Wrong Bond: Your Omega Is Driving Me Crazy novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Terms

Linden won't answer, and he and Ivor bargain on the gold: Linden runs the breadless keep, Ivor keeps him, and nobody lies; at dawn Osric's riders blow their horns at the gate.

Linden didn't answer him.

He stared up at the ceiling, at the black rock and the old soot stains, and kept his mouth shut.

"That's not an answer," Ivor said.

"No. It isn't."

Ivor sat back on his heels in the gold.

Coins slid down around his boots.

"Then here's mine," he said. "Get up, dry off and leave in the morning."

"I can't."

"You walked in. You can walk out."

"I claimed the Hoard Law."

"I heard." Ivor picked a coin out of Linden's hair and put it back on its pile. "You're the first one to try it in two hundred years. Congratulations. It doesn't work if I don't accept you."

Linden sat up so fast his head swam.

Nobody tells you that part in the stories.

"Then accept me."

"Why would I?"

Linden looked around the hall.

A thousand candles' worth of gold, and three candles burning.

"When did you last eat bread?" he asked.

Ivor opened his mouth and shut it.

"Autumn," he said. "Maybe."

"Who cooks for you?"

"There's a cook."

"What does she cook?"

"Porridge." Ivor frowned. "When there are oats."

"And when there aren't?"

"I go out and eat a goat."

"Raw?"

"I'm a dragon."

"You're a man sitting on a fortune who eats raw goat in the dark." Linden pulled his wet hair off his face. "I can run a keep. I ran Blackmere's kitchens for three years. I can keep ledgers, I can bake, I can set a broken bone. I'll have this place warm and fed in a week."

"I like it cold."

"Nobody likes it cold."

Ivor stared at him with those slit gold eyes.

Linden stared back, dripping on the crown.

Then something happened to Ivor's face that Linden didn't expect.

One corner of his mouth went up.

"How much bread?" he said.

"As much as you want."

"And what do you want?"

"To stay. To be yours under the law, so no wolf can drag me out."

"For how long?"

"Until the spring Moon Court." Linden's voice wobbled and he made it stop. "After that, it won't matter either way."

Ivor didn't ask what he meant.

He looked at the back of Linden's neck instead.

He could smell the mark. Everyone could.

"Terms," Ivor said, and sat down on the gold across from Linden like they were two merchants at a fair.

He held up one long finger.

"You don't touch the gold."

"I need money for flour."

"One coin a week."

"Five."

"Two."

"Four, and I'll make you honey cakes."

Ivor considered that for a long moment.

"Three," he said. "And the cakes."

"Done."

He held up a second finger.

"My one real rule. You never lie to me. Not once. I can smell it, and I won't keep a liar under my roof."

Linden's heart thumped.

"Then I'll tell you now," he said. "I won't tell you who has my ninth tail. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. But I won't lie about it."

Ivor breathed in.

Whatever he smelled on Linden, it made him tilt his head.

"That's true," he said quietly. "Fine. Keep your secret."

He stood and held out his hand.

Linden took it.

Ivor's palm was hot as a hearthstone.

"Accepted," Ivor said. "You're mine under the law, little fox. Gods help us both."

Then he shrugged off his black velvet coat and dropped it over Linden's shoulders.

It came down past Linden's knees and smelled of smoke and old books.

"You're shaking," Ivor said. "Treasure doesn't shake either."

He took Linden to the kitchen.

There was one old woman in it, sitting by a small fire and mending a sock.

She looked at Linden, then at the coat, then at Ivor.

"He's brought a person," she said. "Finally."

"He brought himself," Ivor said. "He's treasure."

"Is he." She got up and felt Linden's forehead with a dry hand. "Treasure's got a fever."

A man came in from the yard with snow on his shoulders.

He had one arm, and he was carrying a lantern in it.

"There's a Blackmere stallion going down past the tree line with no rider," he said. "I thought somebody'd died."

"Nearly," the cook said.

The stableman looked Linden over.

"White fox," he said. "Wolf mark. Bad business."

"He's staying," Ivor said.

They both turned and looked at him.

"What?" Ivor said. "He bakes."

The cook gave Linden the last of the oats.

He made a pot of porridge with salt and the end of a jar of honey she'd been hiding.

Ivor ate three bowls standing up.

The stableman told Linden he'd come up the mountain ten years ago with the Winter Court's army.

"He burned us back to the snow line," he said. "I lost the arm in the retreat. Fell in a ravine."

"And you came back here?"

"He's the one who climbed down and pulled me out."

Ivor scowled into his bowl.

"Nobody asked you to tell that," he said.

That was the night Linden learned that the most terrifying Alpha in the Northmark kept strays.

Ivor gave him a room off the hoard-hall with a bed nobody had slept in for years.

For the first time in three years, nobody in the house wanted Linden gone.

He slept.

He woke in the grey before dawn to a sound that went straight through his bones.

Hunting horns.

Wolf horns, three long blasts, right below the gate.

Then a voice he knew, one of Osric's riders, shouting up at the rock.

"Send out the runaway omega, dragon! The Alpha of Blackmere wants his property back!"

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