Chapter 17
It was for the best that Ragnar turned and marched back down the hill, but Leif hadn’t given him leave to do so.
He followed.
“The men are in need of direction, your grace,” Leda called at his retreating back, a clear reprimand.
Leif threw a wave over his shoulder and kept walking.
He walked all the way down the road and around the bend, keeping just close enough behind Ragnar to see the dark gold of his hair rippling as he ducked between two guards and entered camp.
Then Leif kept walking, past confused Southerners who shouted questions at him; past blackened tree trunks and the wreckage of tents; past his own pack members, who he waved away with a growl.
They looked hurt and confused at his rebuff, but he knew they would wait for him, and would follow when he was ready to lead.
For now, he kept walking, following the thick, unhappy scent trail that Ragnar laid down all through camp, and then out the other side of it and down the pine needle-covered slope studded with boulders large and small.
The din of voices and clamor of camp breaking had faded by the time Ragnar’s scent intensified, acrid, boiling with fury, so sharp that Leif pulled up short.
He realized that his own heart was pounding in automatic, sympathetic response, and that his hackles prickled unpleasantly.
A member of his pack (mate, the stubborn wolf voice said in his mind) was distressed, and it was his job to soothe him.
To right all the wrongs, and settle the equilibrium.
Leif could hear Ragnar’s open-mouthed breathing off to his left, and knew exactly where he stood, just on the other side of a screen of anemic cypress trees.
But he didn’t turn that way. He laid a hand on the nearest boulder, its cool, moss-smooth surface, and worked to slow his own breathing; to push an aura of calm out into the air.
In response, Ragnar sucked in a sharp inhale, cursed to himself, and, if anything, grew more agitated. Pine needles crunched and shifted under his boots.
Leif was baffled.
He chuffed in lupine inquiry, and earned a growl in response, low and defensive.
Leif stared ahead, at the stunted tree trunks that writhed and dipped, a frozen portrait of the winter winds that scoured the mountainside.
He said, “You care nothing for the Southerners. None of them.” He turned his head, finally, and glimpsed Ragnar standing between the tree trunks, blue eyes glowing in the shade of the branches.
He looked small: tucked into himself, shoulders rounded, spine bent, head ducked low enough that his torq was hidden in his hair.
“Not even Amelia. Perhaps,” Leif said, comprehension dawning, “especially not her.”
Ragnar bared his teeth. “How perceptive of you, alpha,” he snarled, mocking. Irate. Hurt. He sounded as though Leif had hurt him.
“I thought you liked her. I can smell that you want her, at the very least.”
“Almost as much as you, eh? Will you weep now that she’s gone? Rend your clothes? Will you burn the world down to get her back?”
In the whole of Leif’s life, Ragnar had surprised him many times; this moment here, the way his voice cracked and his eyes blazed, was somehow the biggest surprise of all.
“Ragnar,” he said, slowly, “what in the gods’ names are you talking about?”
Ragnar’s head tucked lower, and he started growling again. “Admit it: you want to fuck her, don’t you?”
“So do you,” Leif said, hands spread in a helpless gesture. “We’ve already established that. How many women have we shared at this point? What’s different about—”
Ragnar flinched as though struck, and Leif knew, then, with certainty, the problem he faced.
“You’re jealous of her.”
Ragnar shot him a viciously wounded look, and attempted to smile. “You overestimate your appeal, cousin.”
Leif took a step closer, and then another when Ragnar’s knees bent, and his arms closed tighter around his middle like a wounded animal protecting his soft underbelly.
“Why don’t you want me to fuck her? And don’t deny that’s what you’re thinking, because it clearly is.”
Ragnar scoffed…and turned his face away.
Leif took another step, close enough to see the way the fine hairs stood erect on Ragnar’s arms. Close enough to smell the pungency of fear in his already-sour scent.
Leif gentled his voice when he asked, “Why do you encourage me to lie with whores and camp followers, but don’t want me to be with Amelia?”
Ragnar’s lips parted. His breath came in quick, shallow pants, the sound echoing off the tree trunks around him.
“Is it because,” Leif continued, “you covet her for yourself? Knowing you’ll never have her?” He tilted his head. “Or because you covet me?”
Ragnar stopped breathing, and held still one long moment, the span of three heartbeats. Then he surged upright with a vicious snarl and snatched the front of Leif’s tunic in two trembling fistfuls.
Leif’s human side had expected such a reaction, and even his wolf wasn’t riled to aggression. This was his packmate (mate, mate, mate, regular old mate) in pain, anguished, and his wolf sought only to comfort.
