Claimed by the Wolf King

The Den

The Blackwood Pack's den was nothing like the caves and hovels the border ballads described.

Sera had expected filth. She had expected the smell of raw meat and worse, dirt floors, animal skins nailed to crude walls, the general squalor she'd been taught to associate with anything existing outside the reach of Everfell's civilization. What she found instead, as Kade led her through a hidden fold in the hillside and down a long earthen passage lit by strategically placed lanterns, was something closer to a fortified village: timber-framed structures built into the natural rock, smoke rising from proper chimneys, the sound of children laughing somewhere out of sight.

It unsettled her more than filth would have. Filth she could have folded neatly into everything she already believed. This, order, craftsmanship, the unmistakable evidence of a functioning society, had no obvious place to go.

"You're staring," Kade said, without looking back at her.

"You have children here."

"Wolves have children the same as humans do, Princess. Did you imagine we hatched from eggs?"

"I imagined," she said, "that you would look considerably more like the thing you are right now, and considerably less like a man with a poor sense of humor."

That earned her something close to a laugh, short, surprised, quickly suppressed, and she filed the reaction away with the same instinct that had kept her alive through nineteen years of court politics: know what moves a person, and you know how to move them in return.

They emerged into a wide central clearing ringed by the timber buildings, and the reaction to her arrival was immediate and total. Conversation died. A woman carrying a basket of what looked like mending stopped mid-stride. Two boys who'd been sparring with wooden practice blades froze with their weapons still raised, staring at Sera with open, unguarded shock, and beneath the shock, unmistakably, hostility.

"Alpha." A man detached himself from a group near the largest structure and crossed the clearing at a pace just short of aggressive. He was built along similar lines to Kade, tall, broad through the shoulders, dark-haired where Kade's was a lighter brown, but where Kade's expression had settled into something Sera was already learning to read as careful neutrality, this man's face held nothing back at all. "You brought a Thorne into the den."

"I brought a hostage into the den, Draven. There's a difference."

"Is there?" Draven's gaze raked over her, and Sera made herself hold still under it, chin up, the same posture she used for hostile ambassadors and condescending lords at court. It seemed to work here just as poorly as it usually did. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you carried a piece of Everfell's crown straight into our home with half the eastern search parties already fanning out along the ridge."

"I'm aware of the search parties."

"Are you aware of what happens if they find her here? Every treaty we've clung to for three hundred years, gone. Every truce your father died maintaining, undone, because you decided to play savior to a girl who'd have you skinned for a coat the moment it suited her."

"I would not," Sera said, before she could stop herself, "have anyone skinned for a coat. That is a remarkably specific accusation and I would like it noted that I find it insulting."

Draven turned the full weight of his attention on her, and for the first time since the crash, Sera felt something colder than fear settle into her stomach, not the fear of a predator that might kill quickly, but the fear of a man calculating exactly how a death might be useful to him.

"She has opinions," Draven said to Kade, as though Sera weren't standing close enough to hear every word. "How charming. I'm sure Everfell's court finds that sort of spirit very fetching in a princess. I find it considerably less fetching in a hostage who could get every wolf in this den killed."

"That's enough." Kade's voice hadn't risen, but something in it changed, a weight settling behind the words that made the hair on Sera's arms rise, and she watched Draven's jaw tighten, watched him visibly swallow whatever else he'd intended to say. "She stays. Under my protection, in my den, until I decide otherwise. That decision is mine to make, Beta, not yours."

"For now," Draven said quietly, and there was something in the way he said it, not quite a threat, but close enough to one that Sera's instincts, sharpened by years of watching court rivals circle each other, cataloged him immediately as a problem that had not yet finished announcing itself.

He left without another word, shouldering past a cluster of pack members who parted for him with the practiced ease of people used to staying out of his way. Kade watched him go with an expression Sera couldn't read, and then turned back to her as though the confrontation had never happened at all.

"Ignore him," he said.

"He seemed rather difficult to ignore."

"He's my cousin. He's been difficult since we were pups fighting over the same scrap of meat, and he's spent the last three years believing he'd make a better Alpha than I do." Kade started walking again, toward one of the smaller timber structures at the clearing's edge, and Sera followed because the alternative was standing alone in a den full of wolves who'd made their opinion of her quite clear. "He's not entirely wrong that you're a danger to us. I'd be a poor Alpha if I pretended otherwise."

"Then why bring me here at all? Why not simply..." She stopped herself before she could finish the sentence, unwilling to hand him the idea if it hadn't already occurred to him.

"Kill you and save everyone the trouble?" Kade glanced back at her, and something in his amber eyes made her feel abruptly, uncomfortably seen. "I've considered it. I'd be lying if I said otherwise. But a dead princess is worth nothing to me, and a living one, returned at the right moment under the right terms, might be worth ending a decade of border raids your father's men keep dressing up as accidents."

"You want to use me as leverage."

"I want to use you as insurance," he corrected. "There's a difference, though I understand you may not appreciate the distinction."

He stopped in front of the smaller structure, a single room, she saw as he pushed the door open, sparse but clean, a real bed rather than the pile of furs she'd half expected, a washbasin, a narrow window covered with oiled cloth that let in soft, filtered light. "You'll stay here. It locks from the outside, which I won't pretend is for your comfort rather than mine, but it's warm and it's dry and no one will trouble you without going through me first."

"How generous," Sera said, "to be a prisoner in comfortable accommodations."

"You're welcome to try the alternative, Princess. I hear the forest floor is lovely this time of year, provided you don't mind sharing it with wolves considerably less inclined toward manners than I am."

Despite everything, the ache in her wrist, the fear still sitting cold in her stomach, the impossible strangeness of the entire day, Sera felt her mouth twitch, and she suspected, from the flicker of surprise that crossed Kade's face, that he'd noticed it too.

"I'll have food sent," he said, businesslike again, already retreating toward the door. "Rest. Whatever happens next, it won't happen tonight."

He left before she could ask what, exactly, was meant to happen next, and Sera sat down heavily on the edge of the narrow bed, listening to the bolt slide home on the other side of the door, and found herself thinking, with an unease she couldn't fully explain, that she had expected to be more afraid than she currently was.