The Soul Beneath Her Skin

Chapter 2: Kneel

The word had scarcely left his mouth before the yard remembered its knees.

People dropped around me. The woman at the well sank first, her skirts spreading over wet stone. The grooms followed. Even the broad guard bowed his head, one hand still near his knife.

The wolves lowered themselves last.

I remained standing beside the grain wagon with my employment letter held out like a fool asking a storm to read.

Darius Vale stared at me.

I stared back.

Mate was a small word for the damage it had done. It had stopped work, emptied faces and made Silas abandon two sound horses. It also appeared to have cost the Alpha the use of ordinary speech.

The guard recovered before he did.

“Kneel.”

I glanced down. Flour had already made a disgrace of my coat, and the yard was wet with slush, horse dung and what looked like half a turnip.

“No.”

The guard raised his head. “You stand before your Alpha.”

“I arrived to stand before a stove.”

Someone behind me sucked air through their teeth.

Darius had not moved. His attention sat on my skin with the weight of a hand, though he remained several yards away. He seemed to be listening to something I could not hear.

That made two of us.

Inside me, there was only the old silence.

The black wolf near the stable crept closer with its belly low. Its nose worked at the air. Another followed, then a grey female with one torn ear. None looked ready to bite. I would have preferred teeth. Teeth had an honest purpose.

“Kneel,” the guard repeated.

I folded the letter along its softened crease. If Hallowmere dismissed me now, I had enough money for one night at an inn, provided the innkeeper had poor eyesight when counting. After that, my choices narrowed to a workhouse, a hedge or returning to Bellcross to ask the placement clerk why she had sent me into a yard full of wolves.

The workhouse had the better roof. The hedge asked fewer questions.

“I do not belong to this pack,” I said.

“You are on Vale land.”

“So is the wagon. It has not knelt either.”

A muffled noise came from one of the servants. It might have been a laugh suffering a swift death.

The guard crossed the space between us.

I put the letter into my coat pocket and moved my bundle behind my heel. If I had to leave quickly, I meant to leave with my stockings.

He stopped within arm’s reach. Up close, he smelled of leather oil and cold iron. A pale scar divided one eyebrow.

“Last chance.”

“To ruin my skirt?”

“To show respect.”

“Respect that requires two guards and a clean patch of ground is usually called something else.”

His hand closed around my upper arm.

I went still.

He mistook it for surrender.

Most people did.

The guard pulled down. I turned with the force instead of against it, drove the heel of my boot across his instep and twisted my arm towards the gap between his thumb and fingers. His grip loosened. I tore free.

He caught the back of my coat before I had taken one step.

The collar dragged hard against my throat. A seam gave beneath my left shoulder. My bundle rolled under the wagon and burst open, spilling an apron and one pair of stockings into the slush.

Something hot and useful replaced fear.

I drove my elbow backwards.

It struck his ribs. He grunted but kept hold of the cloth, so I stamped on his foot again and threw my head back.

Bone met bone.

Pain flashed across the back of my skull. The guard released me with a curse. Blood ran at once from his nose, bright over his mouth and down the front of his uniform.

The wolves surged upright.

This time they made noise.

It began low, too deep to belong to one throat. Claws scraped stone. The horses lunged against the brake, and the wagon shifted half a foot before the wrapped reins caught it.

The guard wiped his mouth. His glove came away red.

Then he reached for me again.

“Back.”

Darius did not raise his voice.

He did not need to.

The guard stopped with his hand in the air. The wolves froze. Around us, bowed servants pressed lower, as if the single word had acquired weight on its way across the yard.

Darius walked towards us.

His bare feet left dark prints in the frost. He passed the guard without looking at him and stopped close enough that I could see the grey mixed into his brown eyes.

“Let go of her.”

The guard looked down. One fist still held a torn strip from my coat.

He opened his fingers.

“Everyone back,” Darius said.

No one argued. The guard retreated first, blood dripping from his chin. The servants rose and drew away in a confusion of skirts, boots and lowered faces. The wolves moved with them, though several kept their noses turned towards me.

