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"Am I?"

"You used to look at me like I was a problem to solve."

"And now?"

She glanced up, firelight dancing in her brown eyes. “Now you look at me like I'm something you want."

I didn’t deny it. It would’ve been a lie, and I’d decided somewhere in the last two days that I was finished lying to this woman.

"Perhaps I've finally learned the difference," I said.

Her hands stopped moving. "And what's that?"

I looked at the brass compass resting against her chest, catching the light.

"Some things aren't meant to be captured. They're meant to be chosen."

"And if they choose badly?" she asked.

"Then at least the choice was theirs."

She looked toward the rain-dark window. "You're making it difficult to remember why I dislike you."

"I can remind you."

"Please don't. I'm enjoying the confusion."

I smiled, but she was watching me again with that unguarded look I had come to treasure, and the humor slowly left us both. For the first time in my life, I wanted to be wanted more than I wanted to win. She didn’t answer me. But she didn’t look away either. We stayed like that while the rain came down, and I let the silence be the most honest conversation I had ever had.

I’d ridden into Sherwood believing I understood the woman I hunted. I’d known her as a thief and a rebel. She was an Omega who’d made a mockery of my authority every chance she got, a legend with a bow who left notes pinned to my wagons. That woman I could’ve arrested.

But now I knew how her face changed when she spoke about her father. I knew she slept with a dagger under her shoulder and gave her only blanket to a wounded enemy, that she could not remember his voice anymore and was ashamed of it, that she laughed with her whole face in the rare moments she forgot to guard it.

And I knew exactly what her scent did to me when she stood close enough to touch.

The Crown had ordered me to bring the Ghost of Sherwood to her knees.

I was beginning to suspect I would be the one kneeling.

16

ROBIN

Iwoke in the chair beside the fireplace having slept perhaps two hours of the night, and not one of them peacefully.

Every time I closed my eyes I was back against the north wall with the rain coming down and the Sheriff of Nottingham’s palm flat on the boards beside my head, and I kept hearing him say it in that low voice he only used when he had stopped performing for anyone.

Then tell me when you’re certain.

He’d put it in my hands.

That was the trouble with the man. He could’ve taken what he wanted twice over, and instead he had set the whole thing down in front of me like a loaded bow and walked away to let me decide whether to pick it up.

I’d spent the night deciding.

He slept on his back out of necessity, with one arm thrown above his head and the blanket down around his waist. His hair had come out of its severity in the night and fallen across his forehead, and without the discipline holding his face in place he looked years younger and considerably less like a man who had put a price on my head.

The cabin smelled of him. Cedar and iron and cold winter air, thickened by two days of the same small room, wound into the wool and the thatch and the smoke until there was no part of that place where I could not find him. It should’ve put my teeth on edge, because an Alpha’s scent in an enclosed space is how my people learn to be afraid.