Page 101 of Settle Down, Princess

Where I hoped like hell Creed’s beast wasn’t raping the girl or murdering her.

I swore black and blue under my breath, damning Jessalyn’s stupidity, her recklessness… her bravery. It felt like a claw went around my throat when she approached a feral Creed, her hand looking like a tiny little star as she reached out for my brother. It squeezed all the breath out of me, forcing its talons into my windpipe as she calmed Creed’s beast.

Gods, Jessalyn didn’t have the sense the gods gave a cat, but each time she seemed to survive her thoughtless gestures. I had to hope that divine luck was with her now. My body ached, my muscles protesting at being required to do more, but we ran past fields and cottages, then followed the trail of broken branches into the forest.

“Do you think he—?” Roan asked.

“Shut up,” I replied.

“But what if he’s hurt her. I don’t have my fucking sword—”

“I’ve got a few knives on me.”

We both turned to look at Silas, who just shrugged. “I know they said no weapons, but I wasn’t going to use them, not unless I really had to.”

“You could’ve gotten us disqualified if you were caught,” I snapped.

“If I got caught.” Silas’ smile was smug. “You know that was never going to happen. I’ve got blades in places that only someone very intimate with me would discover and…”

It was Creed’s voice, hers, that stopped Silas’ little boast midstream. Our feet slowed, then stopped as we bled into the undergrowth, ready to identify any threats and act on them. I just didn’t expect them to come from the princess, not Creed.

“Why me and not the others?” The question was for me, not my brother. “Why bring me here and not all the other princesses?” Jessalyn damned me then, asking the same question everyone asked. Shit, I even asked it myself when it became apparent Creed was her mate. “If the packlands are a safe haven for all women, why not them?”

Yes, why not them, I asked myself as Silas and Roan turned to stare at me. They’d suggested the same damn thing each time we escorted a woman to her death. We’d argued long and hard about it initially, and then… We stopped talking about it at all.

But they didn’t know what I did.

I swallowed hard, forcing my attention back to the clearing.

“A hero that stood by as women died.” I’d felt the sting of the lash, having been whipped more times than I could remember, but it never stung as much as Jessalyn’s words. “A hero that refused to step up and protect the weak from the brutal.”

I was everything she said and more. Worse, far worse, and she didn’t understand that. None of them did.

“Or Arik had to stop him.”

Don’t say it, I hissed inside my head. Don’t fucking say it, brother.

“Kill his brother, take the throne, become the next king of Khean.”

They knew what I thought of this. I’d made myself clear when I turned upon anyone who suggested such a thing with so much ire, they dared not speak of it again. This was confirmed by Roan and Silas shooting me uneasy looks.

“It’s why I couldn’t say anything to you, even though every fibre of my being needed to because I knew I couldn’t rely on the commander to back my play.”

That stung like a bitch. When my own blood family was slaughtered like sheep by Magnus, I’d built another with my brothers. I wanted to stand up tall and shout at Creed that he could bring anything to me. But he couldn’t, and that was a bitter pill to swallow. He couldn’t bring this to me.

“He will do anything to avoid sitting on the Emerald Throne, including seeing a bunch of women die.”

That wasn’t the price I deemed acceptable to pay. My breath was coming in fast and hard, forced to squeeze past a compressed windpipe. Not because I’d been injured, but because the collective weight of their gaze was directed at me. Not just Silas and Roan’s accusing looks, but all the women I’d betrayed. I forced myself to forget their names, to drive every detail of the princesses we’d brought to Magnus out of my mind because it was the only way I could survive. They were just pretty pawns in a game my king was playing with the continent at large, to cow the lot of them, rub their submission to Khean in their faces, but most of all, he played with me.

No matter what I did, no matter what I achieved, he would always have the upper hand. I forced myself to take one shuddering breath, then another, readying myself to burst in here and stop this treasonous talk, when Jessalyn delivered her coup de grâce.

“You want me to feel safe? You’ll do anything to make me feel protected? Then tell me how to do that, Master Creed. Tell me how to make Arik king.”

I felt like I had been struck by a lightning bolt in that second. What else could explain the feeling of galvanic shock as it tore through me? Muscles tensed, ready to jump on my bones, to tear me free of this, because it was all too similar. In my head, another set of lips whispered the same intent, her eyes dancing with a combination of mischief and excitement. We were co-conspirators then, children playing at being revolutionaries. Her father, the Duke of Fallspire, had encouraged this kind of nonsense, something that had heartened me at the time and disgusted me now. I saw the folly of everything we had tried, and I wondered how the hell he hadn’t.

“No,” I said, shaking my head to dislodge the memory. Roan and Silas rose to their feet, ready to say something, so many somethings. I pushed past them, no longer caring if I spooked the near-feral Creed, not when I had this to say. “No, Creed—” Remind him of his relationship to you. Play upon that, my father’s voice said inside my head, sibilant as a snake’s scales. “Brother, we talked—”

“No, Arik.”

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