Chapter Eighteen: Siren

VARUL

I hardly waited to watch her enter her tent before I turned and walked straight back into the forest.

Not because I had somewhere to be.

Not because there was a patrol to oversee.

Because if I stood outside that tent for another minute, I was going to do something monumentally stupid.

Like stalking into her tent and claiming her the way Siren was yelling at me to.

Hard.

Her dainty wrists pinned above her head with one of my calloused hands.

Those gorgeous tits bouncing with each thrust while I—

"Fuck!" I muttered into the black sky.

The forest swallowed me whole. Moonlight filtered through ancient pines, silvering the ground beneath my boots.

I welcomed the cold. It did absolutely fuck all to help the tent growing in my pants.

Not that the cold had ever had any effect on me anyway.

"Pathetic."

The voice echoed through my head. I clenched my jaw. Speaking of the bastard.

Siren.

My wolf.

My curse.

My constant companion.

My greatest headache.

I gritted my teeth. "Shut up."

"You know you caused this for us, yes?" he drawled like a fool, clearly entertained by my predicament. "She was naked. Willing. Ours for the taking."

"Shut. The fuck. Up."

But because Siren existed to annoy the living fuck out of me, he paid me no mind.

"Even last night. She was willing."

I pinched the bridge of my nose, wishing for not the first time since yesterday that I could gag the bastard.

In my present state, I did not need to be reminded of her whimpers and moans as she came in that chair, so responsive to the barest of touches.

"You kissed her. She tasted so fucking good."

A muscle ticked in my jaw. I settled on ignoring him.

"You should have mated her. Thinking of that, you would have mated her if that Beta of ours had not—"

"Darren's timing was perfect. It stopped us from doing something we would both regret later," I clipped.

"We? Who exactly is this 'we' you speak of, Varul? I trust you did not include me in this mysterious group, because I never regret a thing we have done."

"Bastard."

Siren's laughter rolled through my mind.

Deep.

Mocking.

"Yes, yes. That I agree with. We are both bastards," he quipped.

"You know, I still do not understand your need to wait. You either mate or not. Waiting until we return home makes no sense."

"She is a sheltered princess of a noble South ruling house, which, going by all Southern standards, means she must be a virgin."

"And?"

I rolled my eyes and sighed. "We discussed this yesterday. I will not have her too sore to ride."

Siren tutted, but went quiet for a few moments.

"You know—"

I groaned.

"—We could have spent an extra week at Windsmoor Castle if the state of her riding health is of utmost importance to you, you chivalrous fool. You rejected Queen Astrid's offer of hospitality!"

"And suffer a week of South's heat? The Pack will die of boredom if they had to rein in their wolves for a week. You would never have let me hear the end of it if I had to deny you your chances of running. So, shut the fuck up, you hypocrite."

"Well. Fair," he mumbled reluctantly, but I was not done calling him out.

"You caused all these, running down muddy paths like an insufferable brat because I have refused to fuck my bride until we get back home. If you had not done so, I would not have needed to take a bath in that blasted pool."

His reply was a long, mocking laugh.

Siren had picked up the nasty habit since my wedding night, when I had walked out after making her come. After yelling at me for what seemed like hours on end, he asked me to let him loose to run so he could "let out some fucking tension".

And so I had.

And I had ended up needing a serious bath after shifting back.

Like a fool, tonight, I had also given in to his pleas to let him out for a run. The bastard had made himself even muddier. Hence, my visit to the pool.

I had sensed when she left her tent and wandered into the forest. A part of me wondered what she was thinking, wandering in the dark.

Another part of me—championed by Siren, I knew—was pleased to have her alone in the dark. I had given in to my less rational thoughts, wanting to find out if she tasted as sweet as she looked. That body... those tits...

I rubbed a hand across my face.

Gods.

Two days.

It had been two days.

Two fucking days.

And somehow the woman had managed to turn my life into chaos, causing my usually neat, levelheaded wolf to become an impulsive brat who now enjoyed wading in mud for the sole reason of spiting me because I had refused to claim her.

The first time I saw her was yesterday morning. The morning of our wedding. I had been standing in the western courtyard of her castle, and she had been peeking at me from her high windows.

Preparations for the wedding had been underway since dawn. I remembered being irritated.

No. Beyond irritated.

I'd had to make my pack ride a day and a half's journey to the South.

One thing about the werewolves of the North was that we loathed the climate of the South, and we avoided it as much as we could. But being present at the wedding was non-negotiable.

