Page 1 of Through Battle and Blades (The Wolf Queen 2)

1

I gripped my swords tight in my hands. Too tight, Nordred would’ve said. When they sliced through the air, I wasn’t flowing with them, my muscles were clenched too hard, my heart beating too fast, but I couldn’t seem to stop. I shifted across the training room floor, hacking at everything that seemed to fight for space in my head.

As if I could just cut the memories out of there.

Slash.

Dane talking to me in the marketplace on the way over to the temple, quietly informing me about power exchanges and how he wanted my surrender. But of course, I couldn’t hold onto that strange little moment that promised so much, but was yet to deliver. Rather than peel his clothing from him and reveal every inch of my prince, I had his nakedness thrust at me the moment I walked into our suite.

Slash, slash.

Malia lying there naked next to him.

I sucked in a breath at that mental image, it feeling like my swords’ blades were slicing through my own flesh, so I moved faster, trying to outrun the pain. I spun in a series of swift leaps, swords out, cutting through the air and the memory with it.

Weyland tipping my chin up, then feeding me his cock, that mocking smile faltering the moment I did. Him grabbing Axe’s weapon from the air to defend my honour against Kris. Plaiting his hair into braids on top of the tor in Bayard, then him, collapsed onto the bed, his hair a fallen flag of blond strands, spread across the pillow. And her, Leia, snuggled up into his side with well practised ease, her hand on his—

I was pushing myself harder, harder, and there was a danger to that. I wasn’t wielding practice weapons now, but real cold steel. They were hard, impervious, just like I wanted to be, viciously carving through the atmosphere in the room and everything that came with it.

Axe in the bath, holding me against his body, just cradling me there as he washed me clean. But then Axe snoring loud enough to wake the dead, the dark haired bitch from—

I stumbled then, all the momentum of my movements too hard to maintain, and that was bad. As I came abruptly back to the room, I realised something. I was moving too fast, the world was just a blur, because I’d wanted that. I didn’t want to see, hear, think, or feel. I just wanted to fucking fight. It’d taken everything I had to sheath my swords and walk out of the queen’s bedchamber. If I’d dispatched her then, as my soul screamed for me to do, it would be seen as murder.

People could kill each other with impunity, in Grania as well as Strelae, you just had to do it in the right way.

So I’d stalked across the town of Snowmere, running up the steps to the now quiet temple and into the Wolf Maiden’s training room and I’d gone through the motions, trying to lose myself in the savage music of my own body as we prepared for what we knew was coming.

The queen had orchestrated a sexual assault on my pack, on her own sons.

She’d made sure to do it on the night I took my first mate, hoping to drive a wedge between us.

She’d drugged them or cast some spell, making each man think the woman he was with was me.

But they weren’t.

Those girls, those greedy, misguided, stupid, bloody girls had been prepared to pose as me in the hope they’d at least get to fuck the princes, or better, have the men claim them as their mates and that’s what had my fangs aching in my mouth.

They are MINE.

But all that passion had no place on the training ground nor on the battlefield. Nordred had told me over and over, that you were the most effective when your head ruled, not your heart.

“Darcy!”

The masculine shout matched my own yelp of fear as I felt myself fall. I forced my fingers to relinquish the swords, sending them flying away from me before I went crashing down onto the sprung wooden floor.

I landed hard, my breath driven out of my lungs, my head jerking back as pain, more pain blossomed inside me, a carnivorous flower that threatened to eat me whole. I wanted to cry out, to suck oxygen in and to scrabble away as I saw those boots appear in front of me, but instead, all I could do was lie there and hurt.

“Shh shh…” His voice was gentle and soothing and torn with an emotion I knew all too well. He lifted me up into his arms, a familiar warmth that made me hurt so much, more rushing through me, right before it took the physical pain away.

But in some ways that was worse.

My head no longer ached, I was no longer sore between my legs and my lungs could fill and empty without issue, but meeting my body’s many needs left me to face the only one remaining: the ache inside my heart.

Gael couldn’t heal that pain.

“Darcy?” His voice was soft, so soft, a cloud I wanted to just sink into, but Gael, he wasn’t alone.

“Darcy?”

---