Chapter Four
Calista
“Calista,” Dorian murmured. Somehow, it sounded like a warning and a plea braided together.
“I know.”
The king slid from his saddle like winter stepping off a ridge.
His guards folded in around him, some masked, others bare-faced, all sharp lines and colder discipline.
But it was the male at their center who stole the shape from everything else.
Broad-shouldered, all hard planes, and quiet strength.
He looked less like a ruler than a force the realm had simply learned to obey.
I told myself not to look, but I kept stealing glances all the same.
Despite the iron wolf mask concealing most of his face, I could still make out the brutal line of his jaw.
The mask itself was forged in iron as dark as wet stone, its muzzle ridged and scarred, fangs worked in cold silver.
Claw-scratched runes ringed the brow, and the eye slits were deep enough that his gaze felt like a silver sea in deepest winter.
Dark, unruly hair pushed free at the edges of the helm, resisting both crown and iron alike.
A leather strap crossed his bare chest, biting over a torso cut like quarried rock.
Goddess, I had never seen a male built like that.
His fur cloak fell from a heavy clasp stamped with Frostcrag’s sigil.
His mere presence swallowed the rest of the yard until only power remained.
He carried the cold with him, and the scent of smoke, pine, and steel.
The weight of his gaze pressed through the mask, piercing in its intensity. I counted my heartbeats. Three. Four. Five. Until the urge to look up felt like a thing with claws.
Dorian stepped forward first, as protocol demanded, and bowed with his eyes lowered. “Alpha King. Welcome to Hollowcrest Isle.”
Suri’s breath hitched. She reached for my hand again, and I squeezed it tightly, just as I had when she was small and nightmares plagued her sleep. From the corner of my eye, I saw her glance up at the king before dropping her gaze to his enormous boots once more.
“Alpha Woodsmere.” The king’s voice entered the air like shadow, low and everywhere at once. “Your isle is quaint.” His gaze moved across our land, then our court.
Dorian waffled for a moment. “Yes, well. We make do. There is much I would like to share about the state of affairs here and the aid Hollowcrest has been promised—”
The king cleared his throat, sharp and severe, cutting him off mid-sentence. Silence fell over Frostcrag’s party. Then his fingers flexed once at his sides, the whisper of skin against leather somehow reaching my ears over the wind.
“And this is she, I assume.” That deep voice snapped my full attention toward him. He said the words as though the answer had already been decided.
I lifted my chin a fraction and kept my eyes level with the road just beyond his shoulder. I would not cower. I would not shame Hollowcrest by trembling in front of the one male powerful enough to help us.
“Calista Vale of Hollowcrest Isle.” I spoke before anyone else could name me as though I were nothing more than an object to be exchanged. “At your service, Alpha King.”
The silence that followed turned thin and sharp. His frosted silver gaze pressed harder through the indentations in that terrible mask, like a fingertip testing a bruise.
“Calista…” Dorian muttered under his breath.
But I hadn’t done anything wrong. If I was to stand before a king for my people’s sake, I would do so with my own name in my own mouth.
The king said nothing for one heartbeat. Then he moved a step, then another, until his shadow fell across my shoes. Leather, cold, and that maddening scent of smoke and pine touched the air around me.
“Calista Vale.” He said my name as though he were trying it on for size. “Look at me.”
The command ensnared me like a hook. His compulsion pulled at something buried deep in my chest, something raw and instinctive. But without a Wolvryn, his power had nowhere clean to hold.
Still, I felt it, somehow.
“With respect, Alpha King, my Alpha was speaking about Hollowcrest’s needs. In fact only last night, southern raiders struck our shore again.”
Suri made a sound like a swallowed gasp, but Mara steadied her. Dorian’s hand twitched. A vein throbbed at his temple.
The king’s breath changed, a faint difference perhaps only I caught. The corners of his light eyes crinkled ever so slightly, and I could have sworn that perhaps beneath that ungodly mask, he was smirking at me. “Then by all means, let him finish.”
