Claimed by the Wolf King

Amber and Slate

Three days into her captivity, Sera stopped counting the hours by the meals brought to her door and started counting them instead by how long it took Kade to visit each evening.

She told herself this meant nothing. He was, by his own admission, using her as leverage, a valuable hostage he had every reason to check on, the way a merchant checks on a shipment of something fragile and expensive. That his visits had grown longer over the past three days, stretching from a few clipped words about her comfort into actual conversation, meant nothing beyond the ordinary business of a captor gathering information about his captive.

She told herself this every evening. And every evening, when the bolt slid back and Kade Ironwood ducked through the low doorway with a covered dish balanced in one hand, something in her chest lifted in a way that had nothing to do with practicality at all.

"You're frowning," he said, setting the dish on the small table by her window. "Should I assume the accommodations have gotten worse since yesterday, or is this simply your face?"

"It's considerably harder to compose a pleasant expression while contemplating my own extended imprisonment, but I appreciate you asking."

"Extended." He raised an eyebrow, dropping into the room's one chair with the unhurried ease of a man who had, in fact, spent very little of his life worrying about intruding on someone else's space. "It's been three days, Princess."

"Three days is an extraordinarily long time when you spend it locked in a room wondering if your father's already given you up for dead."

That landed. She watched it land, watched something flicker across his face that might have been guilt if she'd believed, even slightly, that Alphas of the Blackwood were capable of it. "I sent word," he said, after a pause. "Not to your father directly, that would be a fool's errand until I know who staged that ambush, but to contacts along the border who'll make sure the right rumors reach the right ears. Your father will know, within the week, that his daughter is alive and unharmed."

"Unharmed. Is that what we're calling forcible confinement now?"

"I'm calling it survival, which beats whatever alternative you'd have found on your own in these woods." He nodded at the dish. "Eat. You've barely touched anything since the second day, and I'd rather not explain to my pack healer why the royal hostage wasted away on my watch."

Sera lifted the cloth over the dish more out of obligation than hunger, and found something that smelled, unexpectedly, wonderful: roasted root vegetables, some kind of herb-crusted meat, bread still warm enough to steam in the cool evening air. It was, she had to admit, better food than she'd expected from a den of wolves, and better than some of the state dinners she'd suffered through at court.

"Your cook has talent," she said, before she could stop herself.

"My cook is my aunt, and she'll be unbearable for a week if she hears a Thorne princess complimented her stew, so I'd appreciate you keeping that opinion to yourself."

"You have an aunt."

"I have an entire family, Princess. Aunts, cousins, an insufferable Beta who happens to also be my cousin, several dozen pack members who've known me since I was small enough to fit in one hand. We're not so different from Everfell in that regard, whatever the ballads taught you to expect." He watched her eat for a moment, something unreadable in his face, then added, quieter, "You didn't ask me to sit."

"You didn't ask permission."

"Fair." But he didn't leave, and Sera found, against every instinct her upbringing had carefully drilled into her, that she didn't particularly want him to.

"Tell me about the treaty," she said instead, setting down her fork. "The one between your pack and my father's crown. He's never spoken of it, not directly, not once in nineteen years, but I know it exists. I've seen how the older courtiers go quiet whenever the Blackwood comes up in council."

Something shifted in Kade's face, a wariness that hadn't been there a moment ago. "What do you know of it?"

"Almost nothing. Which is exactly the problem."

He was quiet long enough that she thought he might refuse outright, and when he finally spoke his voice had dropped lower, more careful, the tone of a man choosing each word like he was defusing something that might still go off. "Three hundred years ago, before either of our families held the titles we hold now, there was a war. Not a border skirmish, a real war, humans against wolves, fought across half this continent before either side had a name for the other beyond monster. It ended not because either side won, but because both had lost enough that continuing meant extinction for everyone."

"And the treaty ended it."

"The treaty ended the fighting. What it actually contains, I couldn't tell you in full. The terms are sealed, kept by the pack elders and, I assume, by whatever priests your crown trusts with such things, and only the Alpha and the reigning monarch are meant to know the whole of it. My father knew. He died before he passed the full terms to me, which means I've spent three years ruling this pack with only half the picture, and I'd guess your father's ruling Everfell with his own half."

"That seems remarkably poor planning for a document meant to prevent a war."

"It seems," Kade said, "like exactly the kind of arrangement two frightened, exhausted kings, human and wolf both, might come up with when they wanted peace badly enough to stop asking questions about the cost of it." He met her eyes, and something in his amber gaze had gone unexpectedly serious. "There's one term I do know, because my father made sure I understood it before anything else. No Alpha of the Blackwood may claim a Thorne bride. It's the only line of that treaty spoken aloud at every naming ceremony this pack has held for three centuries."

Sera felt something in her chest go very still. "Why would that need saying, unless someone had tried?"

"I don't know," Kade admitted. "I've asked. The elders who might remember are long dead, and the ones who inherited the story secondhand tell it like scripture, absolute, unquestioned, no context at all. All I know is it's forbidden, has been since before either of our grandfathers were born, and breaking it would undo three hundred years of fragile peace in ways neither of us could control."

"That sounds," Sera said carefully, "like an oddly specific rule to write into a treaty meant to end a war."

"It does," Kade agreed, and the look he gave her then went on long enough, and carried enough weight, that Sera felt her pulse pick up in a way that had nothing to do with fear. "Doesn't it."

Neither of them said anything else for a while. Outside, the den settled into evening, voices calling goodnights, the distant laughter of children being chased toward bed, the ordinary music of a life Sera had never once imagined existing on this side of the wall. Kade rose eventually, collecting the empty dish, and paused at the door with his hand on the bolt.

"Rest, Princess," he said, his voice gone rough in a way she hadn't heard from him before. "Tomorrow brings its own trouble. Tonight, at least, let's not invite any more than we already have."

He left before she could answer, and Sera sat alone in the lamplight a long while afterward, turning his words over, and realized that the trouble she was most afraid of inviting had already arrived, three days ago, in a clearing full of ferns and blood and amber eyes that looked at her like she was worth more than the crown on her head.