Page 69 of With Fangs and Claws (The Wolf Queen 1)

He went still, staring as his thumb moved further down, the pad brushing over my skin until it reached the corner of my mouth and then—

“Everything alright?”

Both of us jerked apart to see Dane standing there, a quietly contained expression on his face. His eyes catalogued all the ways we were intertwined but I couldn’t quite work out how he felt about what he saw.

“Darcy was just volunteering to run away with me,” Gael said with a slow smile.

Well, that seemed to narrow Dane’s focus, his eyes boring into me.

“How can you do this?” I asked, putting myself between him and Gael. “How can you make him go back there, to that place? To that woman who—”

“I know exactly what my mother did,” Dane replied with a deadly seriousness. “I was forced to stand there and watch as it happened. This wasn’t the plan, you weren’t part of that, but I’ve been working every damn day to change the circumstances that allowed a grown woman to disfigure a child like that, and that hasn’t changed.”

“He’s not disfigured,” I snapped. “And at what point were you going to include me in your little plan?”

“As soon as I could be sure you weren’t going to slip through my fingers and go running off, though I guess if you’re prepared to take my brother with you, there’s some hope.”

“You need to be open with Darcy,” Gael said, placing his hands on my shoulders and, as he did, I was hit by an instant wave of warmth that turned my muscles to goo. “We need to tell her everything.”

“Fine,” Dane ground out, pulling up a log to sit down upon and we went to do the same.

“No,” I told Gael, patting the dirt between my feet, “sit here.”

He frowned slightly and I watched him waver, instinctively wanting to pull away, which made me feel all the more grateful when he sat where I’d asked him to. He regretted it as soon as he did though, when my hands went to his hair.

“Darcy, no—”

“You can wear your hair how you like,” I said. “I don’t care. But hiding, it makes people assume something about you. That this is a weak spot they can press their thumb into.”

I stroked my fingers through the long fall of his hair, waiting for him to reply.

“And you’re gonna give me warrior braids?” he said, his voice starting to take on that sneering edge. “That will make me vulnerable in a whole lot of other ways.”

“No, it won’t,” I said, impulsively raking all of his hair back off his face, Dane nodding as I worked. “You are a warrior. You aren’t weak.”

“I’ve said as much, many a time, brother,” Dane added gently, then the two of them fell quiet for a moment as my fingers worked, plaiting the fine brown hair into a series of braids. “But you want to know what the plan is? On the broadest scale, we bring our country back from the brink. Return to a culture of unity, one where our strength is shared, not pitted against each other. At its simplest, we overthrow our father, my mother, and usher in a new age. I was biding my time until we found our mate, knowing that whoever she was, she would bring an added layer of complexity that had to be considered and I couldn’t act until I knew.”

My fingers slowed for a moment, my eyes staring at Gael’s hair, then I forced them to move again. I felt Dane’s eyes on me before I looked up and met his gaze while he continued.

“Now I know. You told Weyland that he doesn’t know you. That you’re just an abstract concept to us, but while I see your point, I don’t think that’s entirely true.”

While Dane watched me plait his brother’s hair, his mask of cool control slipped for just a moment and I saw his emotions writ large. Hunger, perhaps for me to do the same to his hair, or maybe just for some kind of physical contact. Longing, not just for me, but for the consummation of whatever was simmering away between us. Dane saw a whole new world of possibilities, one he longed for. And then there was one last thing. A frightening thing, something I’d seen in the eyes of many a Granian border lord. A yearning to use power, the burning desire to impose your will on the world in an effort to make it better, whether it wanted it or not. That flickered just as hot as everything else. He looked at me for a long moment and then nodded in recognition of what I’d just seen.

“We still need to find a way to slot together, to be a pack, but Darcy, you’re strong. Stronger than I could ever have hoped. Strong enough to deal with what’s coming.”

“And what is coming?” I asked, tying off one plait before beginning on the next.

“My father is not like any leader before him. In the centuries after the Wolf Queen stepped down, all ruling packs ran the country as a coalition. Of brothers, or brothers-in-arms, they worked together to keep Strelae strong and not allow the Granians to swallow us whole.”

Dane shook his head slowly.

“My father ended that. My uncles are merely there to back my father’s plays. My mother was not even his true mate, just a woman from a powerful family, one that would support my father and his ambitions when he took the queen’s throne. He pits the strongest, the smartest and the richest of our country against each other, keeping their focus on their rivalry so that they never seek to overthrow him. It’s why his queen could rip her claws across my brother’s face, tearing him apart and none stepped forward to stop her.”

“Dane…” Gael growled, stiffening against me.

“Gael’s the trueborn heir, the only one born of the king and his fated mate.”

“Dane!”

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