He laid his hands on Ragnar’s biceps, over the body-warm gold of his arm bands, beneath which the muscle jumped in response to his touch. “It’s all right,” he said, for lack of any better reassurance.
But Ragnar would not be comforted. The veins stood out in his throat, and the tendons leaped in his jaw with the force of the growl that tore up from his chest and blasted hot into Leif’s face.
“Will you share her, then?” he fumed. “You’ll have her first, of course, obviously, but then will you pass her to me? Does your favorite pet prisoner get a turn of his own, once you’ve taken your pleasure?”
“Ragnar—”
“You can marry her!” The words burst out of him. A confession, a dam breaking. In their wake, all the fire drained away, and left him sagging. Leif tightened his hands on his arms to keep him upright, suddenly afraid that, given the way he listed, he might fall.
The growl died away, and Ragnar turned his face to the side.
In a small, miserable voice, he said, “You can’t marry a whore or a camp follower.
But you can marry a lady.” He took a shuddering breath, and his hair shifted to fall across the side of his face, shielding his gaze from view. “You probably will.”
Plain jealousy Leif had suspected, but this…
This astounded him.
A voice that sounded like Erik’s spoke up in the back of his mind: Ragnar’s a liar. A master manipulator. He’s always been that way. He would tell you anything to get what he wants.
But Leif relied, as he always did these days, upon his wolf senses and instincts. In this way, Ragnar couldn’t lie. His hurt, his anger, his fear: all of that was real and true.
Leif had never thought to find himself in this position. He supposed war had a way of twisting not just expectations, but futures as well. He knew, too, what Erik would say to him now.
But Erik wasn’t here.
None of his family was…save Ragnar.
Leif growled, low and chiding, and swept Ragnar’s hair back with a quick slash of his hand.
He caught a glimpse of Ragnar’s startled expression before he hooked two fingers in the torq and yanked him forward.
Ragnar made a choked sound, and Leif gathered his hair up in his other fist and pushed Ragnar’s head down onto his shoulder.
They were almost of a height, but Leif had the slightest advantage.
He used it to turn his head and bite Ragnar lightly on the throat, in the tender skin below the torq, where his pulse throbbed visibly.
Ragnar went limp beneath his teeth. He exhaled in a shocked-sounding rush. And then he rested his hands on Leif’s waist, the grip punishingly tight. Clinging desperately.
Leif didn’t draw blood, but when he lifted his head, saw that he’d left a gratifying mark behind on Ragnar’s throat.
“You fool,” Leif murmured against his ear, and heard Ragnar’s quick inhale, felt his chest swell against his own, and wanted. “I’m not going to marry Amelia.”
“You could,” Ragnar said, muffled against his shoulder.
“Yes, but I don’t want to.” It was really only once he said that he realized how true the statement was. A previously undetected knot of tension loosened under his breastbone. “I don’t particularly want to bed her, either.”
Ragnar pulled back, but only as far as Leif would allow, fingers still hooked in his torq. It put them almost nose-to-nose, Ragnar’s features blurred this close, but his eyes very blue, and very wide. “Liar,” he accused, but the bright, mischievous spark had returned to his voice; a glimmer of it.
Leif snorted. “No. Most days, I’m so randy I’d have a run at a convenient knot in a tree.”
Ragnar pulled back a little more, the torq digging into the back of his neck, his lips hitching upward at the outer corners.
Soberly, and honestly, for the first time since meeting the Lady of Drakewell, Leif said, “I like Amelia, yes. I admire her strength. Is she attractive? Of course. Could she want me? Yes, I can scent it on her.”
Ragnar’s face fell.
Leif continued, “She gives you the occasional sidelong glance as well.”
Ragnar’s brows went up, and…oh. Well. Leif didn’t like that much at all.
“She’s lonely,” he said, firmly. “She misses her dead lover, and she’s not a wide-eyed virgin. She hungers, same as anyone.”
Ragnar considered a moment. His gaze lowered to Leif’s mouth, eyes growing hazy and half-lidded. “Not like us.”
Leif’s pulse jumped, and Ragnar’s did in response; a delicious feedback loop of heated excitement that it would be all too easy to succumb to. “No,” he agreed, “not like us.”
Ragnar leaned in.
Leif shifted his hand to the front of his throat, and pressed his thumb to the torq, right over his Adam’s apple.
Ragnar stopped short, brows lifting, breath stuttering.
“I might not want her,” Leif said, “but I’m not going to let the Sels take her this way.”
Ragnar sighed, long-suffering. “Curse you for being a prince.”