Page 34 of White Horse Black Nights

As I smooth his shirt down my arms, my fingers come away sticky with blood. From a distance, I can’t tell if his wound has stopped bleeding. Hefting my tired body to my feet, I shuffle over to the fire and plop down next to him.

With a poke, I gently inspect the blood-smeared skin around his cut.

“What are you doing?” he snaps, jerking his arm away.

I ignore his tone, knowing that with me, he’s all bark and no bite. “It looks like the bleeding has stopped. The cut is deep but sliced cleanly. That’s good. I’ll need water to wash it . . . ” I look around for any indication of a stream nearby.

Wary, he jerks his head toward his rucksack. “The water flask is there.”

I root around until I find it, and grab a handkerchief as well. Taking my place by Wolf in front of the fire, I gently wash away the blood from his arm.

“The Sisters taught you how to heal?” he asks.

“No.” I wring out the handkerchief and then pat the area dry. “I learned by tending to my own wounds.”

His bicep flexes on instinct. I can see a vein throbbing in his neck. From somewhere high above us, an owl hoots. He growls, “I could kill every last one of them for what they did to you.”

My hand pauses as our eyes meet. The firelight dances in his dark irises. For a second, I forget who we are. That he’s my jailor and I’m his master’s bride. Here in the hidden contours of the forest, we might as well have stepped back in time one thousand years to the fae realm. An age of magic when the trees sang, and puffy white cloudfoxes skimmed the air.

I don’t know if all the stories in the Book of the Immortals are true—the mythical animals and cursed lovers and vicious battles between the gods—but being with Wolf makes me want to believe in fantasies.

Slow, he presses his palm to where his shirt hangs over my ribcage, gently feeling the bone. For a crazy second, I wish the fabric barrier wasn’t between us, and he was holding me again like when we rode Myst together.

Stop that, you idiot,I chide myself, but it feels hopeless.

“You reinjured your rib in the fight, didn’t you?”

I give a soft shake of my head, still unable to tear my gaze away from the firelight reflecting in his eyes. I did hurt my rib, but if I said that aloud, he’d stalk straight to the Order of Immortal Woudix’s church and burn it to the ground. “No. I’m okay.”

His hand remains cemented against my side in a way that makes me think he found as much solace in our horseback ride together as I did. That having me close meant something to him.

Over the next days, I keep thinking of his gentle touch on my ribs. The first time I saw him, I thought he was a gorgeous monster. Now, I’m starting to realize that for all his brutish ways, he isn’t at all like the men who catcall in the villages we pass.

There’s a part of me that wants to trust him with more than just my safety. That wants to lower my walls and ask for something I’ve never had: help.

The next time he lowers me down from Myst, I place my hand over his and, gathering my courage, look him square in the eye as I say, “Wolf, I want you to teach me to fight.”

Chapter12

Wolf

I stare at Sabine like she’s speaking the incomprehensible Immortal Tongue. Teach her to fight? For a moment, with her soft hand pressed against mine, the moonlight painting her skin with a beautiful glow, and her leaning toward me with those rosebud lips, I had thought,maybe . . .

But that can never happen.

Sabine Darrow isn’t mine to kiss.

“I never want to be in the position again that I was in at Charmont,” she says in a voice that nearly breaks as her hand moves to her opposite wrist, where the Patron grabbed her. “My whole life, I’ve done nothing while others abused me. In the convent, there was nothing Icoulddo. I was ten years old when I moved there, a child outnumbered by adults. When I got older and stronger, they threatened to hurt Myst as a means to keep me under their control.” She swallows, her throat catching on a lump of fear, but then her eyes turn determined.

She continues in a steely voice, “I know what they say about Sorsha Hall. The depraved court that the Valveres keep is as lawless as any fae gods’ realm. If I’m to thrive there, I need to be able to defend myself.”

Her request is sensible but naive. She may think she knows what she faces at Sorsha Hall, but she has no idea what she’s about to walk into. Rian has his flaws, but buried somewhere beneath his ruthlessness, a moral compass still tries to guide him, as it did when we were boys. It’s the rest of his family she should fear. His older brothers, Kendan and Lore, though they’ve both been absent for years: Lore heading the Valveres’ shipping fleet far across the Panopis Sea, and Kendan as a captain for King Joruun’s army in Old Coros—or at least, that’s the formal word. Their father, Lord Berolt, was born with a broken moral compass. He built his empire of legal—and illegal—vices through blood and blackmail. There’s a persistent rumor that he killed his late wife, Madelyna—Rian’s mother—in a fit of rage when she birthed a normal third son, after a fortuneteller foretold that Rian would be godkissed.

All that’s not even to mention the Valvere cousins and aunts and uncles and one especially vile grandmother, as well as the questionable company the family keeps: revelers and pirates, mercenaries and whores. All dressed up in fae finery that does little to hide their barbarous desires.

“Lord Rian will do everything in his power to ensure your safety, my lady.” I speak my words carefully, even formally, to try to atone for the unchaste thoughts I was having earlier.

That you’re still having, Wolf.

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