Chapter 10
Korvak
The warrior in her was dying.
I watched it happen day by day. It was a slow, quiet death, unfolding in the cage of my longhouse.
When I had first seen her, she was a creature of fire and motion, a whirlwind of desperate courage in the mud and blood of her city.
Now, that fire was being banked, smothered under a blanket of silence and inactivity.
She had started pacing. Back and forth, from the hearth to the door, a restless, relentless rhythm that spoke of a body and spirit screaming for release.
She was a wolf trapped in a pen, her muscles atrophying, her instincts dulling.
The sight of it was a constant, low-grade torture.
I had not claimed a pet to be kept by the fire.
I had claimed a mate with the heart of a predator, and I was killing her with comfort.
My mother’s lessons were a partial solution.
Kael—the name was a constant, soft weight in my mind—was a fiercely intelligent student.
Her Orcish was still halting, peppered with mistakes, but the wall of silence between us was beginning to crumble.
But language could not exercise the body, could not satisfy the warrior’s need for strife.
I found her one afternoon by the weapon rack near the door, her hand hovering over the hilt of a practice sword. Not touching, just feeling its proximity. Her knuckles were white.
“You are wearing a path in my floor,” I said from across the hall.
She snatched her hand back as if burned, turning to face me. The defiance in her stormy eyes was sharper today, honed by a whetstone of pure frustration. “Your floor is made of stone. It will survive.”
“My sanity, however, is in greater peril,” I rumbled, walking toward her. “You need to bleed off that energy before you chew through the doorposts.”
A flicker of suspicion crossed her face. “And what do you suggest? A brisk walk around the stronghold so your people can stare at your human pet?”
The word ‘pet’ struck a nerve. It was exactly what I feared she was becoming. “No,” I said, my voice sharp. “I suggest a sword. In a training ring. Against me.”
She froze, her entire body going still. I saw the war in her eyes. The deep, instinctual suspicion of a trap warring with the desperate, undeniable need for what I was offering. A weapon. A fight. A chance to feel like a wolf again, if only for an hour.
The need won. “Fine,” she said, her voice tight with a mixture of excitement and hostility. “But if I draw blood, you can’t have me executed for it.”
A true, deep laugh rumbled in my chest. “Kael, if you manage to draw blood on me with a blunted practice sword, I will not have you executed. I will have you made a captain.”
Her lips twitched, the barest hint of a smile. It was like watching the sun try to break through a storm cloud.
The main training ring of the stronghold was a wide, circular pit of packed sand, surrounded by weapon racks and a low wooden fence where off-duty warriors often gathered to watch, gamble, and pass judgment.
When I entered with a small, red-haired human woman at my heels, the usual chatter died instantly.
Every eye in the place fixed on us. I ignored them.
“Choose your weapon,” I said to her.
She scanned the racks, her eyes passing over the heavy Orcish cleavers and axes.
Her gaze settled on a pair of blunted short swords, the kind our youngbloods used to learn their forms. They were still heavy by human standards, but they were tools that prized speed over brute force.
She picked one up, testing its weight, its balance.
She settled into a low, familiar fighting stance, and I saw a ghost of the soldier in the mud, a flicker of the fire I so desperately missed.
I did not choose a weapon. It would not be a fair fight. My hands were weapons enough.
“Ready?” I asked.
Her only answer was a blur of motion.
She came at me fast, a whirlwind of controlled aggression.
It was a beautiful thing to watch. She didn’t try to match my strength—she knew that was a fool’s game.
She was water, flowing around me, looking for a crack in my defense.
The blunted sword was an extension of her arm, a steel serpent that darted in, aiming for my knees, my ribs, the back of my thigh.
I parried her blows with my leather-bound forearms, the impacts thudding with a satisfying rhythm.
I was a mountain, and she was the relentless storm lashing against my slopes.
The warriors watching started to murmur, their tone shifting from mockery to grudging respect.
She was impossibly small, almost a child by Orcish standards, yet she fought with the skill and ferocity of a seasoned veteran.
“You’re slow, General,” she taunted, breathing hard as she danced back out of my reach.
“I am patient, human,” I grunted back, a grin tugging at my own lips. This was life. This was the fire I had seen in her. “Patience is a weapon the young rarely master.”
I let her wear herself down for a few more minutes, enjoying the dance, the sheer spectacle of her.
The way her muscles coiled in her back, the flush that crept up her neck, the absolute, murderous focus in her eyes.
My admiration was a hot, heavy thing in my chest, a feeling so potent it almost distracted me. Almost.
I decided it was time to end the lesson.
The next time she lunged, aiming a low thrust at my leg, I did not block. I moved with her, letting the blade skim past my hip as my hand shot out and clamped around her sword wrist.
Her momentum came to a dead, shocking stop. Her eyes widened. The dance was over.
I twisted my wrist, and the sword clattered to the sand, the sound loud in the suddenly silent ring. Before she could recover, my other arm snaked around her waist, and I hauled her against me, lifting her clean off her feet. She let out a choked gasp, a sound of pure shock.
The contact was a lightning strike. Her back was pressed against my chest, her body so small, so slight against mine.
