Chapter 4 · The Alpha's Hearth

"Take her to your bed, and the Elders brand you a traitor tonight!"

Garrick's voice cracked off the black stone. Vane's hand tightened around my arm until I felt the bone creak.

He didn't turn around.

"Say that again," Vane said. He said it quietly, which was worse than yelling.

Garrick stepped into the torchlight at the top of the cell stairs. Clean uniform. Silver-hilted dagger on his belt. A little smile he was trying to hide.

"She's a branded rogue, my Alpha. The law says cells. Then the rope." His eyes slid to me. "Not your furs."

My wrists were still raw from the silver net. Every heartbeat throbbed in the burns. I'd been dragged, chained, and shoved down one flight of stairs already. I was not about to be a bone these two dogs fought over.

"I'm standing right here," I said.

Neither of them looked at me.

"The law," Vane said, "is me."

The torch beside Garrick shuddered. The flame bent flat, like something had breathed on it. I felt it too, a low hum under my boots. Vane's aura, pushing out of him like heat off a forge.

He was burning up. I could feel it through his glove, through my sleeve. Black veins crawled up the side of his neck, and sweat ran down his jaw even though the stairwell was cold enough to fog my breath.

Two years ago he'd stood on that bloody altar with a face like granite and cut me out of his life. Now his hand shook on my arm.

He was sick. Really sick. And he was hiding it from Garrick.

"Clear the east stairs," Vane said. "Nobody comes up. Nobody knocks. If the Elders want me, they can wait for the thaw."

"The pass is sealed," Garrick said. "The Elders are already furious about—"

Vane's growl didn't sound like a man's. It rolled through the stone and rattled the iron rings on the wall. Garrick took one step back before he could stop himself.

Good. Let him choke on it.

Then Vane hauled me up the stairs like a sack of grain.

"I can walk," I snapped.

"Then walk faster."

I tried to twist free. He caught my chained wrists in one hand and pinned them against my chest. I hissed. The silver bit down to the bone.

His grip loosened. Just a little.

He looked down at my wrists, and his jaw flexed. Something ugly and furious crossed his face. It wasn't aimed at me.

"Who put the net on you that tight?"

"You did," I said. "Your men. Your orders."

"I said alive."

"Alive isn't the same as unhurt, Vane."

He didn't answer. He just shifted his hold so his thumb rested on the unburned skin above the shackle. His palm was scalding. It should have felt like a brand.

It felt like the first warm thing I'd touched in two years.

I hated that.

We climbed past two guards who suddenly found the wall very interesting. Past a long hall hung with old claw-banners. Past a window where the blizzard slammed the glass so hard the whole frame sang.

No way out. The storm had shut the fortress like a fist.

At the end of the hall stood a door banded in black iron. Vane didn't knock. He shoved it open with his shoulder, dragged me through, and kicked it shut behind us.

The heat hit me like a slap.

Pine charcoal. Wool. Leather. Smoke. And under it all, his scent, dark cedar and something wild, like a storm about to break.

A fire roared in a hearth big enough to roast an elk. Fur rugs covered the floor. A huge bed sat against the far wall, piled with pelts and heavy black blankets. The shutters on the tall window shook with every gust.

A man could cook in here.

Vane dropped the iron bar across the door with one hand. Then he pulled a key from inside his collar, locked it, and slid it back against his chest.

My stomach turned over.

"Take these off." I held up my wrists. "Now."

"No."

"I'm bleeding on your nice rug."

"Then sit by the fire."

"Go to hell."

He almost smiled. It came and went so fast I might have imagined it. Then his whole body jerked. He caught himself on the bedpost, knuckles white, breath dragging in and out.

The wood groaned under his hand. A crack ran up the carved post.

I should have run for the window. Any sane woman would have. But the room was a locked box, the storm was a wall, and Vane was between me and the door.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I watched him.

His eyes had gone from gray to molten gold, the pupils blown wide. His shirt clung to his back. And he kept staring at my throat like it owed him money.

"What's wrong with you?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"You're shaking."

"Stop talking."

"Make me."

Bad idea. I knew it the second it left my mouth.

He crossed the room in two strides. I stumbled back and hit the bedpost opposite his. The chain between my wrists rattled. He caught it, looped it over a hook I hadn't noticed, set into the carved wood at shoulder height, and my arms went up.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"Keeping you here."

"This is a cage!"

He didn't answer. He planted one hand on the post beside my head and leaned in until I could feel the heat of him through my ruined coat. Sweat dripped off his jaw onto my collarbone. My pulse hammered so hard I knew he could hear it.

Then he pressed his face into the curve of my neck and breathed in.

All of him went still.

The tremor in his hands stopped. His shoulders dropped half an inch. A low, rough sound came out of his chest, almost a groan, almost a sob. He sounded like a man who'd been underwater for two years and had finally broken the surface.

My body betrayed me. Of course it did. My knees went soft. My head tipped back before I told it to. And the old scar at the base of my neck, the one he'd cut himself, the one that had burned every night since the altar, flared up hot as a coal.

"Vane," I whispered. It came out like a plea, and I hated that most of all.

His mouth dragged along my skin and stopped right on the scar. I felt the edge of his fangs, careful and terrible. His breath scorched my throat.

"Not a cage, Seraphina," he said against my pulse. His voice was wrecked, low and rough with something I couldn't name. "This is your bed."