For months, he’d been waiting for his eyes to tell him what the Sight already knew. So he might see the change in her slender body as she swelled with the promise of new life. For any hint that she was aware they’d been successful, that she’d been conquered. And in doing so, had tamed them all, his wildling queen who ruled them with soft coos and sharp lines.
A band of obsessive want flared behind his laces. Kicking at his leathers, where his dick grew fat and heavy with the need to fill his sensory pits with her. To taste and see and smell all that she was.
He couldn’t wait.
Knew just what would happen if he let Sin at her and didn’t intervene, the selfish spoiled prick.
The shift was effortless, the Sight showing him what only those in his line might see.
Slick that never went out of season, she was a beacon. Hard to follow, at first, for she’d been everywhere he looked. She’d taken to wandering the compound at night, almost unable to remain in her nest while the moons were ripe and the light was low. As if they didn’t notice the flat, reflective disks glaring back at them from the shadows. That her pupils shone green in the way of a night thing.
Nocturnal.
The truth of her night vision just another secret Giaus waited for her to divulge.
A treasure he’d wait for her to give in her own time.
If she needed patience, she would have it.
A curse echoed up from the den. Deep in the nesting pit the unlikely trio shared.
“She’s gone!” Sin snarled, bolting up from the dark. Mane standing on end, fury billowed off his shoulders in waves of panic Giaus could almost taste.
The king blinked and banished the Sight. “Gone?”
“The little bitch ran.” A choked bark of laughter and pain burst over the general’s lips. “Gone.Again. I fucking knew it,” he hissed, vibrating as he shoved past Giaus so he could send a frantic scowl over the Queen’s Landing. “By the Nine. I fucking told you she’d run! That her domesticated act was exactly that.”
The insult saw Giaus’ testicles draw up, tucked flush against his body where they dumped homicidal levels of testosterone directly into his blood. “Slow down,” he snapped, trying to master himself. To smother the flare of his mane and think before he struck the general down with the back of one fist. And then the other. “She’s here somewhere, she couldn’t have—”
A crack.
It caught his eye.
A little glimmer of temptation and darkness that shouldn’t have been—and right down the middle, a twisting trail of golden damnation that ledaway.
Someone had left the gate open.
Unblinking, the king took a step he didn’t bother to muffle. First one, and then three more. Faster and faster, until he was sprinting with all the grace of an earthquake.
“We have to prepare the others to hunt,” Sin gasped, shivering with something beyond fury. A thing they shared.
Terror.
The queen was a vicious warrior in spiritonly. A treasure Giaus would indulge and spoil until she hissed and demanded her space.
But she was also a slave to instinct, a babe among beasts. Kept ignorant of the dangers of life without her pack of devoted slaves. Delicate these last months, when her scent had only just begun to hint at something profound.
“Trail’s going cold,” Sin rasped, and pushed both hands through his hair. Making fists in the bristling hair at his shoulders. And then, head tipped back, one pupil flat and black, the other reflecting a misty sheen of silver, he said, “It’s been hours, Giaus. How the fuck—”
A glance passed between them. Both shaking with a possessive horror neither had known before.
That she would dare to risk her safety while in such a delicate state, to expose herself to the dangers that lay beyond the wall? At the mercy of a vicious place, teeming with predators who wouldn’t hesitate to end something both males would die to defend.
Their legacy.
Season endlessly ripe, no matter that breeding her was no longer possible, hers was a scent that would draw predators and competitors alike. For hundreds of miles in every direction. Downwind, upstream… through mountains and brimstone.
She was a gift.
