Bought By the Raven King (Monsters’ Bride Market #5)

Olwen

Istood on the auction block, third from the left, and performed the act of breathing.

Shallow inhale. Pause. Slow exhale.

I’d practiced in front of a cracked mirror for three weeks straight, watching my reflection until the rhythm looked natural, until the rise and fall of my chest matched the women around me.

“Lot forty-seven.”

The auctioneer’s voice bounced off stone walls, too loud, too jovial for what this place was.

He was a thick man with a red face slick with perspiration, jowls quivering as he consulted his leather ledger.

“Human female. Twenty-two years. Literate. Numerate. Merchant stock.” He squinted at his notes. “No diseases. No deformities. Teeth intact.”

A yellow smile. “Excellent breeding potential, gentlemen. Shall we start the bidding at one hundred gold?”

I kept my gaze fixed on a point above the crowd.

The rafters. Thick oak beams gone dark with age, left over from the building’s days as a granary, or perhaps from less savory purposes.

I didn’t want to know.

Easier to look up there than at the faces below. The monsters who had come shopping for wives.

I counted them in my peripheral vision because I couldn’t afford not to know what hunted me.

A serpent lord in the corner, his scales glinting copper and green beneath a hooded cloak. Other shapes in the shadows, monsters I didn’t look at long enough to identify.

And in the front row, a wolf shifter, massive. Bigger than any wolf had a right to be while still wearing human form. His shoulders strained the seams of his leather vest, a chest like a barrel.

Fur the color of rust crept up his neck and across his jaw, and his eyes were gold coins in a brutal face. He leaned forward on the bench, nostrils flaring wide.

Scenting the air.

Hunting for the one thing all predators sought in prey.

Fear.

His brow furrowed. Nostrils flared again. Again.

His lips peeled back from yellow teeth. The gold faded from his eyes, replaced by something colder. Hunger. The kind that sharpened when the hunt got difficult.

“Two hundred gold,” he growled.

The auctioneer’s face split into a grin that showed too many teeth. “Excellent opening bid! A discerning eye, good sir. Do I hear two-fifty?”

The other monsters shifted. Glanced at the wolf. At me. Calculating odds, weighing risks.

I kept my gaze on the rafters and counted my heartbeats.

“Two-fifty,” the Serpent Lord offered, his voice a dry rustle.

“Two seventy-five.” The wolf. Irritated now.

“Three hundred.”

The new voice came from the shadows at the back of the market hall.

Low. Quiet. The kind of voice that didn’t need volume because it expected obedience. The kind of voice that had never in its existence needed to repeat itself.

The crowd parted.

Not voluntarily. I watched their bodies move, watched the way they stepped aside without deciding to, as if the shadows themselves had pushed them.

And from that darkness, he emerged.

The Raven King.

He walked through the crowd, and the crowd let him. Tall. Lean, dressed in black that swallowed the torchlight, wearing a long coat with silver clasps shaped like raven skulls.

Hair the color of ink, swept back from a high forehead.

And his eyes.

Black. Completely, impossibly black. No whites, no iris, no pupil. Just void looking back at me, dark and depthless as a well that went down forever.

He stopped at the edge of the bidding floor.

He didn’t look at my body the way the wolf had. There was no assessment of curves, no calculation of breeding potential. He looked at something else.

Something behind my face, or perhaps at the space where something should have been.

The hollow place.

Could he see it?

Could he see me?

A pouch landed on the bidding table with a heavy thunk. Not the musical clink of gold. Something duller. Colder.

“Black iron,” someone whispered.

The auctioneer’s smile faltered. His fingers twitched toward the pouch, then stopped. “Sir. We prefer standard currency for the market.”

“I am not paying for flesh.”

The Raven King’s gaze never left mine. Black eyes, dark and bottomless, and I felt myself falling into them like a stone into still water.

“I am paying for silence.”

Silence. I could do silence.

The wolf snarled, a genuine animal sound full of threat, and shoved forward through the crowd. “I bid higher. Three-fifty. Gold. Real gold, not grave-offerings.”

The auctioneer looked between them.

I watched his face calculate: the wolf’s gold spent easier than funeral coins, but the Raven King was not a creature one wanted as an enemy.

His thick fingers drummed against the ledger. Sweat beaded at his temples.

“Perhaps we should let the lady choose,” he said, voice oily. “As is custom.”

The wolf snorted. “Fine. Let her choose.”

He grinned at me, and there was nothing friendly in it. “Come here, girl. Let me get a proper look at my new bride.”

He grabbed my wrist.

Heat seared through me.

