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There were certain words said in a certain order that were so triggering for a female, they might as well have an altogether different, truer meaning become the new definition. Like any male, Bronze’s particular lilt to the expression was heavily seasoned with one underlying note: regret. It was unmistakable, even down to the tired way he dragged his body down the hall. Whatever strength she’d known him to possess had been replaced with the weight of poor decisions in the new dawn’s light.
The sinking feeling that had started off her day continued to pull her down further, except this time, it had the foresight to rake claw marks across the burgeoning bloom of hope and fondness she’d begun to harbor for the angel. “What about last night?”
“I wanted to know what your plan was.”
Her . . . what? “My plan . . .”
“Yeah, given the parameters of our arrangement and the bomb that exploded yesterday. I know you didn’t expect any of it, and I want to make sure we’re okay. I hadn’t planned on stepping out of line, but I kind of couldn’t help myself given the situation, you know?”
A bomb. Was that what he was calling what they’d shared? The single-most mind-altering encounter she’d ever experienced with a male was, in his eyes, little more than an explosion with a blast field that left a wave of collateral damage in its wake? Clara swallowed past the hurt tightening her vocal cords, surprised that he was beginning to mean enough to even warrant the biological reaction.
Was his part in her pleasure just a manipulation, too? A throwaway space on a game board he had to pass through anyway, so why not engage in the play?
The hair at her scalp seemed to pull inexplicably tighter, worsening the tension headache already beginning to form. By the Moon Mother, she wished she could just claw the bun out, shift, and run as far away as her wolf would carry her.
It would be so easy to run. But then the words from Lord Raff floated over Bronze’s inquiry, until they flared hot in her mind. Easy things are not worth having.
And she had been easy, hadn’t she? All it had taken were a few charming looks and a fair amount of skin on display on his part and she’d fallen prey to his tempting manipulations.
Clara halted mid-stride, leaving Bronze to continue several paces ahead of her. White-hot rage stung her eyes and wound tightly around the part of her that was coming to care for the male.
How utterly simple of you, Clara, to think you meant anything more to him than the honor-bound duty of his celestial station.
She tried to swallow past the tension stiffening every muscle in her body, until the whispers of his words from yesterday penetrated through the toughening fibers of her mind.
He’d called her the viper, hadn’t he? Well, perhaps it was time to embrace that persona. As she pushed down the hurt and rejection, her remaining strength cleared some headroom for another emotion: determination. Yes, she could be the viper. She would choose when to strike, when to wound, and when to kill.
“Are you having second thoughts, warrior?” Her tone was colder than the polar ice of her wolf’s ancestral homeland.
“What? What are you talking about?” The look of shock twisting his features was almost genuine. Almost.
Clara clenched her fists and buried them in the pockets of her tunic. “You claimed you were honorable.”
“I am fucking honorable. I pulled you out of a river, didn’t I? Where the hell is this coming from, Clara?”
“You tell me. Is the behavior you demonstrated last night indicative of the tenets of your species? You’ll have to inform me because the only frame of reference I have includes a very small sample size.”
Auburn waves danced around his chin in whips of disbelief as he shook his head. A play of emotions flickered across his heated gaze like the flames of a funeral pyre. “Something happened. This isn’t like you. Did Raff say something after I left last night? His room’s down the hall from yours, isn’t it?” Then he stepped forward with a heat of his own and made to grab her shoulders, but she quickly stepped out of reach. “What did he do to you?” His eyes pleaded for a scrap of something with which to make sense of her reaction, but she was giving him none of it.
“Do you still agree to honor our arrangement?”
“You know I do,” he said thinly.
“Good. Then we’ll continue on as if last night never happened. I’m sure Polina, wherever she is, will be grateful for your continued devotion to your honor.”
The feathered brush of her tunic’s hem against his pant leg as she whirled from him might as well have been the roar of a human freight train. No longer hungry, she stormed away from the direction of the hall and ran out of the keep, toward the closeted patch of forest her wolf needed.
Only when she was fully engulfed by the safety of the familiar blue spruces and mighty oaks did she manage to rip her clothes off and let her wolf take over.
The soul-deep howl of agony that the creature bellowed into the open air was unexpected, yet unavoidable.
Her wolf, it seemed, wasn’t the only part of her that had shifted.
Chapter 20
Bronze had a fucking Black Friday receipt’s worth of items that had done nothing but follow his sluggish ass around for the two days and change that Clara wouldn’t speak to him. On a good day, it would have been hard not to take the spurning personally, but now, on the day the first game was due to take place, it was proving impossible.
Turned out, he had been right. Like the viper he’d pegged her for, the female sure as shit knew just when and how to wound. When she fired her parting shot at him and flung Polina’s name into the chaos of his confusion, it hadn’t just ignited his mental kindling. No, it’d obliterated his thoughts on a cosmic level, sending them to the furthest reaches of his past and present so there was no hope of collecting his sanity again.
