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“We’re only delivering a message.” Greybeard’s hands came up, palms out. His eyes never left the blade. “Ye’re wanted at home. Ye should visit yer clan.”

“I’m returning to me clan as we speak.”

“That lot of killers on the hill isnae yer clan, and ye ken it.”

Something flickered in Evander’s eyes. It was not anger. Freya had seen anger on men; anger was hot and loud and stupid. This was the opposite. This was a door shutting quietly from the inside.

“Ye’ve delivered yer message,” he said. “Go home.”

But the other two men weren’t looking at him anymore. They were looking at her. She felt it like a draught, and she sat very straight in the saddle.

She wished they would look away. She wished they would leave her alone. But that was impossible. She had decided to marry the Wolf, and with that came a certain danger she couldn’t ignore.

There was no going back now; she had come this far. But Evander didn’t flinch. He still looked like he had it handled. He didn’t even look over his shoulder to see how she was faring.

“If ye daenae come,” Greybeard pressed, bolder now, “we might have to get a wee bit insistent about it with yer lady back there.”

“Really?” Evander’s voice hadn’t changed. “How so?”

“Perhaps it’d be easier for ye to come along, if yer lady was already there waiting.”

A hand closed on her arm. Freya jerked away, but the hand held her steady. She wasn’t sure where the man had come from or how quickly he had managed to get his hand on her. Not on her sleeve. But on her, hard, his fingers digging in above the elbow.

The shock of it went through her like cold water, and for one terrible instant, she was no longer on a road in the hills. She was sixteen, standing behind a barn with the music still playing, and a boy she’d liked was saying, “Daenae be like that, Freya,” and his hand was⁠—

Something wet struck her cheek. Then the hand was gone from her arm. It lay on the ground, the fingers still curled, and the man it had belonged to was screaming… until he was screaming no more. Evander pulled his sword out of the other man’s heart, and the body dropped next to the fallen hand.

Evanderturned away from him, his blade bright red and his face expressionless.

The Wolf dropped the pretense of harmlessness and showed his fangs. He had cut the hand that grabbed her. Then he had killed the man. After that, he killed the one who’d made the threat, whispering that he should have thought twice before threatening the Wolf’s wife.

“W-Wife?” the third man asked.

Evander glared at him. “I’ll let ye leave. Ye didnae touch or speak of her. Ye can bury yer dead, too. But stay away from me wife.”

The man nodded and stepped aside so Evander could climb back on his horse.

Freya was in shock. She couldn’t believe what she had just witnessed. Evander had killed two men without so much as blinking. He had done it with such ease that she wondered if she had made the right decision agreeing to stay with him for three weeks.

A part of her wanted to turn her mare back around and ride far away, so far away that no one could find her. But when it came down to it, Evander had protected her. He hadn’t been ready to lash out at any of these men until one of them had touched her.

That was the part she kept circling back to. He had let them talk. He had let them go on and on about how they wanted him to come back with them. They had gotten several warnings. They hadn’t been unaware of what the Wolf would do to them if they failed to obey his orders.

Only when the hand had closed on her arm had he moved.

She didn’t know what to do with that. It sat in her chest like a stone she’d swallowed, heavy and strange. She’d spent eleven years believing that men were one thing when they wanted something and another thing when they didn’t, and that the trick was never to be the thing they wanted.

She looked down at her hands still clutching the reins. They had stopped shaking somewhere between the second man hitting the ground and the third man running off.

She should have been more frightened of her husband now, not less. That was the sensible order of things. A woman who had watched a man cut another’s hand off at the wrist should ride the other way, not sit her horse afterward thinking about the way he had said wife, flat and final, like a door being barred.

But there it was. The tremors had stopped. Her heart had slowed.

Some animal part of her, older and stupider than sense, had looked at the Wolf with blood on his blade and decided, without consulting her at all, that it was safe.

She did not trust that part one bit.

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