Chapter 5
“There are moments when your life hangs in the balance and you realize sarcasm may have carried you farther than wisdom ever intended.” ~Kara
The silence after the Troll King lifted his hand was worse than the threats had been.
Silence implied decision. And decisions made by creatures large enough to use boulders as decorative accents rarely, in Kara’s experience, favored the prisoners. Not that she’d necessarily had much experience with said creatures, but it just seemed like common sense.
She resisted the urge to step backward. Mostly because she suspected showing fear to trolls operated on the same principle as bleeding in shark-infested water, technically survivable if luck is on your side, statistically inadvisable, and not an experiment she was prepared to run today.
The king studied her with the focused, unhurried attention of something that had learned patience the hard way, across centuries she couldn’t begin to calculate.
His black gaze moved over her like a hand tracing the surface of something he hadn’t expected to find interesting, and the quality of his attention, curious rather than predatory, was, somehow, more unsettling than contempt would have been.
Contempt she knew how to navigate. Lots of her foster parents had held contempt towards her and the other foster kids, it wasn’t anything new. This was something else entirely.
“You carry two powers,” he said at last. His voice was low, ground-deep, the kind of sound that resonated in the chest rather than the ears.
“Not just the witch power you claim, though I do feel that magic, as does the power seeping into my realm. A power you brought with you.” Accusation dripped from his tone.
Kara blinked. “Well, that feels prematurely presumptive.”
His black gaze narrowed by a fraction, the stone-cut lines of his face shifting with the expression like fault lines redistributing weight. “And a third not yet born.”
Every sound in the cavern died.
Not faded. Died. As though the air itself had decided to stop circulating while it processed what it had just heard.
The drip of mineral water somewhere in the dark went still.
The shuffle of enormous feet ceased. Even the torchlight seemed to hold itself in place, flames frozen mid-flicker in the sudden, absolute quiet.
And then Nick went feral.
Not metaphorically. Not in the way people said it when they meant someone had lost their temper or raised their voice.
Actually feral—the distinction being audible in the sound that tore out of him, a growl so deep and so primal that the iron bars of the cage vibrated with it, a resonance that traveled through the stone floor and up through the soles of Kara’s boots.
It was the sound of something civilized being stripped back to its foundation in a single moment, every careful layer of control shredding at once.
“No one,” Nick snarled, his hands wrapped around the bars, knuckles bone-white, his eyes burning with a gold so intense it threw light onto the cage floor, “speaks of my mate or child again.”
The words weren’t a threat. They were a line drawn in bedrock, and everything in his voice said he would burn whatever needed burning to hold it.
The Troll King turned toward him slowly, with the unhurried certainty of something that had faced down a great many things and had rarely lost the exchange. He studied Nick with the same quiet, assessing attention he’d turned on Kara, and then, terrifyingly, inexplicably, he smiled.
Not cruelly. Knowingly.
The distinction, in Kara’s mind, was everything, and this one hit her squarely in the sternum. Cruel she could argue against. Knowing implied the king held information about the current situation that none of them did, and that was a significantly more dangerous position to be standing across from.
“Wolf,” he rumbled, his voice carrying the patience of something that had watched many storms and weathered every one, “if I meant them harm, you would already be mourning.”
Kara stared at him for a long moment. Then she turned the sentence around in her head, examining it from several angles. Then she set it back down.
That was, she had been generous when she had called it “deeply unhelpful.”
She lifted a hand, the gesture pulling everyone’s attention before she’d made the conscious decision to demand it.
“Quick question.” No one in the cavern looked particularly interested in her questions.
Several of the assembled trolls had the specific expression of people who’d been hoping the smaller creatures would simply stop generating sound.
She continued anyway. “Why on earth would you bring up the fact that you think I’m pregnant, when I don’t look pregnant at all?
I mean, surely even in your culture that’s considered taboo.
Do troll men walk up to a troll chick and just toss out casually, ‘you’ve got an unborn power,’ e.g.
a baby in your belly, even when the troll woman’s stomach isn’t remotely swollen, and not get smacked in the face?
