COSIMA

Chapter 4: The Monster King

The crossroads settlement of Vaneth existed for exactly one reason, which was that it belonged to no one.

Unclaimed ground between three packs, too small to be worth a border dispute, too useful to abandon entirely, it had grown over the decades into the kind of place where merchants, wanderers, and wolves without a pack to call home all pretended not to notice each other's business. I arrived on the third day of walking, dust in my hair, my grandmother's ring catching no light at all against my dirt-streaked hand, and found a healer's stall willing to trade me a night's floor space for an afternoon spent setting a blacksmith's badly broken finger.

It was in that stall, waiting for the swelling in the man's hand to go down enough to splint properly, that I first heard the name.

"You're new," the blacksmith said, wincing as I probed the joint. His name was Orsino, broad through the shoulders in the way of men who'd spent a lifetime near a forge, and he had the loose, talkative manner of someone in pain looking for any distraction from it. "Pack Ardente, by the accent. Long way from home."

"Not anymore." I didn't offer more, and something in my tone must have told him not to ask, because he let it go with the easy grace of a man who had learned when a subject was closed.

"Well. Wherever you learned healing, you've got steadier hands than the last one who came through here." He hissed as I straightened the bone, then relaxed once it settled. "Casa Notte sends theirs sometimes, when the roads are calm enough. Not that they'd waste one on a blacksmith's finger."

"Casa Notte." I turned the name over, unfamiliar and heavy in my mouth, the way a name sounds when you can tell, before anyone explains it to you, that it carries weight. "I don't know it."

Orsino looked at me the way you look at someone who has just admitted they don't know which way is north. "You're not from around here at all, are you. Casa Notte is the seat. The Council's seat, the Alpha of All Alphas, the whole business. You didn't hear of Raffaele growing up in Ardente?"

The name landed somewhere in my chest and stayed there, small and strange, the way certain names do before you understand why they matter.

"Only in passing," I admitted, which was mostly true. I remembered fragments now that he'd said it plainly, half-heard mentions at gatherings, my mother lowering her voice the way people lower their voices around things they respect and fear in equal measure. A name invoked to frighten children into behaving, or to end an argument about power with the simple, unanswerable fact of his existence.

"Passing." Orsino laughed, short and disbelieving, and flexed his splinted fingers experimentally before I could stop him. "Raffaele isn't a passing sort of name, healer. He's the reason there's been no open war between the packs in eleven years. He's also the reason nobody's dared test that peace, because the last three Alphas who tried ended up dead, and not quietly."

"Eleven years is a long peace for wolves." I kept my voice even, curious in the careful, controlled way I'd trained myself to sound since the fire in the woodland, since I'd made a vow to a stranger's ring and an empty night. "What does he actually do, this Alpha of All Alphas? Is it a Council seat, or something more."

"More." Orsino's voice dropped, not from fear exactly, but from the particular reverence people save for things too large to gossip about carelessly. "Every pack answers to its own Alpha. But there's always been one Alpha the other Alphas answer to, when it matters, when the old laws need enforcing or a Council vote needs breaking. Casa Notte's held the title for three generations. Raffaele's held it eleven years, since he was twenty. Killed his own uncle to take it, they say, though nobody says that part where it might get back to Casa Notte's ears."

"Twenty." I did the arithmetic without meaning to. Thirty-one now, if the story held. "That's young, for a man to hold that much power without someone taking it from him."

"That's exactly why nobody's taken it from him." Orsino flexed his hand again, testing the splint, apparently satisfied enough with the healing to stop being careful with it. "They call him the Monster King in some territories. Not to his face. Nobody says anything to his face they haven't rehearsed first. Some say he doesn't sleep. Some say he's never lost a fight in eleven years, not one, and that the last wolf who challenged him for the title is still buried somewhere under Casa Notte's east wall as a lesson to the next fool who gets ambitious."

I finished the splint in silence for a moment, letting the details settle into whatever cold, calculating place in me had been forming since the fire, since the vow, since I'd first understood that Isolde's small, private revenge would never be enough. A man who held absolute power through fear rather than affection. A man with no mate, if the old rumors held any truth, no weakness anyone had ever managed to locate and exploit. A man who needed nothing from anyone, which made him either impossible to use, or the only person in this entire world capable of giving me exactly what I needed if I could find the one thing he actually wanted.

"Does he have a Luna?" I asked, keeping my tone light, the question of a curious traveler rather than a woman quietly building a plan out of scraps of gossip in a blacksmith's stall.

Orsino snorted. "Casa Notte's Council has been trying to marry that man off for years. He's refused every candidate they've brought him, and they've brought him the best of every bloodline in the territories, noblewomen bred for it since birth. Word is he doesn't believe in the bond at all, not really, not as anything more than biology dressed up in moonlight and superstition. Which is a strange thing for the most powerful wolf alive to believe, given the bond is half the reason any of us still listen to the old laws at all."

"Strange," I agreed, though privately I understood it better than Orsino likely did. I had believed in the bond with my whole chest for six years, had built my entire sense of worth around a thread of moonlight pointing at a boy who turned out to be nothing at all, and I understood now, sitting in a healer's stall three days from the only home I'd ever known, why a man who had watched enough treachery might come to the same cold conclusion I had, from an entirely different direction.

"You've got that look," Orsino said, studying me now with something sharper than the idle curiosity he'd started the conversation with. "The one people get right before they do something foolish."

"Do I."

"Casa Notte doesn't take in wandering healers out of charity, if that's what you're thinking. The Council's picky. You'd need to prove yourself worth the trouble before anyone important so much as looked at you twice, let alone the man himself."

"Then I'll prove it." I said it simply, without drama, the way you state a fact rather than a hope, and something in my own certainty surprised even me. I had come out of that woodland with a new name and a vow and no clear shape yet for how I intended to keep it. Now, sitting in a crossroads stall with dust in my hair and a stranger's broken finger healing under my hands, the shape had finally arrived, whole and inevitable, as though it had been waiting for me the entire three days of walking to simply notice it.

The Monster King. A man with no mate and no weakness, ruling through fear eleven years running, the last true power in a world that had nearly killed me over a bond that turned out to be worth nothing at all.

I did not need him to love me. I understood that clearly, sitting there with Orsino's hand healing under my palms. I needed him to need me, which was an entirely different, entirely more achievable thing, and I had spent six years learning exactly how far a woman could go once she stopped needing anyone's love and started making herself indispensable instead.

"Where is Casa Notte," I asked, "from here."

Orsino gave me the direction with the particular caution of a man handing someone a weapon he suspected they intended to use, three days north and east through territory that grew steadily less forgiving of strangers the closer you came to the seat of power itself.

I thanked him, finished my work, and lay awake that night on the borrowed floor of his stall, turning the name over and over in the dark until it stopped sounding like a stranger's and started sounding like a destination.

Raffaele.

Whatever he was, monster or king or both at once, I intended to become the one thing his entire fortified life had never accounted for.