Chapter 26
T he young female healer stood before Bronze, wringing her hands and begging him to hand off the job of wrapping his wounds to her care. “Are you sure I can’t help you in this regard? I’ve already cleaned the gouges thoroughly. I recognize your preference to forgo any stitching of the flesh, and that is certainly your prerogative as the princess’s chosen champion, but at least let me secure the binding. You are to give it the best chance at healing before the third game tomorrow, and I should not like the dressing to come loose while you sleep.”
“Thank you, but there is no need. I can take care of my own wounds.”
“Yes, sir.” The head bow of disappointment was so heavy, it was almost— almost —enough to make Bronze feel guilty over turning away the kind healer. It was clear she cared deeply about her profession. After all, it wasn’t her fault she got stuck with an ornery angel who’d just had his ass handed to him in the most public of settings.
The lycan closed the door behind her, leaving Bronze to admire the scene of his stupidity. The infirmary room they’d brought him to was much, much smaller than the one he’d spent time in with Clara when they’d first arrived. This one, with its butcher-paper-clad utilitarian cot and very little else, was likely for those who couldn’t afford a side of office furniture with their injuries.
It was a perfect place to lick his wounds. Quite fucking literally.
The gouges Raff had scored into his flesh weren’t the only parting gifts the male had left him with. There were just some things that stuck with a being, no matter how much time had passed. For Bronze, the sound of those two scraps of brown leather thwacking the dirt next to his ear would be the eternal metronome in his mind ticking back and forth between two of his most solid truths: loss and mate .
He sure as shit had enough in the first column to fill a black hole. The second column, however? That pain was about as fresh and murky as his newly appointed gashes before the healer had cleaned out all the gunk that clung to him from the arena. Over the eons, from time to time, he’d summon the idea of a mate to his mind and more so ever since Titan had been the first of his brothers to find his soul bond in his lovely female, Rose.
It had always been Bronze’s duty, however, that would engage first, calling to mind images of Polina, but the thing was . . . the representation was always invariably a bit off. Long blonde tresses haloed over the slight stature of the woman he thought he recalled, but when he tried to narrow his focus, the best his brain could come up with was Malik’s ugly mug stretched to fill out the face holding up all that hair. And Bronze had to believe there was more to Polina than the sum of her brother’s features, but for the life of him, whenever his mind conjured up the word mate , it was his oath regarding Polina, not the female herself, that always floated to the surface.
Until recently, when a frost-haired lycan princess began slipping into his dreams. With Clara, they’d tossed the mate moniker around freely, as if it was a frisbee to be played with. Whoever caught the thing in that moment was the proverbial keeper of the secret and actor extraordinaire, until they flung it back and could breathe a sigh of relief that the ruse was no longer theirs to uphold for a time.
Except, somewhere along the line, the ruse had stopped feeling so . . . ruse-y. It was in the feel of her hair, the taste of her skin, the strength in her back when she stood up against her father’s oppression. In those moments, his heart had begun to clench more tightly, anxious and terrified for the time when he’d have to catch that frisbee again and pretend he didn’t want to try the truth of the part on for size.
Maybe Raff had knocked loose more than just Bronze’s back teeth.
“Bronze!”
For anyone else, a frantic lycan flinging a patient room door wide would have been enough to call not only security but the nearest Comic-Con convention to see whether they were missing some of their talent. For him, however, it was just enough to scatter the rest of the staff and afford him a measure of privacy with the female he needed to apologize to in a big fucking way.
“Hey, princess.” Then he cleared his throat, trying to chase away some of the gravel. “Clara, look, I’m so sorry for how I?—”
“I’m so sorry for the words I?—”
The verbal collision caught them both off guard, casting an expectant pause around the small room.
Clara quirked her head to the side, and Bronze had to bite his lip to keep from smiling. It was easy to forget sometimes that his female was descended from canines and occasionally exhibited very canine-like mannerisms. Now was not the time to point it out to her, however. The prime mages had gifted him with a nominal amount of intelligence most days, but even he was smart enough to know to gird his loins if he let that observation about her fly.
