Page 37 of With Fangs and Claws (The Wolf Queen 1)

I opened eyes sticky with gunk and blinked rapidly to try to clear them, without too much success, but that was soon resolved. The door to the carriage was rudely wrenched open, something that set the priests twittering, but I couldn’t focus on that. A familiar iron grip closed around my arm, hauling me out. I stumbled, my legs like rubber, unable to support me, but he could.

“What the fuck did you do, you wilful little bitch?”

Father dragged me up, up, onto my tiptoes and then beyond that, leaving me dangling in his grip like a small child as his face was shoved into mine.

“Sought to escape the marriage,” Gerald informed him, even as I tried to stammer out an answer. “Kristoff was at our monastery in the dead of night, ready to fall on his sword and rescue the girl through matrimony.”

“That was your plan?” I opened my mouth to reply but he shook me so hard my teeth began to rattle in my head.

“I would suggest a ritual birching to cleanse the bride before her big day,” Francis said with a sniff. “It’s a practice that’s fallen out of favour and much to the detriment of our womenfolk I feel.”

“A splendid suggestion,” Father said, dropping me to my feet and then hauling me along.

The priests didn’t follow. They had their own business to attend to and it had little to do with me. They didn’t care if I turned up to the church bleeding, as long as I did turn up.

I glanced up the stairs with eyes that burned as Father dragged me up, up, my mouth falling open, ready to shout for the wargen.

“Don’t bother with that, missy. Your plan backfired. Those beasts are still sleeping off the draught you gave them to keep them quiet as that idiot Kris came to your aid. Not that it did you much good. Fortuitously, it means they won’t interfere with this.”

As he opened his bedroom door, I made a sound I hadn’t made since I was a child. A pathetic little whimper as my heels dug into the flagstones, as I frantically tried to free myself from his grip. But when I dug my nails into his wrist, he stopped and struck me across the face, stilling me utterly.

He hadn’t done this for so long. When I was small, he’d beaten me assiduously, to an extent even Francis might have baulked at, but when I proved to be so relentlessly recalcitrant that even beating Linnea wasn’t enough to make me comply, we’d formed an unspoken truce. Do whatever I wanted, as long as I didn’t embarrass him. And I hadn’t. But right now, he believed all his chickens had come home to roost, that my half-heartedly hidden rebellions had coalesced into this.

And the problem was, he was half right.

I had talked about this with Kris. We had schemed to get me out of this arrangement. But I hadn’t done what he thought, what the priests had said, what…

Linnea appeared with a serene smile on her face, her wimple snow white as she presented him with a fresh cut birch branch. Stout enough that it wouldn’t break. Still green and full of sap, so it would be marvellously flexible. So that when he raised his arm, when he cracked it down across my back, it would mould itself to my skin, making sure every inch of me felt its lash.

“No,” I said, fighting in earnest now. “No, no, no, no!”

But my protests meant nothing as I was hauled inside the room and thrown at the bed, the drugs in my system not allowing my reflexes to help me. I sprawled across the end and felt a rough hand hauling my shirt up and away from my back.

“Undo her corset, Linnea,” Father ordered. “We don’t have much time. The beasts will rise soon, and I need her subdued before then.”

“Of course, Your Grace.”

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