Page 85 of Knotted in Sherwood Forest

The admission nearly undid me, and she felt that too, and she went quiet for a moment.

"Good," I whispered.

"Don't look so pleased with yourself."

"Impossible."

We spent a while finding out what the bond actually did, which was less than the ballads claim and considerably more than I had bargained for. I couldn’t read her thoughts. I couldn’t tell what she was about to say, and I had never once since been able to tell what she was about to do. What came through was emotion rather than words.

Warmth.

Unease.

A sharpening when her attention caught on something. The particular bright spike of her being amused at my expense, which I have since learned to recognize at forty yards.

And she was still entirely herself. That is the part I had quietly feared. The barracks talked all about the Omega going soft and biddable, settling into an Alpha's household like water finding a level. I’d been afraid of waking beside a gentler version of the woman I fallen in love with.

Inside the hour she’d told me my stitching was ugly, taken the last of the water without asking, and informed me that if I ever again knelt on a cold floor with a knife wound in my side to make a speech, she would shoot me somewhere non-fatal.

I had never loved anyone so much in my life.

She slept at last, properly, in the middle of the nest with my mark on her throat and one hand closed in the front of my shirt. I lay awake in the dark and did the accounting.

I wa permanently bonded to the most wanted outlaw in England. There is a warrant out for her execution. If Fitzwalter learned of what we’d done, he wouldn’t need to hunt the Ghost of Sherwood through a forest ever again. He would simply take me knowing that she would come.

And she would come find me, and that terrified me. We had handed each other the only weapon either of us was ever genuinely vulnerable to.

I thought about the first night she’d ever gotten away from me. It’d been nigh, two winters ago at Blackwater, with the river up and an arrow in her shoulder and the ford fifty yards upstream that I chose not to use. I thought about nine notes pinned to nine wagons.

Still too slow, Bisbane.

I thought about her father's letter in the lining of my coat, and the sealed estate records sitting in my own castle, and a cooper named Aldous in my own cells with a daughter of nine, and the gray-bearded man who had looked down at me from a saddle and decided he would be reporting all of it.

Whatever came next wouldn’t be fought between a sheriff and an outlaw. That part of my life had ended somewhere in the last fortnight, and I had no intention of mourning it.

It would be fought by the two of us together, which was considerably a worse proposition for Edmund Fitzwalter than he currently understood.

She stirred against my chest.