The pressing need to see her compelled him to sit up just as dawn broke. He stroked the ribbon, calluses catching on the satin, and wondered if he would react to her the same way as the day before. Was his drug-addled mind correct about who she was? He wouldn’t be sure until she returned to him.
And then he heard her voice on the other side of the metal door.
It took everything in him not to strain and snap against his chains when he listened to her hushed voice, the way the men spoke of her like she was little more than a dog. Only the memory of how she cowered kept him back against the wall.
It had been so long since he’d encountered even a mated submissive that he had to rifle through the dust of memory to find the skills to handle her. Even before he made the foolish mistake of joining the war, he’d been in the woods an awfully long time.
His kind were solitary by nature except for when they mated and had cubs. The most socializing he did before the war involved sending letters and occasionally stepping foot in a saloon or market. What he knew came from the other shifters in the village he grew up in. One of his closest boyhood companions was a soft-spoken submissive wolf shifter, but it had taken the better part of a bright northern summer to win Jacob’s trust, and even that was only accomplished with the patient coaching of the elders.
Those old skills in handling submissives were already rusty long before he stepped foot on Alliance soil. At least he still knew enough to hold very still when she shuffled into the cell, her arm clasped by the odious witch who looked at her too closely, withwantin his eyes.
Neither the man nor the animal liked the way the witch dug his fingers into her arm. Theyespeciallydisliked the way he kept his gaze on her slight form, eyes lingering on her back as he closed the door.
However, as soon as the bolt slid into place, Otto’s sole focus became the little enigma.
Be gentle,instinct urged.Be soft. Earn her trust.
What was gentle? What was soft? He’d been on the front lines for forty years. Before that, he lived in an isolated den in the Northern Territories. His last experience with softness was the day he left his mother’s embrace to set out for the wild, as all of his kind did.
Even under ideal circumstances, he imagined he would have struggled — and their circumstances were far from ideal.
They lose their animal.
The hair stood up on the back of his neck whenever he remembered her heartbroken whisper. Otto remained unconvinced that lyssa was at play here, but now that he was lucid, he knewsomethingwas going on.
Of course, being at the front as long as he had, Otto had heard rumors that the Orclind was employing some sort of new weapon. They were being pinched on two sides — with the Elvish Protectorate closing in from the west and the Alliance from the east — and growing increasingly desperate. Tall tales of monsters on the battlefield,werewolves,had begun to proliferate amongst their numbers, threatening to damage already flimsy morale.
Lee Seymour, the young elk shifter in command of the northern half of the Alliance packs, had tasked Otto’s battalion with investigating the rumors, seeing as they were closest to the border.
Now that he was thinking straight, he was dismayed to realize how well Josephine’s story matched up with those rumors.
However, that didn’t mean it was lyssa. Whatever it was she claimed to be infected with, it couldn’t possibly be that nightmare disease.
And nothing, as far as he knew, could kill the animal in a shifter.
Just the thought made his stomach twist with nausea. To not be able to shift was a nightmare. Even being chained was unnatural. A shifter needed to move freely from one form to the other, lest their minds begin to fray and their instincts spin out of control. If not, they tended to grow increasingly lost to the animal’s desperation, making them volatile and dangerous.
He thought of all of this as Josephine quietly retrieved a tray from the slot in the door. She hadn’t spoken to him since her whispered admission, and what little progress he made with her seemed to have evaporated as she skated well around him, as if there was an invisible barrier erected three feet from the tips of his bare toes.
Otto tried very hard to summon the man he used to be. The one with seemingly infinite patience, who would have thought nothing of taking his time winning his sweet submissive mate, no matter how long it took.
That man died a handful of months after his first battle. Now he was harder, with sharp edges previously unknown. Now he knew what profane cruelty the world had to offer. When he stared at the downturned, somber face of his littlekone,he saw every one of them.
They did not havetimeto do the traditional courtship dance. Urgency pressed down on him from all sides. Josephine was obviously mistreated, the gods knew what her father had in store for him, and he grew increasingly worried that they were much, much closer to the front than it seemed. They needed to escape.
He needed her to trust himnow.
The only relief he felt in watching her carefully stoop to set a bowl of porridge by his foot was that she appeared to be moving better than the day before.
When he said as much, Josephine hunched her shoulders and hurried back over to her cushion. “The aches go away,” she answered, sitting down and lifting her own bowl into her lap. Her fingers looked frail and white against the wood, but elegant, too. A musician’s fingers, maybe.
He wanted to pursue the topic, to press for any and all information that might be useful, but he was wary of upsetting her more. Her trust had to come first, or else all the information in the world would be useless.
Because no matter what happened, he intended to escape this strange, unsettling place. Josephine did not believe him, but he knew with absolute certainty that she would be coming with him. That endeavor would be markedly easier if she didn’t fight him the whole way.
So instead of asking why she ached, what it had to do with lyssa, what that meant forhim,Otto slowly reached for his bowl and pulled it into his lap as well, intentionally mimicking her pose.
“You have very pretty hands,” he told her. “Do you play an instrument?”
