Page 19 of Mated to the Mad Marquess

“I thought you said she was a feral beast?” Hrafn teased.

The fairy used her claws to pet down Ezra’s back. He leaned into her touches.

She can eat my face off,he said,so long as she keeps scratching my itches.

Hrafn’s keen eyes could see in the dark, a gift of the Divine Night to all the Vanir. The wagon pulled through a long gravel lot, then down a slight incline where the horses slowed to a crawl. She heard the rush of a river in the distance. Thick trees formed a wall that blocked the waters from view. Between willow trees, a stone fortress burst from the ground. An old Vanir fort, Skugborg it was called. The horses came to a standstill before a large carriage house. Movement outside drew her attention, her senses zeroing in on shifting shadows in the dark.

“Hello?”

She heard more movement and shuffling in the overgrown lawn, but no one answered her. Slowly, lights came on inside the great fort as fires were lit and lanterns hung. She counted three individuals moving amongst the rooms.

A large gate parted with shouts and a great clamor. She sat there shivering in the cold for over an hour, studying the lanterns as they were carried from window to window. They were preparing something.

The cage door opened with a loud shriek of metal scratching metal. Hrafn jumped.

A cloaked figure dropped his hood. Her inhale caught in her lungs. She released it with a whoosh of breath.

Malcolm clambered inside, boots landing heavily against wooden rungs. He sat on the bench across from her, eyes red-rimmed and smudged. He looked as bad as she felt. They stared at each other for a moment in charged silence. The painful prick at her soul that had appeared the day she met him was gone. She had an inkling as to why it no longer bothered her, but she shoved the thought away. Hrafn had plans that such fancy could ruin.

The sound of the wind moving through the trees and the chirrups of the bugs singing their songs to one another faded away. Wrung out from top to bottom, the call of him overwhelmed her senses.

“Are you hungry?”

“No,” she said more sternly than she meant to. Her stomach was in knots. She worked her throat. “Am I to hang?”

“Never,” Malcolm rasped. “I can tolerate no harm against you.”

His words spoken so matter-of-factly washed over her, steady and reassuring. Her stomach began to unclench. “Then your king granted your request?”

“He did. But don’t rejoice just yet. You remain under arrest,” he warned. “My king made me your jailer. You’ll stay here with me in this fortress under my command. You’ll make no attempts to leave the place I’ve prepared for you. I have questions. You will answer me, and I’ll only hear honesty from your lips.”

“I’m no liar,” she breathed. The suggestion that she would dare do otherwise put something hot and prickly in her chest. It made her want to take up a spear and defend her honor. Her fingernails dug into the palms of her hands.

He sat unflinching in the face of her aggravation. “Did you conjure the attack on Reedlet?”

“No.” Hrafn blinked at him, confounded. “You think I’m guilty?”

“I did at first. Then I spoke to a witness. Now I’m undecided on the matter.”

“You believed I killed those people . . . and you came and saved me from that prison anyway . . . ?” She could make no sense of the lord before her. The man who took her with his magic shadows and then rejected her by releasing her without a fight. Now, in her time of need, he came to her aid, placing her above his own people like she had great value to him whatever her guilt.

Like he wanted to claim her.

“If you’re about to ask me why I saved you, don’t.” He pressed his palm over his heart, the same place where she felt the pull of him the strongest. Strangling the wool of his cloak, he made a fist. Strain lined his face, turning it drawn and pale. “It’s been a very, very long couple of days since I met you, Hrafn of the Vanir. I’m too tired for foolish questions, and we’re both too old to pretend we don’t know what this is between us.”

Her lashes lowered. Of course she knew what budded between them. The pull of their blooming bond was glorious, but that didn’t make his actions any less unbelievable.

She could make no sense of him.

She could hardly fathom the way her body reacted. Near him, she felt like she’d been struck through by lighting, then put back together and wrapped in warm gossamer. Like she’d gone weightless and was both floating and sinking in a pit with no bottom. The blooming mate bond tugged at her with such tenacity that the line between violence and passion, friend and enemy, was an unfathomable blur.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” she said finally. “There is no honor in hurting those people. I didn’t summon the birds. I wouldn’t even know how to do such a thing.”

“But you know who did,” he said with cool certainty.

She dropped her chin in assent. Yes, she knew the monster responsible well. They’d shared a cage for centuries. It was the prisoner, she the jailer. She glanced down at the cuffs that weighed against her ankles. Oh, how the tables had turned. “I know the monster responsible.”

“Can you name it?”

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