He was furious, shaking and sweat-slick as though stricken with fever, and Leif was bewildered. Gods, did he fashion himselfin lovewith Amelia? Could he want her that badly?
Leif snatched a handful of Ragnar’s hair, right at the root, and twisted until Ragnar’s posture went lax. His neck tipped, and his anger melted, and his growl became a whimper. “Are you challenging me?”
“No, alpha.” This time, the title held all the proper reverence and submission.
But Leif didn’t feel any satisfaction. If anything, he was more bewildered than ever. And sad, if he was honest. He hadn’twanted to have this conversation, and he liked the wild rolling of Ragnar’s eyes now even less.
“Will you neglect the prisoner if you’re charged with watching him again?”
“No, alpha.”
Leif released him, but Ragnar didn’t retreat. He remained close, shoulders slanted, spine bent. Leif could smell the crackling of magic that meant he desperately wanted to shift.
“Go, then,” Leif said, and he went.
6
“I have a confession of my own,” Amelia said, tall, gray grass waving around her shoulders. A piece bowed to tickle her face, and she swatted it away with a gesture Oliver remembered well from their youth, slapping at flies and midges on the banks of their favorite creek, when the summer sun turned the whole world thick as soup.
Oliver plucked a strand of grass and wrapped it around and around his finger. His ring, the one Erik had given him as a token of their union, didn’t glitter and gleam here in the Between the way it did in the waking world. He saw that as an ill omen. “It can’t be as damning as my confession.” He swept a hand through the air. “Confess away.”
She bit at her lip, and turned unusually hesitant. “Recall I told you that we’d captured a Sel when we retook the tower?”
“Yes. You chained him up in the wine cellar at Inglewood.”
“Yes, well…” She started playing with the grass, too, and Oliver forced his own hands still. “He’s not in the wine cellar anymore.”
He lifted his brows. “You executed him?” He still remembered well the whistle of Erik’s axe through the air. The meaty thump of blade meeting neck, and the steaming spray of blood across the snow. And then the dead Sel in the great hall. The blood had needed to be scrubbed from the flags, but Oliver knew some must have slithered through the cracks, forever staining the soil beneath.
Amelia chewed harder at her lip. “Not exactly. The opposite, in fact.” She grimaced, and in that moment, she was a girl again, caught putting a live frog in her father’s boot. “I brought him along on the march.”
“Oh. You…oh. Well. Then.”
“Oh.” She scowled and was herself again, grown and jaded. “As if that’s more shocking than your clandestine emperor meetings.”
Oliver held out his hands in a bid for peace. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You saidthenin a very condemning way.”
“I’m not condemning you. I’m merely surprised.”
Her gaze narrowed. “Because only you are allowed to fraternize with the enemy?”
“I’m conducting reconnaissance.” He narrowed his eyes back. “Why, areyoufraternizing?”
“I’m using him for information. He claims he’s defected from the Sel army for good; that he was a slave there and doesn’t wish to go back.”
“And you believe him?”
Her lip curled, and he braced himself for a hurled invective. She deflated, though, shoulders slumping. “I really do.”
Oliver nodded.
“He claims not to possess any magical abilities, and not only can I not detect any sort of power coming from him, the wolves can’t, either.”
“They would be the best judges. Them and the drakes.”
“He seems sincere.” She shook her head, and pulled her knees up to her chest, arms looped around them. “But am I naïve?”