” Kara’s eyes bounced around the room, looking at the trolls.
Finally, one spoke up. “Troll females all have bellies. Why would a male want a female that isn’t soft to cuddle? No one wants to snuggle bones.”
To Kara’s shock, Gavril said, “I have to agree with the troll. Nothing better than holding my female and not being able to count her ribs with my fingers.”
“Way to make us boney chicks feel good about ourselves,” Zara mumbled as she side eyed her mate.
Wadim held up his hands. “Babe, I didn’t throw in my hat with the thick lady crowd. I like you any way you are. As long as I get to touch you, I don’t care what my fingers can count.”
“I feel like we’ve gotten way off topic,” Rachel said, her voice calm and poised, like she always seemed to be. Kara was sure she’d never seen the healer rattled in the least.
“The female wolf is right,” the Troll King nodded his large head.
“It doesn’t matter what your body shows.
Your magic has revealed another source inside of you.
New, growing and pure. Only a child has that kind of energy–” He paused, still looking at her.
“There is much more going on here than just a group of wolves, a fae, and a witch hybrid entering our realm.”
The king stepped closer, close enough now that Kara had to actively resist the instinct to crane her neck back to maintain the eye contact she was committed to holding.
Up close, the age in him was apparent in ways she hadn’t been able to see from a distance, his stone-dark skin was crossed with cracks like old fault lines, deep and deliberate, the kind of marks that weren’t damage but record, the accumulated evidence of centuries pressing themselves into flesh that had been around long enough to hold the weight.
He wasn’t merely powerful. He was old, in the way that the mountains were old, existing before the concept of ancient had been coined to describe things like him.
“The Deep Below woke for you.”
The silence that followed was different from the one before, less shocked, more reckoning.
Kara swallowed carefully. “I’m sorry,” she said, keeping her voice level through what she felt was a commendable exercise in self-control, “the what did what, now?”
From his cage, Wadim said, quiet and controlled in the particular way of someone managing their own dread through the careful maintenance of composure, “I was afraid he’d say that.”
Kara didn’t look away from the king. “Why were you afraid he’d say that? Have you heard of such a thing?”
He shook his head. “No, but, civilizations tend to collapse after phrases like ‘the Deep Below woke.’” A pause. “Historically speaking. In my experience.”
She filed that away under things to panic about once we’re not in immediate danger and kept her gaze on the king’s face.
The column of her spine felt very straight because she’d lost all ability to slump forward like a normal person with bad posture.
Kara was completely in scared-straight posture mode.
The king extended one enormous hand toward the darkness at the cavern’s edge. “Come.”
She did not move. The soles of her boots remained in contact with the stone floor as though they’d developed opinions about the proposition. “Hard pass.”
“It was not a request.”
From behind her came the sound of metal taking impact, of Nick’s fists against the bars again, the growl in his chest a constant low frequency, like a second heartbeat running beneath the conversation. Kara turned sharply, and found his eyes immediately.
They were pure gold. Pure protest. Pure panic, barely held behind the cage bars and the thinner, more fragile bars of self-control he was maintaining for her benefit rather than his own.
Their bond vibrated with everything neither of them said out loud, the connection between them taut and humming like a wire under too much tension.
She felt his fear not as a separate thing but as an extension of her own, the specific kind that didn’t belong to you but lived inside you anyway because the person it belonged to was part of your architecture now.
“I’ll be okay,” she told him through the bond. “You know what I’m capable of.”
His answer came back without words, traveling the bond in a form purer than verbal language, and it landed with the particular weight of things that were true before they were wanted.
“I do know. But I cannot stand the thought of you out of my sight. Not again. Not ever. But, I also know I can’t clip your wings. ”
She hated that. Hated his acceptance far more than she would have hated his resistance, because resistance would have given her something to push against. This was worse, this was Nick understanding, which meant he’d already run the numbers and reached the same terrible conclusion she had, and his agreement was its own kind of grief.