The War God Alpha's Arranged Bride novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Bar on the Door

She opens the door he barred, talks him out of a nightmare with his claws in the bedpost, and he asks her to come back.

The bar dropped at midnight, and then the noises began.

First it was only breathing, harsh and fast, on the other side of two stone walls.

Then something heavy hit the floor, and the whole corridor rang.

I was out of bed before I thought about it, with a candle in one hand and my glasses crooked on my nose.

The rumors said he had killed two servants.

I stood in the hall in my nightdress and told myself that two servants were not a reason to stay.

Wood splintered.

Then a sound came through the door at the end of the hall that I had heard once before, on a night in my girlhood when a hurt wolf had crawled into our barn.

It was a man trying not to scream.

I put my hand on the door.

It was bolted from the inside, with a heavy iron bar that must have taken two men to lift.

"Torin," I said.

The noise stopped.

"Torin Askeland. It's Ylva. I'm not going away."

"Leave," he said, and his voice was nothing like the one from the courtyard.

It was lower and rougher.

"Go back to your room."

"Is anyone hurt?"

"Only me. Go."

"Then open the door."

"I can't."

I took a breath.

I thought about the clause, and about free will, and about the fact that he had said nothing here was owed, not even my company.

"I'm standing in my nightdress in a stone corridor with a candle," I said.

"I'll stand here until my feet freeze."

"Or you can lift the bar."

For a long moment there was nothing.

Then the bar scraped up, slowly, and the door swung open.

He was kneeling beside the bed.

His shirt was gone, and his chest and arms were slick with sweat and covered in old white scars.

His hands had changed.

The fingers were thick and tipped with black claws as long as my thumb, and they were sunk deep into the wooden bedpost, which had split down the middle.

His eyes were glowing gold, with no human white left in them at all.

I should have run.

My legs didn't move.

"Don't come closer," he said hoarsely. "I don't always know who I am when it starts."

"You know my name."

"I know your voice."

"Then listen to it."

I put the candle down on the table, because my hand was shaking now that I could see it.

I came across the room slowly, the way I would cross a barn to a hurt animal.

"I counted Lowmere's winter stores this morning before the feast," I said.

"Four hundred and twelve sacks of barley."

"Two hundred and six of oats."

"Sixty barrels of salted fish."

He was looking at me, breathing hard.

"The barley was mostly rotten at the bottom."

"Gudrun never checked."

"I did, because somebody had to, and nobody thanked me for the extra eleven sacks I saved."

"Why," he said, "are you telling me this?"

"Because I don't know what else to say, and numbers help me when I'm afraid."

His chest rose and fell.

I knelt on the floor in front of him, close enough to feel the heat coming off his skin.

The claws had not moved.

"Four hundred and twelve," I said again, softly. "Two hundred and six."

Slowly, very slowly, I reached out and laid my hand over his.

The back of it was hot and rough with scar tissue.

It twitched under my palm.

"Two hundred and six," Torin said.

The claws drew back, one at a time, with a faint wet sound, until his fingers were fingers again.

The bedpost sagged.

His head dropped, and for a while we stayed like that, kneeling on the stone floor, my hand over his.

"I can't sleep with the door open," he said eventually.

His voice was almost normal again.

"When it comes, it comes with claws."

"I barred it so I couldn't walk out and hurt anyone."

"You didn't kill two servants."

"I never killed anyone in this keep. The servants left because they were afraid of a rumor, and I let them go."

"That's stupid," I said.

He looked up, startled.

"If you're going to be afraid of yourself, you should at least let someone sit with you," I said. "It's cold, and you're shaking."

"I am not."

"Torin."

He glanced down at his own hand, still trembling under mine, and a sound came out of him that might have been the start of a laugh.

I stayed until the shaking stopped, and then until his eyes had gone back to gold with the white showing around them.

When I stood, my knees cracked.

"Good night, my lord," I said.

His hand closed gently around my wrist.

It was not hard.

He could have broken the bone with two fingers, and he held me.

"Come back tomorrow," Torin said quietly.

Then, so low I almost missed it, he added, "Please."

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