Filed to story: My Kidnapper Is the Wolf King
When clouds gather in the afternoon and the sky opens up, it does little to heighten my mood. I bring my horse beside Philip, irritated. “Are you sure you’re going the right way?”
“Yes.”
“How can you bear north when we cannot even see the sun? Callum said we should have reached a forest by now, at which point, we are to turn west.” I taste the rain, and my cloak is starting to stick to my body.
“If you wish to take the lead, be my guest, little sister.” His red hair is flat, and rain rolls over his mouth, but while I shiver, he seems at ease. “I didn’t ask to become bodyguard to your spoiled arse.”
“Must you be so constantly unpleasant?”
“Must you?”
I withhold my snarl, and turn my attention to the towering mountains, and the many shades of green and grey that surround us. Not for the first time since we set off, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing by traveling with him. I can barely stand his company.
By nightfall, I’m convinced we’re lost, yet Philip seems triumphant when a woodland comes into view.
“There, see? The forest we were looking for. We’ll make camp until dawn,” he says, heading into the tall trees.
I follow, because it’s better than roaming the mountains in the dark searching for the actual forest we were supposed to turn west at-I’m sure this is not it. The sound of the rain softens when I lead Heather beneath the evergreen canopy, and there is immediate relief from the cold wind.
Philip leads us to a clearing. We both dismount, and he orders me to light a fire while he waters the horses at a nearby stream, the sounds of which fill the pine-scented air.
I’m sitting on a log, warming my hands by the crackling flames, by the time he returns. He sits on a boulder opposite, and clasps his hands between his long legs. I pass him some food. We eat in silence. We finish. He sharpens his sword. I wring out my hair, and re-braid it.
A stubborn part of me wants to maintain the silence, to suppress all my questions because I don’t want him to get the incorrect impression that I care about anything that happens to him. My curiosity outweighs it. His past is my past. I need to know.
“Are you going to tell me what happened to you?” I ask.
“That depends.”
“On?”
“Whether or not you ask me nicely.”
I glower at him over the crackling flames. “Oh please
Philip, please tell me what happened to you. Because I really care.”
“Sarcasm is quite unbecoming of you, little sister.” He shrugs, then sheaths his sword. He props it against the boulder. “What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know. Everything. Did you know mother was a wolf? When did you get bitten? Was it before you left the palace, or after?”
“Before.”
Shock slams through me, and I try to pull back my reaction so he can’t see my hurt. If it happened before he left, he must have known about Mother-about me
-and never told me. I should expect no more from him, yet he’s my family. His expression softens.
“I was not pleasant to you, growing up. I know that,” he says. “In my defense, I didn’t like you very much.”
My hurt turns into irritation, and my fingernails dig into my palms. “Oh, well that’s okay then.” A thick silence extends between us and I can’t stop the question that has plagued me for years from erupting. “Why?”
“I was jealous, I suppose.”
“Jealous? Of what?”
He sighs dramatically. “I don’t know. You spent your days swanning around the palace, dressing in fine clothes, preening, playing music, watching plays, embroidering. All the while, I had to train to go to war. I never wanted to learn to kill humans or Wolves. I certainly did not want to be up at dawn every morning, failing to impress our father, constantly being told what a disappointment I was.” He shrugs. “Before she died, you were always Mother’s favorite child, and I was Father’s. When Father sent me to war, it was to ‘toughen me up’ because he believed I was too soft. I didn’t see what was wrong with being soft. It always seemed to me that you got the better part of it all.”
I had never thought of it this way, yet I release a bitter laugh. “I didn’t, Philip. I was powerless. You have no idea what it was like to be a woman in that situation. I had no voice, whereas you always did. You got to escape it. Do you know what my escape was? I was supposed to marry Sebastian.”
He looks up at the tree boughs overhead-as if he can’t quite meet my gaze.
“I heard about that.” He runs a hand over his mouth. “Since I met Ingrid in the Snowlands. . . I realize some of my perceptions may have been incorrect. I’m just saying, that’s how I felt at the time. And, alongside my envy, there was a hunger growing within me that I couldn’t understand. I tried to drown it out with drink, and fill it with women and men, and appease it by picking fights. . . yet I was never sated. You always seemed like you were at peace-it never occurred to me that you may be going through the same thing and were more adept at hiding it than me.”
“You could sense you were a wolf?”
“I began to suspect it just before Mother died, yet I didn’t ask her. I was afraid, I think. Of the discovery, of the answers, of her outing me to Father. When she passed, I started looking into Wolves. I read everything I could get my hands on in the library. If anyone saw me, I told them I was researching my enemy, so I’d know how to kill them better. One day, one of the guards saw me. He told me there were Wolves in the dungeons beneath the palace, if I wanted to see one up close.”
Something coils, serpent-like, around my insides. Philip cocks his head to one side. “What?”
“Is that where you met Blake?” I ask. My voice is barely audible over the rain pattering on the evergreen canopy and the stream nearby.
“I’d seen him around, but that was the first time we spoke. One night, my curiosity got the better of me. I went to see what lay in the depths of our home. There he was.”
You’re looking better than the last time I saw you.
Philip had said that to Blake when we were at Madadh-allaidh. “He’d been tortured.”
“Yes. So you can imagine how my fear of discovery grew, on finding him and the other prisoners down there.”
I shake my head, disgust writing within. “You did nothing.”
“Would you have done differently, little sister?”
“I. . .” I shake my head. I like to think that I would have tried to help, but perhaps that is fanciful thinking. Perhaps I’m as much a coward as my brother. “I don’t know, Philip.”
“I tried to distance myself from what I’d seen. I tried not to think about it. It haunted me, though. It would be my fate if Father ever discovered what I was. Honestly, it had never occurred to me that you would share the same affliction, the same fate. I was too wrapped up in myself. The only saving grace was that I knew I was a half-wolf, and I had not yet been bitten.”
“What changed?”
“The night of the full moon, I felt. . . restless. I snuck out to the docks, and drank so much I could barely stand. When I returned to the palace. . .” He shakes his head. “I was overtaken by a sick curiosity. I wanted to know what they looked like when they transformed.”
“You went back to the dungeons.”
A sorrowful look flickers across his face. “There were five of them in the cells. I was barely conscious, I was so drunk. I taunted a couple of them through the bars. I was bitten. I deserved it, I suppose.”
“Blake said he knew the wolf who bit you.”
“Yes. He’s at Madadh-allaidh now.”
My eyebrows raise. “Who?”
He snaps his gloved fingers, as if he’s searching for the name. “The man with the dreadlocks and the southern accent.”
“Jack?”
“Yes, that’s right. Jack.”
Shock blooms inside me. I had never asked how Blake met his right-hand man, but I didn’t expect them to both have been prisoners within my father’s palace. Darkness spreads inside me as something else occurs to me. “Jack is part of Blake’s clan. That makes Blake your alpha.”
The thought that Blake is playing a bigger game intensifies. It can’t be a coincidence that he has managed to become alpha to both the prince and the princess of the kingdom that entrapped him. As much as I protest that Blake is not my alpha, his bite still marks my shoulder.
Philip shrugs. “He certainly thinks he is. He tried to use the Àithne on me when he had me in the infirmary.”
“It didn’t work?”
He shakes his head. “No. Although I let him think it did.”