Page 38 of With Fangs and Claws (The Wolf Queen 1)

Chapter 17

“I didn’t do this, Father!”

“You think you can lie your way through this?” he replied as I felt the firm hand of Linnea shoving me down onto the bed as her clever fingers undid my stays. “You think that somehow you can twist your actions with your words to escape my wrath? The entire country relies on you, one stupid girl, to know her place and could you do that? Could you just lie down with the damn beasts and complete the deal?”

His hand went to my hair, grabbing a handful of it and hauling my head back with it until my teeth were forced to clamp tight or I’d cry out.

“The king’s bloody eye is on us. He’s sending his knights here to settle my men down. Mine. That blasted Kristoff has them all riled up and ready to revolt, because of you.” His grip tightened and I really did whine then, as it felt like every strand was being very slowly torn out at the scalp. “Everyone told me I should’ve taken a firmer hand with you, and you just had to prove them right.”

I was let go abruptly and with that came my words.

“Father, I admit I didn’t want to marry the wargen, but if I truly meant to dishonour you in this way, why would I have protected Axe in wolf form?”

“A means to throw you off the scent, milord?” Linnea suggested in an angelic tone. “A ruse perhaps?”

“A ruse indeed, Linnea,” he agreed.

“Then how the hell did I drug myself?” I snapped, trying to rise but being shoved back down again. “I was out cold when Kris came.”

“To try and maintain your innocence if your stupid plan failed,” Father replied. But it wasn’t his words that had me flinching, it was the sound of the birch rod being swiped through the air, something that was all too familiar. I knew what was coming, and hence my words became a rapid babble.

“If you wait for the wargen to rise, they’ll tell you I planned to go with them tonight. It was them I was going to slip from the keep with, to ensure that the men didn’t see and try and stop us. Please, Father! Please don’t do this!”

“I have to, that’s what you’ve never understood. You know the consequences of what you do, but you do it anyway. Well, no more, Darcy. You’ll go to your marriage bed with a healthy reminder of the limitations of your power.” His hands grabbed my wrists, holding them behind my back in a way that drew a long and incoherent cry from me. “It’s a match made in heaven, because you’re little more than a beast yourself.”

Was it that last statement that allowed him such freedom when he beat me? Later I’d think about it often, but like most women that survive these things, I found few answers. Who can truly say why one person believes they have a right to lash another? We just know they do. And so, when the first crack whipped across my back, I screamed. Linnea fussed and Father berated me for being weak, but I didn’t care anymore. I wasn’t blameless, but I wasn’t the arch-manipulator everyone seemed to think I was. But what was real didn’t matter. They had the whip in their hands, so they created reality with it. And my reality? It was one of pain.

At first it was just a white-hot feeling, too intense, too sharp to truly feel. But the affronted nerve endings quickly gathered steam and then my body exploded in sensation. Red-hot stripes of agony flared hard before another crack was applied, then another. The pain then became greater than the sum of its parts, my skin becoming sensitised, even the parts that had escaped his lash. But they didn’t last long anyway, because Father was relentless. He striped my back over and over from top to bottom, leaving no part of me untouched, and that’s when I went away.

You must be wondering why I was the way I was. If I’d just done as I was told. If I’d just followed the rules. Many asked me the same question and the answer was this. Rule followers, I’d found, were very convinced by displays of power. The threat of this or that coming down to crush them was enough to get them to toe the line.

Then there were people like me.

Father had started beating me too early, too young and he got to the point of reaching for the birch too quickly. I was beaten for small infractions and I was beaten for large, so I stopped trying to evade the lash, because I couldn’t see a way that I could avoid it. Instead, I found the means to escape it mentally. My mind detached from my body, the pounding sound of my heartbeat something else altogether. I felt airy, insubstantial, as if all that was Darcy could blow away and, frankly, I wanted it to. I just wanted to not be. I could still feel the pain, still hear my father’s shouts, but it was all far, distant, muted. But often, as I drifted, a small fear would form, one that I would drift too far. That I would go away from everything and never come back.

But right now, I was more than happy for that to come to pass. I willed it to be so with every breath and that’s perhaps why the next thing happened. I wanted to be nothing too damn much, so instead, I became everything.

I couldn’t be allowed to just float, to drop down, down, down into myself and exist in some somnolent state. I felt the blood trickling down my skin for just a second, knowing that this time was different. This time he was going to tear my flesh from my bones. And that made my mind consider what had happened, how I had come to be here.

Kris.

The thought of him conjured his golden presence and, for a moment, I felt that same wrench inside me at the sight of him. He was everything I’d been told to love and desire, so obviously I’d done just that. But it was the childish, ill-formed thing of a girl, that had finally become clear to me. The things he said about nunneries and being intact, the reckless disregard he had for the power of my father and the wargen, yet he left me to bear the consequences of that rashness?

He felt good to kiss, hot under my fingers, was a devil on the battlefield and then…? What did I even know of the man? My mind couldn’t provide much and that wasn’t something that could be just blamed on the abuse being heaped upon me. I literally knew very little about the man I had been willing to jeopardise my future for, which made me wonder why the hell this had become my fate.

My father was beating me because he was scared. Of the king’s wrath, of the withdrawal of royal gratitude for everything Father had managed to achieve in getting the deal signed. Of the deductions Father could expect the king to make when he was due to receive his reward. Of my cousin taking over the title as duke, turning Father from a powerful man to a figurehead, left to rubber-stamp all my cousin’s decisions. Because he’d learned just how perilous his hold over his knights was.

A lord relied on having loyal, compliant men who’d fight his battles for him, otherwise what was he? An over-bred, overly privileged target, sitting on a pile of land and money that others coveted. He’d had to drug them into compliance last night, for fear they’d tear it all down and, in his mind, he’d centred the blame for all of that on me.

Unwomanly Darcy. Reckless Darcy. Rebellious Darcy. I was the nail that refused to be hammered down and therefore I attracted his ire like a lightning rod.

But what I was? There was so much more to it than that and some of it had been beyond my ken before now.

Why did the wargen want me so much? Why was some ill-bred woman from the borderlands so damn enticing? I couldn’t flatter myself thinking it was my personality, because they barely knew who I was. They’d tasted something in my blood… And at that, my vision filled, with fat red shapes that moved along a long pink corridor, pulsing to the beat of my heart.

It was my blood, I learned that later, but right now I just watched their pulse. Better that than the ruin Father was making of my back. Blood was falling now, too much blood. Blood that sang when Kris touched me. Blood that pulsed, throbbed, overcame me when the wargen did. Blood of a nobleman. Blood of girl. Blood of…

I can’t precisely tell you what happened next, just how it felt. When Weyland had touched me, it’d felt like he set my body on fire. A pleasant burn full of gasping pleasures, but there was none of that now. Despite all my efforts, the raging conflagration of pain my father had inflicted came rushing back, but something else came with it. It wasn’t just my back that burned, it was all of me. My head whipped back, a strangled scream tearing through the air, one that quickly transmuted, becoming a howl.

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