The Alpha King and His Virgin Bride novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Skin

Linnea walks into the King's bedroom uninvited and brings him back, he tells her he's decided to refuse her and die, she tells him he doesn't get to decide what she risks, and Ragna appears to announce the council's plan: the human dies on the Blood Moon and the King marries Ragna.

Tove met me at the gate in her bare feet and ran me up three flights of stairs.

The bedroom door at the top was hanging off one hinge.

"He did that," she panted. "Trying to get outside. He says he wants to die under the sky."

"Dramatic," I said, and went in.

A bed, a cold stone fireplace, a wall of windows black with the lake.

Vidar was on the floor beside the bed.

He was on his side, curled around himself, shaking so hard his teeth clicked.

Frost had climbed his arms to the elbows.

I could see my breath.

I knelt and touched his neck.

Nothing for a long second.

Then one slow, sullen beat.

"Get his shirt off," I told Tove.

"He's not wearing one."

He wasn't.

He was in a pair of gray sweatpants and nothing else, and his skin was the color of skim milk.

I pulled off my own jacket.

Then, after a second's thought, my fleece.

I lay down on the floor beside him in my undershirt, and I put both my hands flat on his bare chest.

It was grabbing a fence post in January.

The cold went into my palms and straight up to my elbows.

I set my teeth and held on.

His heartbeat faltered under my hand.

Then it caught.

It beat once, twice, then ran on hard and steady, and heat came pouring up out of him.

It was so fast I gasped.

The gray lines on his arms pulled back.

He groaned and rolled toward me without opening his eyes.

One arm came around my waist and hauled me in against him.

He buried his face in my hair and breathed in.

"Okay," Tove said from the doorway. "I'm going to go stand in the hall. For a while. Forever."

The door scraped on its one hinge.

I lay very still.

His chest was hot under my hands now.

His breath was hot on my neck.

His heart was pounding, and so was mine, and I was aware of every single place he touched me.

"Vidar," I said.

He went rigid.

His eyes opened.

Gold, then gray.

He looked down at me, pinned against his chest on his own bedroom floor, and his jaw locked.

"I told her not to call you."

"She ignored you. Good for her."

He let go of me and sat up fast, scrubbing a hand over his face.

I sat up and tugged my undershirt down, and he looked at the wall very hard.

"How long was I gone?"

"Your heart was doing about six beats a minute when I got here."

"You shouldn't be here."

"You keep saying that. Then you keep almost dying."

He laughed, once, without any humor in it.

Then he got up and pulled a sweater off the end of the bed and threw it at me.

"Put that on. You're freezing."

"Whose fault is that?"

"Mine." He sat down on the edge of the bed. "All of it is mine."

The sweater smelled like cedar and him.

I pulled it on.

It came to my knees.

He watched me do it and then looked away again.

"My mother told you," he said.

"She did. I'm still waiting for the part that makes sense."

"It doesn't make sense. It's a curse."

"Then explain the curse."

He was quiet so long I thought he wouldn't.

"My father had an older brother," he said. "He was King before my father. In 1990 he met his mate. A girl from your town."

"From Gull Harbor?"

"They're always from Gull Harbor." He rubbed his wrist, where the frost had been. "He refused her. He said no wolf of his blood would take a human. He died on the night of his thirtieth birthday, at moonset, in the courtyard below this window. The whole pack watched."

The wind moved against the glass.

"Three years later my father met his," Vidar said. "Another girl from Gull Harbor. Twenty years old. He took her. He married her here, under the moon, and he marked her."

"Marked her?"

He touched the place where his neck met his shoulder.

"She was dead before dawn."

I felt that one in my stomach.

"I'm not doing that to you," he said.

"So what are you doing?"

"Nothing." He looked at me then, straight on. "I've decided. I refuse you. In twenty-seven days I turn thirty, and the moon goes red, and that's the end of it. You go home. You live."

"You've decided."

"Yes."

"For me."

"For both of us."

I stood up in his enormous sweater.

"You don't get to decide what I risk," I said. "Nobody's decided anything for me since I was seventeen. You don't get to start."

He stared at me.

Something moved in his face that wasn't anger.

"You've known me for one day," he said quietly.

"And I've had my hands on your heart twice."

He opened his mouth.

A woman's laugh came from the broken doorway.

She was tall, with platinum hair and red lipstick, in a long white cashmere coat.

She leaned against the door frame.

"Ragna," Vidar said, and his voice went flat.

"Don't get up." She smiled at me. "The council met tonight, Vidar. They've set it."

"Set what?"

"Your wedding. You take the human on the Blood Moon. She dies, you live." Her ice-blue eyes slid to me. "And at the winter moon you marry me."

Vidar was on his feet.

She ignored him.

She looked at me in his sweater, from my socks to my braid.

"Don't worry, sweetheart," Ragna said. "They say it's quick."

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