Queen Astrid and I rarely ever saw eye-to-eye, but we had mutual respect for each other. She was more willful than half the noblemen I usually encountered at court, if not colder.

And so, when she had sent a missive to Pillak towers insisting that the wedding with her daughter must take place in Windmoor Castle, I respected it.

*

The tale of the entire realm was one of bloodbaths, gorged eyes, and torn limbs. A war as old as time itself. Werewolves versus humans.

Our ancestors believed that we were of higher stock than the humans, and hence we had to exercise our dominance and rule over them. The humans refused to be our servants. Both worlds clashed endlessly. Innocent lives were lost. Babes were killed.

Eventually, both sides grew tired of the fighting.

The North needed peace.

The South needed peace.

But neither side trusted the other enough to maintain it because the truce had been broken so many times in the past.

So the kingdoms had chosen the oldest solution known to man:

Marriage.

The intermarriage truce ran for centuries until my father, Kanaan, became Alpha.

He had unseated the previous Alpha through a coup and spearheaded an uprising of that old ideal: werewolves were superior to humans.

He broke the truce and refused to marry a human. He had thought it beneath him, a purebred wolf marrying a "weak" human.

So, he had married my mother instead, Ingrid, a purebred from one of the ruling houses in the North.

In the years that followed, the peace dissolved by inches until the border was a wound that wouldn't close.

The deaths were mounting on both sides, and the council was divided. Kanaan ruled with iron fists.

As a boy, I remember being on the offensive end of those fists.

Kanaan considered it a favor to me. He needed me to "toughen up". He expected me to be fucking grateful.

My mother mostly turned a blind eye. He used his iron fists on her, too.

She was a fucking doormat who had been too scared to stand up to him, even when he was hitting her son.

And when, finally, she had died at his hands one night, I did not feel pity or pain.

All I had felt was pure rage. And fucking unadulterated hate.

Meanwhile, the South was arming, and, soon, everything Kanaan had called strength turned out to look remarkably like ruin.

I had fixed it. The way I fixed most things. With violence.

And an alliance with the South. There were still werewolves in the North who despised me for this, but I could not care less.

I remembered the blood on the floor of the council chamber. The way my father had looked at me at the end, not with hate, which I had expected, but with something worse. Something even more sickening: respect.

He had seemed proud of me. Like he had seen, finally, what he had built.

*

I swallowed bile as I shut the memory down.

Inside me, I could feel Siren retreat. He always seemed to lose his steam in the face of these memories.

The marriage between Windmoor, the ruling house of the South, and Pillak, the ruling house of the North, was a union forged purely in politics.

It was practical.

Necessary.

Expected.

I had accepted it because I had pledged an oath to the South, and I was a man of my word. Nothing more.

Then I had seen her through that window, and all thoughts of duty maddenly took a halt.

Not because she was beautiful.

Though she was.

Gods, she was.

The stories I had heard failed to do her justice. Hair almost as white as snow. Eyes as green as obsidian. Full lips as red as scarlett.

But beauty was not what had struck me.

It was something deeper.

A calling of mates.

How was that even possible between a human and a purebred?

Siren had immediately become insufferable.

"Her."

"No."

"Her."

"No, down, boy."

"Her."

"Absolutely fucking not. Down."

Then came the ceremony, and every reckless thing that came out of her mouth during the vows. She was a Southern disaster, a blast of fresh wintery air in the face of the stifling uptightness of every Southern noble that was present at the wedding.

Siren was delighted.

She was nothing like the timidity I had expected of a sheltered Southern princess. Given the stories the realm pedaled about me, I had expected a frightful bride who would only be useful for breeding.

But what I got instead was a princess with a sharp tongue and a mischievous glint in her eyes. She was stubborn. Full of life.

There was something else about her, but I could not place a finger on it. Her scent was different from anything I had ever known. Rare.

She was dangerous, both to mine and Siren's sanity.

But her danger called to me. Her soft moans and sweet whimpers. I wanted to explore them all.

I wanted to put that sweet, sharp mouth of hers to better use around my cock.

I wanted to eat her cunt so many times until she passed out from pleasure.

I wanted to bend that body of hers in so many positions and hear her cry out my name in pleasure.

I wanted to claim her. Body and soul. Until there was no doubt in her mind that she was mine.

I was serious about what I had told her on our wedding night:

I really was going to enjoy playing with her.

Inside me, Siren purred.

"Good thing 'home' is only a half-day's journey away."

If Siren had his way, she would not survive the first night there untouched.