There.
Erik raised his fist, and his warriors slowed, forming up behind him in practiced silence. Fifty men against however many waited below. The odds didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting to Claricia.
He drew his sword—the familiar weight settling in his palm like an old friend. Around him, steel sang free of leather sheaths, the sound his warriors had made a thousand times before battle. War horses shifted beneath their riders, ears flat, nostrils flaring at the scent of violence about to erupt.
Aksel moved his mount alongside Erik’s, close enough that their stirrups nearly touched. “Like old times, braither.”
“Aye.” Erik’s eyes never left the camp below. “Except this time, ‘tis personal.”
“Fer all of us.” Aksel’s voice carried the weight of loyalty fifteen years deep. “She’s our lady now. And nay bastard takes what’s ours.”
Around them, Erik’s warriors sat silent and deadly—men who’d followed him through raids and battles, who’d sworn oaths in blood and iron. These weren’t just soldiers. They were his pack.
His family, now her family too.
Erik looked at each face—hard men made harder by war, but loyal to their bones. “Ye ken what we’re ridin’ intae.”
“Aye, me jarl.” Torsten’s grin was all teeth and violence. “‘Tis a splendid night fer killin’.”
“Duncan’s mine,” Erik said, quiet and absolute. “Anyone who gets between me and him answers tae me after. Understood?”
A chorus of agreement rippled through the warriors.
Erik raised his sword in signal. Moonlight caught the blade, turning it silver-bright against the darkness. His voice, when it came, was pitched low enough to carry only to his men. “Fer Skye. Fer our lady.”
Then, Erik threw his head back and let the howl tear from his throat—long and terrible and absolutely furious—transforming mid-cry into words that carried across the hills like judgment itself: “ÚLFR TIL VALHOLL!”
The Wolf sends ye tae Valhalla.
His warriors took up the cry with savage joy, voices rolling across the darkness in a wave of promised violence.
“ÚLFR TIL VALHOLL!”
“ÚLFR TIL VALHOLL!”
Erik kicked his stallion forward, and fifty mounted warriors exploded down the hillside like an avalanche with teeth.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
‘ÚLFR TIL VALHOLL!’
From somewhere in the darkness beyond the camp came a sound that made Claricia’s heart soar.
A wolf’s howl, long and terrible and absolutely furious.
Chaos erupted as warriors poured from the darkness like avenging spirits—Erik at their head, Aksel beside him, and behind them a force of battle-hardened Norsemen whose very presence made Duncan’s mercenaries hesitate.
“CLARICIA!” Erik’s roar cut through the night, raw and desperate and absolutely murderous.
“Here!” she tried to scream, but Duncan’s hand clamped over her mouth, dragging her towards the birlinn.
Steel rang against steel as the battle joined. Through the press of bodies, Claricia caught glimpses of Erik cutting through Duncan’s men like a scythe through wheat—his sword singing death with every stroke, his movements fluid and terrible and mesmerizing in their lethal grace.
He is truly a wolf,Bonnie and deadly and utterly unstoppable.
She felt fierce pride.
“Get her on the boat!” Duncan bellowed. “Now! Ye wretched dogs!”