Dorian cleared his throat and began again, stumbling only once.
He spoke of duty and alliance and Hollowcrest’s need in plain terms: grain, medicine, weapons enough to turn the raiders back.
I tried to keep my attention on his words, but it was nearly impossible with the king’s piercing gaze on me for the whole of it.
When Dorian finished, the king answered in that same quiet that felt more like authority than volume. “You will have what we agreed upon. And more, if she proves worth the trouble.”
My jaw tightened to suppress the smile. Trouble. Good. At least he wouldn’t be surprised. But the promise beneath it was what truly mattered.
More. More grain? More guards? More protection than Hollowcrest had dared hope for?
Dorian bowed his head. “Then Hollowcrest Isle is in your debt.”
“No.” The king’s gaze raked over me once more, like tiny pinpricks skating over flesh. “It will be in your bride’s hands. She will decide what price you pay.”
I breathed once, slow and shallow.
Moons. This was truly happening.
Not the marriage alone but the possibility.
The chance that standing beside this male might actually mean something for Hollowcrest. That this would not be a sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake, but a bargain I could turn into safety for my people.
A sudden hush rippled through the Frostcrag ranks.
Boots shifted, and a harness creaked. Even the wind seemed to pause as the king lifted one hand, palm open, in command.
“You mentioned the raiders.” His voice carried over the yard.
“Before our betrothal vows are spoken, I offer a gift to my bride.”
My spine locked. A gift.
A gilded chain dressed in velvet? Or maybe some spectacle meant to remind Hollowcrest what power looked like when it belonged to someone else.
He didn’t even look at me when he motioned to his guards.
Two males broke from the line at once and returned moments later with the scrape of wheels over stone. A cart rolled forward from the back of the Frostcrag party. It was low and heavy, its boards stained dark. The smell reached me before the shapes did, sharp copper beneath the clean bite of frost.
Then the tarp shifted.
Bodies.
Broken forms piled like refuse. Blood stiffened their clothing black. Limbs bent wrong. Faces slack and pale, eyes half-open as if the dead still watched the sky that had failed them.
My stomach lurched.
For a heartbeat, the yard tilted then narrowed to the cart and the ruined proof of what he had done.
Raider cloaks.
Southern cut.
The same kind that had burned our nets and put half our shore to smoke.
I swallowed, throat tightening. Shock crawled up my ribs, cold and hot at once. Before the vows. Before the bargain. Before he owed us anything.
So this was why they called him Savage.
He stepped forward one pace, fur cloak shifting over his shoulders, the wolf mask turning his expression unreadable. But there was nothing unreadable about the message.
“The southern raiders thought to test Hollowcrest in the night.” He tipped his head toward the cart. “They will not test you again.”
A murmur moved through our court, a tangle of awe, fear and… hope.
My gaze snapped up despite myself. “You killed all of them?”
“I ended the threat.” His voice did not soften. “Now the south will understand what happens the next time they touch this shore.”
This shore. His shore.
He took another step, close enough now that I could clearly smell the winter and steel beneath the fur, close enough that the air thickened with him. “No one dares threaten what’s mine,” he growled, low and absolute, then his eyes flicked to my own. “What’s ours.”
The words slammed into me harder than the sight of the bodies. Heat flashed in my chest, traitorous and sharp, but more than that, relief surged. The raiders were dead, and our camps would breathe easier tonight.
In a single night, he had done what Hollowcrest had prayed years for.
A part of me hated how much safer that made me feel. I should have been happy. This was a king answering violence with violence swifter and greater.
And for Hollowcrest’s sake, that was exactly what we needed.
My gaze flicked once more to the broken men on the cart, then to Dorian, then to the rest of my Court with all their hope laid bare and fragile in their faces.
The Savage King had finally answered our suffering with more than prayers.
Before I had managed a full breath, a figure in white stepped from the Frostcrag ranks.