The Lion King's Reluctant Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Thirty-Nine Nights
For the thirty-ninth night the lion king drops a buck on the exiled wolf's bed, and when the wolf shoves it out the cave door before the king's whole hunt, the king smiles and gives him until dusk.
The lion king had put another dead buck on Jory's bed.
It was a fat roan buck with its throat opened clean, and it was still warm.
Lucan Sunmere sat on the cave floor beside it like a man arriving at his own table.
"Eat," he said.
Jory stood in the cave mouth with an armload of firewood and counted to ten.
"That's my bed," he said.
"It is a good bed."
"It's a pile of dry grass and one hide. Now it's got a deer on it."
Lucan looked at the deer and then at Jory, and his amber eyes were very pleased.
"It is very fresh," he said.
Jory set the wood down by the fire pit, because he was not stupid enough to throw it at a king.
Lucan was the biggest man he had ever seen.
His gold-brown hair was tied back at the nape and a pale scar split his left eyebrow.
His chest was bare under a fur mantle.
He had walked into this cave nine times in twenty-six days without once being asked.
Jory had woken here twenty-six days ago with a fever, a half-healed bite across his left shoulder, and a stranger's body.
The wolf who had lived in it was gone, and nobody had explained where.
Jory had spent eleven years in the Ash, a world that had burned down to bone and rat meat.
He had counted every ration since he was eighteen.
Thirty-nine kills had been left at this door, one for every night.
"Are you fattening me up?" he asked.
"No."
"Then what do you want?"
Lucan stood, and the cave got smaller.
He crossed the floor in three steps and stopped close enough that Jory felt the heat coming off him.
Then he lowered his head and breathed in at the side of Jory's throat.
It was slow and thorough, and it went on a moment too long.
"You smell of smoke and my meat," Lucan said into his skin.
Jory's pulse went up so hard he could hear it.
A large hand closed around his wrist, and a thumb settled over the beat.
"Your heart is running," Lucan said.
"You're standing in my doorway."
"You are standing in my grass."
"This is Ironbark land," Jory said.
"This is the border," Lucan said, "and you know it."
Jory did not.
He knew nothing about the border, or about whatever this was.
He only knew that his face had gone hot and his knees were behaving badly.
He did not like either of those facts.
He pulled his wrist free.
Lucan let him, and that was somehow worse.
"Tomorrow is the fortieth night, wolf," Lucan said.
"What happens on the fortieth night?"
Lucan went very still.
"You are asking me that."
"I'm asking."
"You have eaten every gift I laid at this door," Lucan said slowly. "You know what it means."
"It means I was hungry."
Something moved behind the king's eyes, and it was not a good something.
Jory looked past him out of the cave.
There were people in the grass below the slope.
Five or six of them, men and women with spears and hide wraps, sitting in a patient half circle.
A tall woman with a tawny braid stood with her arms folded and her face set.
He had thought they were hunters passing by.
They had been there every night.
They had been watching him eat.
In the Ash, nobody gave you a whole animal for nothing.
In the Ash, a gift was a debt, and the debt came due in the dark.
Jory had survived eleven years by never owing anyone a thing.
He stepped past the king, got both hands under the buck's hind legs, and heaved.
It was heavy, but the new body was stronger than he was used to.
The carcass went out of the cave in one long slide.
He dragged it down the slope in front of the whole hunt and dropped it in the grass at the tall woman's feet.
"Take it back," he said. "I don't owe anybody a deer."
Nobody breathed.
The woman with the braid closed her eyes for a moment. She had plainly been expecting this.
Behind him, Lucan came out of the cave at an unhurried walk.
Jory turned, ready for the claws.
The lion king was smiling.
It was the first time Jory had seen him do it, and it changed his whole face.
"Say it again," Lucan said. "Louder. So they all hear it."
"I don't want your deer."
A low sound ran through the half circle, shocked and delighted at once.
Lucan walked down the slope until he stood chest to chest with Jory, and then he tipped Jory's chin up with two fingers.
"Then we do it the old way," he said. "The Sun Stone. Dusk."
His thumb brushed the corner of Jory's jaw.
"Come and say no to my face, wolf, with my whole pride watching."
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