Page 62 of The Wolf

Scarlet jerked away, disgusted, almost dropping her wine carafe.

He looped an arm around her waist and yanked Scarlet into his lap, much to the convulsive laughter of everyone at the table—save for Bright and Brine. This kind of behavior was not unheard of between the wolves and the servants who were there to satisfy their every whim, and it certainly wasn’t new to the people in the room that Tarros would treat Scarlet this way.

Though she burned with humiliation, Scarlet remained calm the way she had been taught to, and daintily tried to get back up even as Texel laughed at her predicament. Tarros tightened his burly arm around her waist, his grip strong and unwavering.

He wasn’t going to let her go.

She glanced toward Arwen who did not do anything but drink her wine and continue on with her conversation. There would be no help from her stepmother.

A prickle of dread ran down Scarlet’s spine. She did not need to look at Tarros’s eyes to know that they were trained on her, hungry and resentful in equal measure, though she stole a glance at his expression nonetheless. She immediately regretted it, for the look in his eyes was so much worse than it had been before the dragon shifter had mauled him on her behalf.

Tarros looked at her as if he were sure she was doomed to die by his hands.

Just try it.

“Won’t you drop the servant girl?” a voice cut through the air—Brine, carefully casual as if Scarlet was merely a semi-interesting topic of conversation. She did not dare stare at him. “It’s poor taste to do such things at the dining table. And it is, after all, a dinner in my honor, is it not?”

Tarros had the audacity to laugh, his breath heating Scarlet’s neck. “Are you challenging me for her? She’s human. Fair game to all of us in here.”

Brine took a breath, ready to reply, but it was Arwen who spoke. “Is that true?” she purred. “Because last time I checked, dear Tarros, Red wasmine.”

That caused Tarros to drop Scarlet like molten rock. She retreated from the table quickly, flushed with shame and desperate to run from the room, but she knew she couldn’t. Despite her anger, she kept on working.

All that would await her was some horrible punishment if she didn’t.

It was a long, drawn-out night before Scarlet finally made her way back up to her room, beyond exhausted. She decided that enough was enough.

Perhaps her mother had been wrong. Kindness got you nowhere in Betraz. Maybe she’d been too tenderhearted all this time to people she should have fought with steel instead.

Tonight had made it abundantly clear she needed to fight fire with fire. If Brine was determined to fit in with the rest of the pack—and tonight’s dinner only proved that—then Scarlet wasn’t going to be able to make Brine take her on as a wife through ordinary means. But if she was going to gain power and freedom over her whole life—over her own people—then the bride Brine chosehadto be her.

It was the only way she could get out from underneath her stepmother’s thumb.

If it was an insult for Brine to choose a human as his wife, as was typical of the rest of his kind, then Scarlet would have no choice but to blackmail him. What the dragon and the fox had been doing was dancing in her head, including the threat against her speaking the truth of what Brine had done. But Brine himself did not know that Scarlet would never out him to her stepmother. He didn’t know her intentions, after all, and that would play to her advantage now.

Brine would think he didn’t have a choice.

He would marry Scarlet or she would reveal his entire plot to Arwen.

She was done playing nice.

THIRTY

BRINE

Brine was thrown back into pack life but all he could think about was Scarlet. She was on the edge of his vision everywhere he went within the Betraz Estate. She cleaned the floors. She served meals. She tended to the gardens. She acted as the punching bag sparring partner for many of the wolves.

The mangled red wolf, Tarros, had his eyes on her everywhere she went.

Brine knew he had to forget about her. He had a job to do, and so far he had been doing it poorly, inasmuch as he had not learned anything that Pyre and the Dark Court had not already known.

Stop thinking about her. She’ll be the death of you.

Arwen had shown him the fields of mimkia that she’d been cultivating in mountain caverns. She had been using a specially bred strain of the flower that fed off of darkness, not light, which was why it had evaded observation for so long. Brine witnessing it only served to confirm suspicions.

Still, now the Dark Court knew that no land was safe from the spread of the drug. It could be grown almost anywhere, at any time of year, for anyone. That was a serious problem indeed. Brine sobered at the thought.

He dipped his hand into the warm bath and leaned his head back against the tub, listening to the wind whip the curtains back and forth.

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