The black one resisted longest. Darius looked at it.

“Back.”

The wolf withdrew.

Soon there was a circle of empty stone around us. Farther off, work resumed badly. A groom buckled the same strap twice. The men with the broken crate lifted it, lost several onions through the split corner and pretended not to notice.

Darius’s gaze settled on the rip in my coat.

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

Blood from the guard’s nose dotted the flour near my hem. My shoulder stung where the seam had torn, but the skin beneath it felt whole.

Darius looked towards the retreating guard.

“If he is dismissed for bleeding, I will not accept the position in his place.”

His attention returned to me. “He will not be dismissed.”

“Then we have both kept our prospects.”

“You struck one of my guards.”

“He put his hands on me.”

“I saw.”

That stopped the next answer behind my teeth.

Men with rank often witnessed an injury only after deciding who was permitted to have caused it. Darius had stated the order correctly. The guard touched me. I struck him. He offered no lecture on obedience, no claim that my resistance had forced the man’s hand.

He stepped nearer.

I held my ground, though every sensible thought I possessed advised against it.

The Alpha was taller than he had appeared across the yard. His shirt had been fastened in haste, one button placed through the wrong hole, leaving the hem uneven. That small error disturbed me more than the bare feet. Powerful men could choose to ignore cold. They seldom dressed badly unless something had dragged them out before they were ready.

His gaze moved over my face and stopped at my collar.

I pulled the torn edge of my coat closed.

“Do not touch me,” I said.

His hand had not risen, but his fingers curled once at his side.

“I won’t.”

The answer came without offence.

Behind him, the kneeling had ended. The watching had not. Faces filled the covered walk and stable doors. I could feel Hallowmere fitting the scene into a story it had begun before I arrived.

Darius studied me as if I were the one piece that had been cut from a different box.

“What did you hear?” he asked.

“When?”

“When I spoke.”

I pressed my tongue behind one canine. “You said mate.”

“Before that.”

“You asked who sent me.”

His expression changed by so little that I nearly missed it. A tightening around the mouth. A private calculation.

“Nothing else?”

“Should I have?”

He did not answer.

The frost had begun to melt beneath his feet. A thin line of water touched one heel. Whatever had brought him outside barefoot, he appeared to have forgotten the cold again.

I bent to retrieve my things. Keeping my eyes on the nearest wolves, I reached beneath the wagon and pulled out my bundle. One stocking had acquired a rind of slush. The apron could be washed. The coat would need a patch before the tear spread to the sleeve.

Darius crouched and caught the second stocking before it disappeared beneath a wheel.

An Alpha on his haunches in the dirt drew more attention than my refusal to kneel.

He held the stocking by its dry end. It had been darned twice at the heel and once along the toe. His gaze rested on the repairs for a moment before he offered it to me.

I took it without touching his fingers.

“Thank you.”

His hand remained open after the stocking was gone.

The black wolf whined from beside the stable. Darius flinched as though the sound had come from much closer.

I stuffed the wet things into my bundle and stood.

“Am I employed?”

He rose more slowly.

“That is your concern?”

“It was three days’ concern before it became yours.”

Something passed across his face that might have been surprise.

“You are not leaving the grounds.”

The small fairness I had credited him with vanished.

“That sounds less like employment.”

“It is protection.”

“From whom?”

His gaze moved past me to the wolves, the servants and the open arch through which Silas had fled. When he looked back, there was no comfort in his expression.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Then you may protect me by finding out. I will work in the meantime.”

“You think I will put you in my kitchen after this?”

“I think you have a wagon to unload, a guard bleeding on his uniform and at least forty people pretending not to watch us. A kitchen servant seems the least of your troubles.”

His mouth almost moved.

It was not a smile. I doubted Hallowmere permitted those in the yard without written notice.

Then he stepped close enough for the air between us to narrow.

The wolves shifted again.

Darius went rigid.

His eyes searched my face, not with hunger and not with the astonishment that had followed the word mate. This was recognition sharpened by dread.

He spoke so quietly that the watching yard could not have heard him.

“Where did you get Helena Ward’s scent?”