Chapter 4: The Wolf King's Mercy

The iron gate sealed behind me with a grinding of bone on bone, low and wet, a beast locking its jaw shut after the kill.

Cain carried me through three barred gates. My arms looped around his neck, my fingertips pressed to the skin just above the edge of his gland. Scalding. Abnormally hot. An Alpha King's temperature shouldn't run this high. Not unless he was burning through every ounce of willpower to cage something back.

The guard on duty stepped against the wall, head down. His eyes swept over my soaked dress, over the blood still seeping from my knee. His throat bobbed. He dropped his gaze instantly. Didn't ask a single question.

Second gate. The iron grating lifted with a shriek of rusted metal, the sharp tang bleeding into the air.

Third gate. Thick oak planks banded with iron. It swung open on a gust of cold air that carried the chill seeping from the stone walls.

The living room.

Black stone walls. A black leather sofa. Orange flames snapping in the hearth. No rugs. No curtains. No lampshades. Hunting knives lined one wall, their sheaths polished dark, leather cords wrapped around the grips. A steel rack in the corner held two crossbows and a short-handled axe, their blades glinting cold.

The air was freezing. Stone and iron and the burnt-cedar tang drifting from the fire. No one lived here. It was an interrogation chamber that happened to have a couch in it.

He dropped me onto the leather.

My back hit the black sofa. My wet dress rode up, leaving a dark smear of moisture across the surface. The hem flipped high, baring a shocking strip of pale inner thigh above my knee. Wet fabric clung to my skin, blindingly white against the black leather. The impact tore at the wound on my knee, and I sucked a sharp breath through my teeth. Beads of blood rolled down my calf and pooled into a sticky smear around my ankle.

Before I could push myself up, his hand clamped down on my shoulder. Five fingers dug into the hollow of my shoulder blade and pinned me flat with brutal precision.

"Don't move."

Two words. Delivered with the kind of calm that promised very bad things if you disobeyed.

He turned and vanished into another room.

I propped myself up on my elbows. Flames licked the stone hearth, casting flickering orange light across the black leather. My dress had twisted up to mid-thigh, the soaked fabric plastered to my body, outlining my waist, my hip bones, the curve of both legs. The wound on my knee still oozed blood, mixing with the dirty water from the laundry room, congealing into a thin, semi-transparent film on my skin.

He reappeared moments later.

A heavy field medic box in his grip. Olive green, iron-capped corners scarred and dented from years of use, the handle worn smooth. He set it on the coffee table and flipped it open. Then he crouched down in front of me.

An Alpha King. Crouching on the floor.

He pulled out iodine, styptic powder, a roll of gauze. His movements were clean and efficient, like he'd done this a thousand times. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, revealing an old blade scar snaking from the inside of his wrist to the crook of his arm. It had been stitched. The sutures were rough, crooked. Like he'd sewn it himself in front of a mirror.

"I'll do it myself."

I reached for the iodine.

He lifted his gaze to meet mine.

Ice-blue irises. The firelight reflected in them glowed like metal heated to the brink of turning red, no warmth in it. He didn't glare. Didn't frown. Just looked at me. Two chips of ice. And beneath the ice, something burned.

My hand hung in the air. Then I pulled it back.

He lifted the hem of my dress.

His large palm cupped the back of my knee, lifting my whole leg. My heel left the sofa. My leg hooked over the web of his thumb and forefinger, my calf dangling alongside his forearm. My knee was bared to the firelight.

The gash was a jagged little mouth, its edges peeled back to reveal the white fatty layer beneath. The skin around it was red, swollen, hot to the touch. Blood still welled up, slow and steady.

He twisted open the iodine bottle. The sharp, sterile stench punched into my sinuses.

He poured it directly onto the wound.

Ice-cold liquid flooded the raw flesh.

It felt like a dozen needles stabbing in at once.

A strangled groan tore from my throat. The muscles of my inner thigh seized violently. My leg jerked, trying to pull back on pure instinct. The wet dress rode up another inch from my thrashing, baring a new sliver of tender skin at the top of my thigh, instantly prickled with goosebumps from the cold air.

His left hand clamped down, his calloused fingers biting into my flesh. The web of his hand locked over the back of my knee, pinning me to the leather. The force was immense. I could feel my muscle compressing under his grip, my bone aching faintly inside his hold.

His palm was scorching.

The heat of his hand bled through my chilled skin and into the muscle, spreading up along my blood vessels, blazing a trail all the way to the root of my thigh. The rough calluses at the base of his thumb scraped against the tender, thin skin on the inside of my knee, leaving a faint red burn. My leg spasmed in his grip. Muscles pulled taut. My kneecap trembled.

He glanced down at the place where his hand held me. The pale, supple flesh of my thigh bulged on either side of his dark, weather-roughened fingers. Like dough being kneaded.

"Stop squirming."

His voice had dropped a shade lower.

He picked up the tweezers. The sharp tips probed into the wound, closed around a shard of glass. He pulled it out. A wet clink as it hit the metal tray. Probing again. Another piece. And another. My leg jerked in his hand again, and his grip tightened, his thumb pressing deep into the soft hollow behind my knee, leaving a white imprint.

It hurt. But what held my attention was his hand.

He had my knee pinned, refusing to let me move, yet his thumb kept stroking absently along my inner thigh. The rough pad of his finger dragged over that delicate skin, as if soothing me. As if measuring me. The gesture was too intimate. Far too intimate for a Wolf King and the Omega he'd just fished out of a laundry room.

I looked down at him.

His lashes were long, casting small shadows beneath his cheekbones when he looked down. The bridge of his nose was a blade. His lips were pressed flat. His jaw clenched tight with focus, sharp as a freshly honed knife. The firelight danced over his face, cutting it into two halves. One half hard, unyielding planes. The other half a soft shadow cast by his eyelashes.

He was crouched on the floor of this interrogation-chamber living room, cleaning my wound with the proficiency of a field medic.

A Wolf King.

Something was very wrong.

"What are you looking at?" he said.

He didn't look up.

I didn't flinch from his gaze. I tilted my head, letting a lock of wet hair slide off my shoulder and cling to my collarbone. A bead of water rolled down the strand and slipped into my neckline. I stared directly into his ice-blue eyes, and I let a faint, lazy smile curve my lips.

"You. The legendary Wolf King on his knees, tending to me like a lowly servant. It's quite a view."

The tweezers inside my wound gave a violent jerk.

He lifted his head.

Those ice-blue eyes locked onto me. Something contracted in his pupils. The shock of prey suddenly baring its claws. Then a flicker of something far more dangerous. Interest.

He held my gaze. Then he lowered his head and went back to debriding the wound. But this time, his thumb stopped stroking my inner thigh. It pressed down hard into the soft flesh at the back of my knee instead, so hard I could feel my own pulse throbbing under his fingertip. Painful. But mostly, it was the suffocating weight of having a vital spot pinned.

He pulled out the last sliver of glass and tossed it into the tray. A wet clink. Grabbed a square of gauze and dabbed the pus and blood from around the wound. The white gauze bloomed faint red the instant it touched my skin. He tossed it, grabbed a fresh one. Sprinkled on styptic powder, covered it with a pad, secured it with medical tape. One loop. Two loops.

Seamless.

He stood. Snapped the med kit shut.