Agony. Pure and complete. It wasn’t the gentle prickle of warming frozen fingers, but the full-body shock of plunging ice into boiling water.

His palm was a brand, burning through skin and muscle down to the bone beneath.

I couldn’t breathe, didn’t need to breathe, but the reflex kicked in anyway, a gasp tearing from my throat.

I wrenched backward.

The wolf held on. His brow furrowed. “What the hell is wrong with her?”

The crowd murmured. The auctioneer’s smile had gone fixed and terrified.

Then the Raven King stepped forward. He didn’t speak, didn’t move to intervene, simply let his gaze sweep the room, heavy and cold as a grave slab.

The wolf released my wrist and stepped back, his aggression withering under that silent stare.

I didn’t wait for the moment to break.

I stepped off the platform, walked through the crowd without looking at them until I stopped in front of the Raven King. He didn’t move. Simply waited.

For me. For my choice.

Instead, I reached into my bodice and pulled out the bride-token, a carved wooden coin, worn smooth by the nervous fingers of a thousand women before me.

The symbol of a woman’s right to choose at auction. Small comfort, but the only one this place offered.

I pressed it into his gloved palm.

“I choose the cold.”

His lips curved.

It wasn’t a smile. It was a warning.

His gaze held mine, and for a moment I thought I saw something flicker in those depths, surprise, perhaps. Or recognition.

“Then you have come to the right place, little bride.”

The alley behind the Bride Market was narrow, dark, and stank of piss and rotting vegetables.

I’d asked for a moment of ‘privacy,’ and the Raven King had been gracious enough to not ask questions.

I crouched behind a stack of broken crates, fingers shaking as I fumbled with the leather pouch at my belt.

The small box inside was carved from whale bone, or so the black-market dealer had told me.

Inside lay a scattering of dried petals the color of a winter sky. Ghostbreath, they were called. Flowers that grew only in graveyards, only on the plots of those who had died with unfinished business.

I picked one up with trembling fingers.

It was tissue-thin and fragile, and it smelled faintly of old roses and copper. I placed it on my tongue. Let it dissolve.

The effect was immediate.

Artificial warmth flooded my veins. It was not real heat, nor the burning agony of the wolf’s touch, but a simulation of it. A mask.

My heart kicked into a stuttering rhythm against my ribs. Too fast. Too hard. The heartbeat of a frightened rabbit, not a calm woman.

But it was a heartbeat.

My cheeks flushed. My skin prickled. I inhaled, and the air finally felt like it went somewhere instead of just sitting in my useless lungs.

Two hours. Maybe three. That’s how long the effect would last.

Hopefully long enough to survive the journey to his lands without him pressing his hand to my chest and finding nothing there. Long enough to reach the Veil, where human law couldn’t follow.

Four petals left.

I closed the box. Tucked it away. Stood.

The Raven King waited at the mouth of the alley, a dark shape against the fading light. Beside him stood something that had never been a horse.

It was shaped like one, with four legs, a long neck, and a proud head. But its body was made of smoke and shadow, black vapor held together by will alone.

Muscle rippled beneath a hide that shifted between solid and mist. Its eyes burned like dying embers, red and ageless and knowing.

“A Shadow-Steed,” the Raven King said. “It will not harm you.”

I wasn’t afraid of the steed.

I was afraid of the journey. Hours pressed against his body.

Hours of the petal’s false warmth warring with whatever cold he carried.

Ahead lay uncertainty. Behind I knew too well what waited for me.

I’d take uncertainty every time.

He mounted in a single motion that looked efficient. He moved like a man who had done this so many times the movements had become part of his body’s memory, as automatic as breathing.

He extended a hand.

I took it.

His grip was firm through the leather glove. Strong. He pulled me up in front of him as though I weighed nothing, settling me between his thighs with my back against his chest.

His arm wrapped around my waist and I recoiled. Not as cold as I’d expected. Warmth lingered beneath that frost-touched exterior, and against my dead flesh, even tepid felt like a furnace.

Every dead nerve ending sparked and misfired, sending confused signals to a brain that no longer knew how to interpret any temperature that wasn’t the grave’s emptiness.

It was too warm. It was wrong.

And beneath the discomfort, something else stirred, a pull toward his warmth, a hunger that wanted to reach out and take. I held it back, terrified of what I might do if I let go.

He leaned down, his breath stirring the hair at my temple, and even that was warm, warm and damp and alive in a way I would never be again.

“Do not tremble,” he murmured. “I do not bite.” A pause, weighted. “Unless asked.”

I closed my eyes, and the Shadow-Steed surged forward, and the Bride Market disappeared behind us.