it—given over into his power completely, taken far across the seas to those islands of his so few people ever came back to tell tales about, so far away from here it was likely she’d never, ever return.
She shivered, rolled her warm clay mug between her palms, and told herself she was cold.
It was moot anyway, because there was no way Athenian intended to let Wulf live that long. Kathlyn knew it. She’d be surprised if he made it through the equinox ceremony.
Her heart lurched at that thought, of Wulf and all that raw power of his reduced to yet another still, cold body to add to her father’s ever-expanding count. She couldn’t bear the idea. It made her chest feel as if it was caving in on itself.
So instead, she thought of dancing with him last night. Around and around in the center of the great hall, with all those same eyes all over them again. He’d held her perfectly, a grim sort of look on that hard mouth of his and pure fire in his blue gaze, as he’d led them through the usual steps. As if he danced every day of his war-torn, battle-ready life.
Kathlyn might have sat there all day, reveling in her new silver dress and reliving the events of the previous night, but the guards had knocked on her door and announced that her attendance was required. By the king. Immediately.
Something else that couldn’t possibly bode well.
But Kathlyn refused to show the guards—or anyone—that she was scared. She’d grown up watching all the women in her life square their shoulders and march off to do their duty. How could she be any less brave than they were? She didn’t let her father’s guards hurry her through the palace halls, past the public areas and into the king’s private wing. She walked as nonchalantly as she could. She smiled at everyone she passed. She carried herself as if there had never been so much as a shadow on her spotless reputation.
And she didn’t try to hide any of that when she was delivered into one of her father’s private sitting rooms.
She bowed her head when she saw him sitting there on an ancient settee, watching her with no hint of a smile on his face. But she didn’t break. She didn’t cower. And she raised her head again to face him.
He would have to kill her to break her, she decided then and there as the silence drew out between them. He very likely would.
“You dare to stand before me like this,” the king said softly. Much too calmly—and sure enough, there was that thick, black murder in his gaze. “As if you are fit to grace my presence.”
“I apologize, father,” Kathlyn said calmly. “I was told you sent for me.”
“Do you have any idea how much I lost on your mounting ceremony?” he asked as if he hadn’t heard her. And wasn’t it funny that after all this time, she still couldn’t tell if he was ignoring her or if he truly couldn’t hear anything or anyone but himself. “I could have annexed half of the mainland if I’d liked. I had every king and wannabe noble begging me for a chance to rip through that maidenhead. And what do you do? You give it away to raider scum.”
Kathlyn knew she should stay quiet. She was trembling slightly, as if her body was telling her the same thing. Warning her to behave, the way she always had. Don’t provoke him. Don’t make him angrier than he already is. She could remember her mother whispering the same things when Kathlyn had been little. Don’t give him an excuse.
And she’d spent years mourning the relationship she’d always imagined she should have had with him. It wasn’t a complete fantasy—she’d seen that they existed. Fathers who cared about their daughters. Who rejected the sketchier bids on them and tried to guide them into decent alliances. She’d heard her friends talk of their homes in those in-between times at the marriage market, when they had nothing to do but pretend not to care which men might be bidding on them even then. She’d heard tales of affection. Respect. Even love. She hadn’t made all that up as another way to torture herself over the things she’d lost along with her mother.
Don’t make yourself a target, sweet, her mother would have told her.
“You chose him, father,” she pointed out. Politely, but that wouldn’t matter. Her father only heard the defiance, not the tone. “Not me.”
Athenian laughed then. It made all the blood in Kathlyn’s body chill, then seem to pour through her straight down to her feet. Because there was no merriment in that sound, of course. His laugh was the only thing worse than his smile, and there was nothing in either but the promise of pain.
“I told you I wasn’t ruined,” she told him now, because there was nothing to lose. How had it taken so long to realize that there never had been? He would either hurt her or he would kill her, and she didn’t see how she could possibly affect the choice he’d make. He’d do what he wanted. He always did. “My attendants confirmed it. I don’t know what you expected.”
“I expected you to get what was coming to you, you ungrateful little whore,” her father said cheerfully. Kathlyn steeled herself, but he was still sitting down. For now. “I expected you to suffer for your sins, not revel in them.”
“I have no idea
what you mean.”