I could feel the frantic, rabbit-quick beat of her heart against my arm.
Her scent—honey and iron, now amplified by the salt of her sweat—filled my lungs, flooding my senses, short-circuiting every rational thought in my head.
She did not freeze. She exploded. She writhed in my grip, a feral thing, kicking her boots against my shins, driving her elbow back into my ribs.
The blows were nothing, like a bird beating its wings against a stone wall, but the spirit of them, the sheer, untamed fury, stoked the fire in my blood to a raging inferno.
“Let me go, you bastard!” she snarled, her voice a raw thing.
A low growl rumbled in my chest, a sound I did not consciously make. “Make me.”
This was no longer a spar. This was something else. Something older.
I tightened my grip and used my leg to sweep hers out from under her.
We went down into the sand together, me in control, turning in the fall so I landed on top, bracketing her body with my knees, her arms pinned to the ground above her head by one of my hands.
My other hand rested on the sand by her head.
She was trapped. Utterly, completely trapped beneath me.
And the world stopped.
All the sound, all the motion, faded to nothing.
There was only the feeling of her beneath me.
The fragile strength of her bones under my weight.
The frantic rise and fall of her chest against mine.
I could feel every line of her wiry, muscular body, a perfect, maddening fit against my own.
The sand was cool on my elbows, but she was a furnace of heat beneath me.
Her face was inches from mine, flushed and beautiful in her rage.
Her stormy eyes were blown wide, a tempest of fury and something else, something deeper that looked terrifyingly like fear.
Her short, red hair was a chaotic halo in the sand, strands of it stuck to her sweaty temples.
Her lips were parted as she gasped for breath, and the unholy, overwhelming urge to crush my mouth down on hers, to taste her defiance, was so powerful it was a physical pain.
The General was gone. The strategist was gone. There was only the male, the beast, its claws dug deep into my soul, roaring a single, deafening word.
Mine.
Take. Claim. Fill her. Breed her. Put a child in her belly so all will know she belongs to me.
The thoughts were not my own. They were a feral, possessive litany from the oldest part of my being. My hips instinctively pressed down, a phantom, possessive thrust against the juncture of her thighs.
A small, choked whimper escaped her lips. A sound of pure terror.
It was the only thing that could have broken through the red haze of my lust.
Terror.
The realization hit me like a splash of glacial water.
I was terrifying her. I looked down at my hand, the one pinning her wrists—my one hand, easily encircling both of her wrists with room to spare.
I could feel the delicate, bird-like bones under her skin.
I could snap them. Without even trying. I could crush her ribs with my weight.
I could tear her apart. The image, so vivid and horrifying, shattered the beast’s control.
My own strength, my own size, became a thing of horror.
I had given her a dagger to protect her from me, and here I was, moments from breaking her with my bare hands.
Shame and self-loathing, cold and sharp, cut through the lust. I had given her my vow.
With a hoarse cry that was torn from my own throat, I shoved myself off her, scrambling backward in the sand as if I had been burned.
I got to my feet and, without a single look back at her or the stunned faces of my warriors, I fled.
I didn't just walk away. I ran. I fled the training ring, fled the questions in my men’s eyes, fled the scent of her on my skin, and the terrifying, beautiful weakness she had revealed in me.
I did not stop until I was back in the echoing silence of my longhouse. But it was not silent. Her scent was everywhere. On the furs of the bed where she slept. In the air where she had stood that morning. It was a torment.
I stood in the center of the hall, my body trembling, my breath coming in ragged, painful gasps.
The spar had solved nothing. It had only wound the spring tighter.
The memory of her body pinned beneath mine was seared into my brain, a brand of pure fire.
Her scent, her heat, the terrified look in her eyes… it was all I could see.
The beast was still roaring, demanding release. My vow held it back from her, but it could not be contained forever.
My control shattered.
With a guttural snarl, I went to my knees before the cold hearth. My hand, shaking with a desperate, violent need, fumbled with the ties of my breeches. I freed myself, my cock already painfully hard, aching with a need that was a physical agony.
My eyes squeezed shut, but all I saw was her.
Her flushed face, her defiant eyes, the feel of her legs tangled with mine in the sand.
I imagined peeling my tunic from her body, revealing the secrets of her form.
The curve of her breasts, the flare of her hips.
My hand closed around my length, my movements rough, punishing, a desperate attempt to exorcise the demon she had woken in me.
My thoughts were a feral flood. Mine. I will fill you. I will stretch you around me until you scream my name. I will mark your skin with my teeth, with my seed. Mine.
I remembered her gasp, the whimper of fear, and a fresh wave of shame and desire crashed over me.
The memory was both a whip and a spur. I imagined changing that fear to pleasure.
I imagined her writhing beneath me not in a struggle to escape, but in the throes of ecstasy. The thought was my undoing.
With a final, guttural groan that was half pain, half release, I came, spilling my seed in a hot, thick rush over my own fist and onto the cold stone floor.
I knelt there for a long time, trembling in the aftermath, my head bowed. The beast was quiet now, sated for the moment. But I knew it was not gone. It was just resting.
I had kept my vow today. I had not broken her.