“Why on earth would you be apologizing to me ?” Clara rushed forward and started inspecting his bandaged arms. “I’m the one who said the most awful things to you. And you must know they were outright lies.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but her raised palm silenced him.
“I know what you’re going to say. That they were born from my emotions, and emotions don’t lie, and yes, that may be true, but my sentiments were built on misconceptions and inaccuracies. They were words I believed at the time because I didn’t know I could believe in anything else. Every male who’s been in a position of power in my life has always proven that point ruthlessly. And it’s all garbage. Believing something for the sake of believing doesn’t make it true.” She dropped her hands and clasped them in front of her. “True power does not pick and choose its recipients. It is not defined by role or lineage or?—”
“Gender.”
The look on her face would have been so beautiful if it didn’t also crush him. She still doesn’t believe what she’s capable of.
Bronze cradled her face in his palms. “Listen to me, princess. It is indeed a rare thing to go up against one’s father, let alone one’s king, and publicly castrate him so effectively, all without a single lycan knowing. You want to talk about ruthlessness? About power? Oh, Clara, I wasn’t angry at you, not truly. I was angry at myself for thinking I had made it this long in this realm on my powers alone. There was no way I was ever going to win that match, regardless of how you ensured a fair outcome. From the moment I stepped foot onto that dirt, my brain was already starting from a place of affirmed lack.”
“It was?”
He nodded. “It’s the first rule of any competition. If you start out thinking you’re going to lose, then what’s stopping you? All I was focused on was the power I didn’t have, the strength I couldn’t summon. No shit I didn’t win. All my attention was going toward what I was missing, so of course that’s where my energy went, too. The whole thing was over before it started, and for that, I could never apologize enough. I cost you a match and may have jeopardized what you’ve worked so hard for.”
Clara peeled away one of his hands and placed a tender kiss on his palm. “It’s not over yet. There is still one more game. And you’re wrong. We’ve both worked so hard for this. Whatever happens, it’s something we’ll face together.”
Damn, he didn’t deserve this. Not this soft and warm female who had just flung her arms around him, not the way his body curled around hers protectively as if trying on the part of mate for size.
None of it was his. None of it was real. But like he fucking cared at that point? If life had taught him anything, it was that second chances were not guaranteed. Sometimes the mages robbed you of the life you knew in order for many others to live theirs. Sometimes fate would strip your powers in order for you to prove your strength.
And sometimes a celestial goddess would break all the rules, claiming aces wild, and send exactly what you needed upriver.
“This feels right to me,” he whispered against her hair.
“It does. It really does.”
The rumble of his stomach was a fucking bullhorn of a moment killer. “Shit, sorry.”
“None of that. I’d like to be finished with the apologies for at least five minutes. Let me go bring you some food.”
For once in Bronze’s life, he didn’t argue and was more than content to let Clara walk away knowing she was just as eager to get right back in his arms.
Clara was debating between the apricot and the raspberry jam for Bronze’s hunk of bread. The kitchens had cleared out from the breakfast rush, and the staff was enjoying the brief lull before the lunch prep, so she blessedly had the place to herself.
And also, quite fortunately, leftovers. She heaped the platter high with half a loaf of grainy bread, a wedge of hard cheese, two apples, and—oh, what the hell—two ramekins of both jams, grabbed the small coffee urn, and floated toward the door.
“Late breakfast, I see.”
“Father!” Clara skidded to a halt and raised the platter high overhead, floating it above like a peacock feather on her fingertip. Once the items had stilled and the platter no longer swayed from side to side with the waves of the coffee, she brought it back to waist height and placed it on the counter.
The king jutted his chin toward the tray. “Is that for him?”
“For my champion, yes. He was injured, as I’m sure you recall. Lord Raff dealt him a difficult blow. I am helping him to heal and ensuring he is nourished in the interim.”
“Does that require riding his cock as well?”
All the available air rushed from her lungs. “What?”
Her father moved into the kitchen, taking in the space as one would assess a recently inherited estate they had no interest in or use for. “Naivete does not become you, daughter. For once in your life, do act like you are a part of this family. You are many things, but ignorant is not one of them. Now tell me, has he gotten you with pup yet? Or is it too early to tell?”