“I think we both know you do.” He stood then, and Kathlyn so desperately wanted to find him ridiculous. He was shorter than she was. He was an old man, and evil all the way through. At the very least, she wished she’d thought to tuck Wulf’s dagger away in the deep pocket of her dress when she’d come with the guards. She’d never swung a blade in her life, but she thought this would have been a terrific time to start. “Did you enjoy yourself up there? Taking raider cock like a pro? I suppose you thought I wouldn’t notice.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded leather strap. The one with the metal accents that stung like hell. The one he used when he wanted her to hurt for days.
Kathlyn kept her eyes on him, not the strap. “I beg your pardon. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You should have tried to fight him off,” her father continued, smacking his opposite palm with that vicious strap. And as much as she fought it, Kathlyn could feel the panic beginning to work in her. Her fingers felt numb. Her stomach felt like stone. But she pushed it back. “You should have tried to escape.”
“That would have brought shame to my entire family,” she said, as quietly and evenly as she could.
“So you thought the kingdom should carry forward a memory of my only daughter submitting to a savage?” her father demanded, sounding more incredulous—and more smug—with every word. “Without so much as a whimper? You imagined the whole palace needed to see him rutting at you like an animal while you merely . . . let him?”
And Kathlyn understood, then. Maybe she’d always understood, on some level, that there was no winning. Not when her father changed the rules to suit himself. She understood that the only reason he’d beaten her less in the last three years than before was not because she’d suddenly figured out how to be perfect. There was no perfect, not with her father. It was because he’d needed to keep his property looking healthy and unharmed and well cared for, as its own advertisement. The women who spent their winters in his courtyard talked, after all. How quickly would they spread the word that Athenian liked to beat his daughter bloody? And how much would her worth decrease if she was thought to be either deserving of those beatings, or somehow permanently altered by them?
“You might as well have announced what a whore you are to the lowlifes in the top tiers,” Athenian was saying. He shook his head, his eyes gleaming and his mouth curving as he tried—not very hard—to look something other than gleeful. “You let him fuck you like you were a common trollop. Any decent girl would have tried to escape.”
Kathlyn remembered, then, that day she’d always worked so hard to forget. When her father had called them all into the throne room. Her mother. N’kosi. Kathlyn herself, only ten years old. He’d looked a lot like this. Malevolent and entirely too pleased with himself.
How well-loved you are, Gertrix, he’d said, so merrily. The kingdom adores you. Would they speak of you with such reverence if they knew exactly how much you love men who are not your king?
Back then, Kathlyn had wondered why her mother hadn’t protested. Why she hadn’t defended herself when of course it wasn’t true. Kathlyn had lived with her then. She’d spent almost every moment of every day with her mother. There had been no entertaining of the palace guards. But Lady Gertrix hadn’t said a word.
And now Kathlyn knew why. There was no point.
But if there was no winning either way, what did it matter what she said?
“I think we both know that if I’d tried to escape him you would claim I’d shamed you by refusing to submit to my mounting as any decent girl must,” she pointed out calmly.
She didn’t look at that strap. She refused to look at it. She couldn’t control what her father did. She could only control her responses to it. And she had Wulf to thank for that, and his wildly hot object lesson in exactly this the night before.
It turned out he’d taught her how to fight after all.
“And now you stand before me in a silver gown and your astonishing defiance,” her father sneered, as if she hadn’t spoken. Because as far as he was concerned, she might as well have saved her breath. “When I hoarded your gold for years and you wasted it on a scavenger.”
“Tell me, father,” Kathlyn asked quietly, holding his vicious gaze with her own, calm and direct, “what is it that bothers you more? That I look so much like my mother or that the people love me just as much as they loved her—if not more?”
Athenian’s lip curled. “You are like her in every way, which I would not revel in, were I you.” He moved closer, his black eyes cold. “A cockroach crawling around my kingdom dressed in pretty clothes, spreading your filth wherever you go.”
“Both, then,” Kathlyn said serenely, still holding his gaze as if he didn’t bother her at all. “That must be upsetting for you.”
“I’m going to enjoy killing you, Kathlyn,” her father told her, his voice happy. So very happy. “Even more than I enjoyed killing her.”
