“I appreciate that.” They gazed at one another, and Amelia wondered what she looked like as they did so. If her face or her body betrayed some physical longing.
Then she wondered why she cared at all, because the observations of an enemy prisoner should mean nothing to her.
“Are you finished questioning him?” Leif asked.
“Yes, thank you. You may take him away.”
She turned away from all of them. Paced across the tent and lifted the lid of a trunk to rummage for a bottle of wine as she listened to the metallic clinking of the cuffs being unlocked and then relocked. Someone gave a low grunt of effort—Cassius—and she heard the muffled sound of a shove, then an inhuman growl.
She didn’t look round. For the rest of the night, she didn’t want to think about any of the three of them. And she could only hope that her dreaming, unconscious mind would think the same way, later.
~*~
“I’ll take him,” Ragnar said, when they were outside the tent and striding in the moonlight toward their own.
“No,” Leif said, with another growl. “Youwill not.”
Ragnar had been exceptionally cheeky since they departed Inglewood—and Leif knew that his own leniency and, well, hisaffection, such as it was—was to blame, but he heard the true threat in Leif’s voice now and subsided. Verbally, at least. He kept pace with Leif as he marched Cassius across the grass and to the wolf-bannered tent that hardly any of the wolves used, preferring to sleep coiled up in the brush in their wolf shapes.
Sandr was inside, sharpening his array of bone-handled knives, and glanced up with restrained curiosity.
Leif got him up to his feet with a tilt of his head and a chuff of expelled breath. “Secure him. Get him something to eat. Watch him until I return for him.”
“Yes, alpha.”
Prisoner thus delivered, Leif ducked back out of the tent and strode into the trees without a backward glance, confident that Ragnar would follow right on his heels.
He did.
Leif’s pupils expanded, drinking in the darkness, and he stepped over felled branches, boots crunching softly through last autumn’s dropped leaves. He walked, and then walked a little farther. When he came upon a man-high boulder as broad as a team of hitched oxen, he stepped around it, and came to a halt. Leaned his shoulders back against the cool, rough stone, and folded his arms, ready when Ragnar joined him.
In a pleasant voice, Leif asked, “Did you intentionally keep food and water from the prisoner?”
Ragnar grinned, a flash of white in the gloom. With his wolf eyes, Leif could make out the rough shape of his face, the arch of brow and the blade of nose. His hair gleamed silver in the moonlight that peeked through the patchwork clouds. “Yes.”
He could still lie, if he wanted to, even if it was futile; Leif could smell his dishonesty. But right now, he was honest, gleefully so.
Leif searched for his temper, but it slipped through his fingers. He was more curious than angry at the moment. Thatwas becoming his default state of being when it came to Ragnar, for better or worse. “What if he had fallen ill? If he’d fainted on the road?”
“What if he had?” Ragnar shrugged. “Would you have wept at his funeral pyre? Written verse in his honor to be recited upon the anniversary of his death each year?”
The portrait Ragnar conjured would have made him laugh under different circumstances. Leif schooled his features, though he feared Ragnar could still scent his sudden spike of amusement. In his calmest tone, he said, “I don’t care if the fiend lives or dies, but Lady Amelia—”
Leif smelled the hot, metallic surge of aggression on Ragnar the moment before he snorted, the human sound edged with a growl. “Lady Amelia. Of course.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It doesn’tmeananything,” Ragnar said, tone mocking, lip skinned back off his teeth. “I’m quite familiar by this point with your feelings forLady Amelia.”
Leif felt blindsided…and also felt as though he shouldn’t have been. He’d noticed Ragnar playing coy with Amelia, smiling and smirking at her. Watching her when she didn’t know he was looking. She was beautiful, and so of course Ragnar was drawn to her, just as he himself was.
For his own part, Leif acknowledged, with no small amount of shame, that his attraction to Amelia was a thing separate from his like and respect for her. She was capable, and intelligent, and he well knew the immense strain under which she operated as a general. She’d been raised a Southern courtly lady, and here she found herself in possession of three drakes, leading a hodge-podge army toward battle with a fearsome enemy. But none of that mattered when he felt a physical yearning toward her; it was the same sort of base lust he’d felt with the barmaids and camp followers he andRagnar had shared. Uncomplicated, and therefore dangerous. He entertained no fantasies of Amelia gazing up at him and proclaiming her love for him. In fact, the idea made him want to shift to four legs and take off sprinting through the forest.
Surely it was the same for Ragnar. Surely there were no finer feelings involved.
He couldn’t account for Ragnar’s anger, however. But as his alpha, it was Leif’s job to assuage it. He reached for the likeliest solution. “Amelia is just as you said: she’s a lady. She’s not to be trifled with. But perhaps we should avail ourselves of a willing camp follower. Perhaps one with dark hair if that’s your preference.”
Ragnar’s eyes flashed, and suddenly his face was thrust in close to Leif’s, his breath hot and rapid through flared nostrils, a growl rumbling in his throat. “Is that what you think,alpha?” The title was mocking, bristling with contempt. “You think I want to fuck the lady general? That I want to mount her like a bitch in heat?” He bared his teeth, and it looked nothing like a smile, now. “Do you think she begs? The stiffest ones always unravel the most, you know. Will she call you a prince when you’re between her legs? Or do you want her to call youalpha?”