The raging heat coursing through her veins aggravated her wolf to the point of nearly shifting. “How can you say such things?”
“Because I am the king,” he snarled at her, bracing his hands on the counter. “A king who has made an arrangement with a foreign leader for your hand in marriage and, thus, an alliance to unite our kingdoms in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Raff brings the muscle and might, I bring the currency and your warm cunt. Did you really think you’d be able to outwit me with your little games and the demigod or whatever the fuck he is that you found like some lost plaything in the human lands?”
“Do not speak of him that way. He is more powerful than you can imagine.”
“Powerful enough to dispatch the dozen guards I’ve ordered to stand sentinel outside his patient room after you left? He can’t even manage to get rid of one lycan. How the fuck do you figure he can manage twelve and while injured no less?”
The dark stone of the kitchen walls began to creep toward her in painfully heavy increments. Even her wolf was pacing and circling through her mind at the claustrophobia of it all, her tail lowered and her whimpers pummeling Clara’s nerves with a new sort of fear.
No, this can’t be happening.
“I’ll make this quick, as I haven’t got all day. Unfortunately, due to your little show of independence ,” he sneered, “our subjects are expecting the Betrothal Games to finish in their entirety. However, if you wish for your champion to live to see the sunrise, you will agree to mate with Lord Raff, and the final game shall commence in such a way that the outcome will be secured in our favor. Oh, yes, daughter, I’m well aware you’ve caught on to my arrangements. But you are my blood, after all. So, rather than dispelling my tactics entirely, I rather thought this would present a good opportunity to bring you into the fold, so to speak. Give you a look at the family business, internal operations and all that.”
It was all happening too fast. One moment, she was debating which jam she’d secretly been most eager to taste on her champion’s lips, and the next, she was bartering for his life. Though, it wasn’t really a barter, was it? No. This was pure unadulterated blackmail at its finest, from the male who should have been protecting her from the very beasts he was now subjecting her to.
But Bronze. Oh, Bronze! He’d never asked for any of this. All he’d done was save the life of a female who had begged him to do the impossible, and he’d followed her willingly for no other reason than altruism, a bit of responsibility maybe, and perhaps a small growing fondness between them.
Though it wasn’t small on her part. That had never been truer than when she’d seen him fly through the air, bobbing on fence posts, to claim a relic in her name.
And now he would be killed for it.
“What is your answer, Clara? I have other business to attend to, and my guards are waiting. They have instructions that if they do not receive word from me by half past the hour, they are to breach his patient door and destroy him on sight.”
Half past the . . . what?
Clara ripped up her sleeve and took in the time on her wristwatch. The bone-colored hand had just ticked past the twenty-eight-minute mark and was quickly closing in on the dreaded half hour.
“There’s no time! How can you not give me any time to consider this?”
“Because there’s nothing to consider. I will have my way regardless. I was merely giving you an opportunity to have a hand in your male’s future before I secure yours. Now, what will it be? Will you play your part, or will I end his?”
Her heart forced the answer from her closing throat before the avenue for speech was lost to her entirely, before her head had time to analyze any possible alternatives, any way out of the hell she’d been dragged into.
The truth, when she was finally able to see it clearly, was mirrored back at her through the ashen reflection of her circumstances as they had always been. A broodmare to be won. A bloodline to be purchased.
Love had never played a part, and she was foolish to believe it would do so now.
“Yes.” She sighed. “I’ll do as you ask of me. Just, please, spare him. As you have remarked, he is not one of us. He is innocent.”
The king assessed her with a smirk of satisfaction, yet no small measure of remorse. “ That is yet to be decided. If he dies tomorrow, it will not be by my guards’ hands. That is, so long as you cooperate.”
She nodded, no longer trusting her voice to say anything that wouldn’t end in Bronze’s execution. As she walked out of the kitchen, trailing her father in stature and shadow, she never looked back at the food she’d intended to feed Bronze.
She couldn’t bear to witness the flies that had no doubt begun to descend.