And Kathlyn didn’t want to die. Not here. Not by her father’s hand. Not when she thought it was possible she’d only just discovered that there were things to live for outside this palace. Outside this kingdom. The world might have drowned, but she didn’t want to.
But she might not have a choice in that. What she had a choice in was what she did as she met her fate, not what he did to bring it about.
Kathlyn chose to go out fighting.
She didn’t avert her eyes. She didn’t cower. She looked straight at him, tipped her chin up, and said, “Go right ahead.”
“I’m sure you’d like that,” he snarled at her, not sounding quite as happy as he had before, which she decided to take as a victory. He gripped that strap with both hands and twisted it, as if he wished it was her neck. “I already told you, I mean to make you suffer, you revolting bitch. And I promised that dimwitted barbarian that I would marry you to him.” He laughed at that, low and mean. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint a guest.”
It was on the tip of Kathlyn’s tongue to tell him that Wulf certainly wasn’t dimwitted—but why disabuse her father of that notion? The dumber he thought Wulf was, the better. It meant there might be a chance that would Wulf live through this, after all.
“You make a lot of promises,” she said instead. “You promise to kill me. You promise to marry me off. You promise a great number of things, and none of them happen. Have you ever thought that maybe that’s why the people hate you and fear you in equal measure? Because you can’t keep a single promise you make?”
Her father laughed, and this time, it sounded eerily like joy.
And then he swung, the leather and metal strap catching her on the throat and lighting her up with the searing blast of pain. Kathlyn covered her throat with her hands, but she didn’t bend. Not yet.
“Shut your filthy mouth,” Athenian suggested in that kind, merry voice of his. “Or you see, I’ll do it for you.”
And he swung again, hitting her in the belly, the fire of it exploding through her dress to sear across her skin like a stripe of agony. Then he hit her across one breast, making her nipple scream. Then across her collarbone, until there was nothing but that searing, burning agony—
Kathlyn stopped trying to count each separate hit. And she stopped standing there like an idiot, giving him so much to work with. She dropped to her knees, then rolled to the floor and covered her face as best she could. But she refused to cry. She refused to black out. She would lie here and she would take this, because every shocking, hideous burst of pain was like fuel.
Inside, where he couldn’t touch her, Kathlyn wasn’t numb. She wasn’t switched off. She was furious.
Let him hit her. Let him laugh while he did it. Let him do what he liked. It only added to her fury.
Kathlyn wasn’t a ten-year-old girl any longer and she wasn’t her mother. She wouldn’t go meekly to her own death. Not at his hands. Not this time.
She thought of Wulf as she curled herself into a ball and grunted when the strap
hit her, again and again. He hadn’t simply taken her virginity. He’d somehow woken her up. She’d lived more that night in his arms, and again last night in full view of the entire palace, than in all her previous years combined.
He’d taught there were other ways to fight than with fists and blades. He’d showed her she was alive.
There were different men out there. Different kings. The western highlands weren’t the whole world and her father was just another ruler among many. She didn’t have to accept the life she’d been born into any longer. She didn’t have to resign herself for a few sick and brutal years of upsetting winter sex with terrible men, only to end up disappearing like so many other women of her class. Like her own mother. She didn’t have to suffer this any longer. She wouldn’t.
There was more out there—and she wanted it, no matter the price. No matter if she paid it like this, curled up on a thick rug while her father left the marks of his temper all over the body he viewed as his property. His to sell. His to punish. His.
She thought, I am mine, and she took each blow, because surviving was another way of fighting. And Kathlyn intended to win.
Even if the price of winning was her blood, and this time, it was real.
Wulf woke with a start and rolled, grabbing his blade in one hand as he threw himself off the bed and into a fighting crouch beside it.
Then he went perfectly still, waiting hear what had woken him only a little while after he’d given up searching for the damned tunnels again, maybe with a little more intensity than usual since that mounting ceremony bullshit two days ago was still messing with his head.
To say nothing of his asshole cock.
He heard a scraping sound, and tensed. But he remained still until he heard it again. It wasn’t the door, which he would have recognized, but something else he’d never heard before. He let his gaze move around the room, looking hard at every shadow, but saw nothing. He flowed from his crouch to his feet, then moved over to the arched door of his stone prison to see if he’d somehow missed the sound of his door altogether and had visitors in the outer room.