Page 15 of Steel Heart Iron Claws

The unmade bed.

The carelessly stocked cupboards.

The single chair by the fireplace.

Rian gave you a chance to make something of yourself, and this is the best you did? Bravo, Wolf. Bravo.

It doesn’t take long to pack my knapsack with my few belongings. My bow and quiver go into the pile of things to take. My hunting knives in their leather roll-up bag. An extra pair of boots and two pairs of woolen socks. When I get to Old Coros, my backwoods forest garb will make me look like a caveman compared to the capital’s prissy highbrows, but so be it.

I tug out a few extra pairs of trousers and shirts, but when I root around in the back of my dresser drawer, an unexpected scent smacks me in the face.

Before I can stop myself, I grab a ratty old shirt and press it against my face. I breathe in deep, like an opium addict getting his next hit.

Violets.

Instantly, I’m slammed with desire so strong that my heart tries to fight its way out of my chest. My pulse flares, sizzling like oil tossed onto a fire. All that’s nothing compared to the damn surge of blood to my cock, which instantly hardens.

It’s her scent. It has to be. She must have borrowed this shirt.

The faceless woman I only know as the Winged Lady, because a single minute after hearing her name, it keeps getting sucked back into that yawning abyss in my head.

But this? The scent of violets? The muscle memory of a woman’s skin smooth as petals?ThisI haven’t forgotten. It lives somewhere beyond the part of my mind that Iyre ripped out.

My legs go slack, and I sink down to my bed like a sack of beans, causing the joists to groan under my weight.

A matching groan rumbles out of my chest as I bury my face in the shirt again, rooting like a damn pig for every last trace of her scent, breathing her in as fast as my lungs can fill.

My arms start shaking uncontrollably. A rush of panic rises in me, the feral urge to swing at anything that dares approach me, blinded by a need to remember, to REMEMBER…

I growl into the shirt, fingers twisting in the fabric, ready to tear the world apart for a single memory of this woman.

“Wolf? May I enter? Um—is this a bad time?”

A woman’s soft voice at my door makes me jump, and Istuff the shirt into my knapsack, though it’s a challenge to convince my fingers to let it go.

“Lady Suri.” My voice is gruff as I quickly curse myself for leaving the front door open. “Is there something I can help you with?”

She steps into the game warden’s cottage apprehensively as though I might have set snares in the floorboards. As her wide brown eyes scan my humble pantry, the underwear hung to dry by the fire, the piss-bucket under my bed, I take a closer look at the Lady of Bremcote.

Truth be told, I’ve never paid much heed to Suri. When I first met her, she was an afterthought. The pretty young Kravadan girl unfortunately married to Charlin Darrow.

When Charlin came to Duren to blackmail Rian and brought Suri with him, I found her a curiosity. She managed to maintain a sunny disposition even while married to a drunken lout. Hell, she even cried at his death. Somehow, she’d been able to see the sliver of good in him when no one else could.

Fuck if I know how.

Suri stops her inspection of my meager belongings when she spots my half-packed knapsack. Eyebrows lifted in surprise, she says, “You’re going to Old Coros with the Valveres?”

I flip closed the knapsack flap, protective of the shirt withherscent on it.

“Of course. I owe Rian everything, least of all my service.”

Suri’s lips press tightly, her face at war with itself, before she blurts out, “If rumors are to be believed, you owe him nothing. Not whenyoushould be on the throne?—”

I cut her so sharp a look that it silences her. For a longmoment, we stare at one another as the wind makes the ceiling joists creak. The first fat raindrops of a coming shower plink on the window glass.

“I overheard Sorsha Hall’s servants packing your own bags this morning, my lady,” I say evenly. “I could just as easily demand to know whyyou’regoing to Old Coros.”

“I’m going for a book.”

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