Page 35 of The Wolf in My Tavern

He could keep our future children safe.

Not because he can fight in a pit, but because he is the kind of man who took steps to see my father gone, so I might feel safe. Because he is the kind of man who raids the slave market at great risk to himself to rescue Betsy and me.

In this moment of acute awareness, it dawns upon me that, were it necessary, this man would follow me to the ends of the earth to save me.

With Callum, I would always be safe.

I wish I did not live in this world where a woman needs a man in this way, that instead I lived where the strong do not prey upon the weak, where women might be free to walk the streets late at night without fear of attack or lecherous intentions.

We do not. At least, it is not the way of things in Bleakness.

Maybe in those forests far away, where the deer and foxes play, there are places where only men of Callum’s ilk live and where women never need to fear.

I would like to believe that such a place does exist somewhere. But that is not this place. That is not my reality. That is not Bleakness.

The blows continue to rain down. The other man no longer moves.

I cannot see what happens next as the crowds in front of me raise their arms and cheer.

“Goddess, what is it?” I demand of Betsy, hoping she might see better than me. She is a little taller, but I don’t think it is much help.

“Pa,” she calls to Tim. “What has happened?”

Tim grins from ear to ear. “Callum has won,” he says. “I knew the lad would!”

Gray

The facts are glaringly obvious.

His speed and agility are preternatural.

He is no beta but a latent alpha.

He is also a shifter, although he has clearly never shifted and, for whatever reason, knows nothing of his heritage.

“He has green eyes,” Drake observes, snagging my attention and bringing a further prickling sensation to the back of my neck.

The roar of the crowd washes over me as I let his words settle in. I want to reject my instincts that Callum is a shifter—I want to dispute the indisputable facts.

“You know what that means.”

“It means nothing,” I say bitterly as we take our seats. The fight is over. Callum, victorious, walks out. His opponent is not so lucky. “The whelp cannot even shift.”

“But he could—and will—if you coach him. Regardless, you know exactly what it means for his eyes to be that color.”

I do. Green eyes in a shifter are unusual—unique. The sense of defeat is sharp and filled with despair. I’d already told myself Ada was not for me, that I have a fucking mission, and that it is not one that involves claiming a mate, especially not when the woman I am promised to is a prisoner of orcs. Yet, as I stare down at the pit where Callum so recently raised his arms in victory, I cannot dispute the final, bitterest fact of all.

The whelp—the man I am loath to admit is my competition; the one who, as Drake has already surmised, has me beaten by a mile—carries royal shifter blood.

Chapter Fifteen

Callum

The roar of the crowd chases me as my father hustles me out of the pit and back to the underground room. I feel like I am spinning; pressure is building inside me, and it needs an out.

There is a basic shower down here, no more than a spout that he shoves me under, still clothed in my pants.

The cold water is fucking freezing and feels like needles against my skin.

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