Chapter 8: Her Wolf Wants

By evening my skin hurt.

It was a fever without a fever, a prickling heat that ran up the backs of my legs and settled low in my belly.

I took a cold shower and it did nothing.

All afternoon I had thought about the sentry, gone to the coast, and the clinic records somebody had stolen.

Torin had put two Guards on Imogen's door, and sent a rider after the sentry.

Nothing had come back yet.

Imogen had warned me in the afternoon, standing in my sitting room with her sleeves rolled and her bruise darkening.

"A woken wolf burns for three nights," she'd said. "The body is rebuilding itself, and it wants what it wants. It's not shameful."

"And the other thing?"

"For the other thing, you wait two weeks. Nothing inside you, Willa. Not until I've said so. You're not mended."

"I know."

"Do you?" She'd looked at me over her glasses. "Because I've seen that Captain look at you."

I had pretended not to understand.

Now it was midnight, and I stood barefoot in the corridor in a thin nightdress with my pulse in my ears.

At the end of the hall, a light was on under his door.

I walked to it.

I knocked once.

Torin opened it so fast that I knew he had been standing right behind it.

He was in trousers and nothing else.

I had not known there would be so much of him.

He was lean and long, with a white scar across his ribs and another curving over one shoulder, and the lamp behind him lit the edges of every muscle.

His eyes dropped over me, and came up again, and he gripped the door frame so hard the wood creaked.

"It's the heat," he said roughly. "It'll pass. Go back to your rooms and lock your door. I'll sit in the hall. I'll stand all night if you want."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Rejected His Luna. She Was the Lycan Princess. from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.