Blood smells like rusted iron, but a werewolf's blood carries the sharp bite of pine and winter static. For twenty years, Bridget scrubbed that scent from the stone floors of the high keep. She kept her eyes down, her teeth blunt, passing as a frail human orphan. She locked her beast away in the dark, certain the cage of her ribs was unbreakable.
The lye soap had eaten the top layer of skin off Bridget's hands by her tenth winter. By her twenty-fifth, her fingers looked like they belonged to a corpse — red raw and perpetually cracked. It was a necessary pain. The harsh chemical burn of the lye masked the faint lingering scent of petrichor and wild mint that seeped from her pores when she sweated. In the stone halls of Highrove, a stray scent meant death.
Highrove was a fortress built on the bones of conquered packs. It was a brutal, towering monolith of dark granite perched on a cliff that chewed on the northern winds. Humans lived in the lower rings, serving as laborers, smiths, and scullery maids. The lycans took the upper keep. They were the lords, the knights, the absolute rulers of the realm. A human was property. But an unregistered wolf, a rogue living within the castle walls, was a trophy waiting to be skinned.
Bridget wrung out a heavy linen tunic over the wooden wash bucket. The freezing water bit into her joints. She welcomed the ache. Physical discomfort in her human form kept the beast distracted. Deep inside her chest, behind the cage of her ribs, the wolf paced. It didn't sleep. It hadn't slept in two decades. It just walked a relentless, maddening circle in the dark of her mind, dragging its claws against her sanity.
Let us out. It rumbled, a phantom vibration in her throat.
Bridget swallowed it down with a mouthful of cold air. No.
She had been five years old when her father's pack was slaughtered by the previous king. She remembered the fire, the screaming, the smell of singed fur. Her mother had shoved her into a root cellar, smearing the child's face with mashed wolfsbane and pig's blood.
"You are human," her mother had whispered, her eyes glowing yellow in the dark. "If you shift, you die. If you bare your teeth, you die. Hide the wolf, Bridget. Swallow her whole."
She had obeyed. For twenty years she swallowed the wolf. Every full moon was an exercise in pure agony. While the recognized pack howled from the battlements, running free in the designated hunting woods, Bridget curled into a ball on the dirt floor of her cramped quarters. Her bones would soften, attempting to lengthen and snap into a canine frame. She would bite down on a leather strap until her gums bled, forcing her body to remain human through sheer stubborn terror.
Over the years, the suppressed shifts had taken a toll. She suffered from chronic migraines. Her hearing was agonizingly sharp. Sometimes in the dead of winter, her body ran a fever so high her skin steamed in the courtyard.
"You're scrubbing a hole through that tunic, girl."
Bridget blinked, breaking her trance. Greta, the head laundress, dumped another basket of bloodstained clothes beside her. Greta was human, entirely blind in her left eye, and moved with the slow, deliberate shuffle of a woman who had survived four different kings.
"Sorry," Bridget murmured. She kept her voice raspy, soft, unassuming.
"Don't apologize, just work faster," Greta grunted. "The hunting party returns by nightfall. The king's men will be wanting hot baths and clean linens, and they don't take kindly to waiting."
Bridget's heart kicked off a heavy, syncopated rhythm. The king. King Garrick. He had taken the throne five years ago after his father, the man who slaughtered Bridget's family, died of a wasting sickness. Garrick was a different breed of brutal. Where his father was a tyrant who killed for pleasure, Garrick was a tactician who killed for peace. He had spent his entire reign on the borders, crushing rebellions and uniting the fractured northern territories with an iron fist. He rarely stayed in Highrove for more than a month at a time.
"Is he injured?" Bridget asked, keeping her eyes on the washboard.
"They say they caught an ambush in the Iron Valley, lost three men. The king took a blade to the shoulder, but you know how they heal," Greta said, shaking her head. "Just means he'll be in a foul mood. Keep your head down, Bridget. The wolves are restless when they smell their own blood."
I know, Bridget thought. She could already smell it.
The wind shifted, blowing down from the upper gates. Over the stench of woodsmoke, horse dung, and freezing mud, it hit her. It was a heavy, suffocating scent. Ozone, crushed pine, old blood. It was the scent of an alpha, and it made the hidden wolf inside her thrash against her spine.
She gripped the edges of the wooden tub. Her knuckles turned white, her fingernails elongated by a fraction of an inch, the beds throbbing with pressure. She forced them back, squeezing her eyes shut. Hide.
A horn blasted from the main courtyard. The ground vibrated under Bridget's soaked leather boots. The king had arrived.
The great hall was a cavern of noise and heat. Massive hearths roared at either end, spitting embers onto the soot-stained flagstones. Long wooden tables groaned under the weight of roasted boar, root vegetables, and kegs of dark ale.
Bridget moved through the shadows of the pillars, carrying a heavy pitcher of hot water and a stack of clean linen. She wore a drab gray dress, an apron stained with soot, and a woolen cap pulled low over her mousy brown hair. She was invisible, just another human servant meant to bleed quietly into the background.
She approached the high table. Garrick sat in the center. He didn't sit like a king holding court. He sat like a predator resting between kills. He was massive, built broad and thick, wearing leather armor scarred by countless blades. His dark hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and sleet. His face was a map of hard angles, dominated by eyes the color of a bruised winter sky.
He was bleeding. A deep gash tore through the pauldron of his armor, soaking the leather in dark crimson. A nervous human healer was hovering near him, hands trembling as he tried to clean the wound.
"Get out of the way, old man." One of Garrick's generals, a scarred brute named Corvin, barked at the healer. "Your hands are shaking so badly you'll poke his eye out."
"Beg pardon, my lord. I just need water."
"I have the water," Bridget said.
Her voice was quiet, but it cut through the noise of the immediate circle. Garrick's head snapped toward her.
Bridget froze. Her lungs seized. The sheer crushing weight of his alpha aura hit her like a physical blow. To a human, it would feel like a sudden drop in air pressure, a wave of instinctual fear. To a wolf, it was a command. Submit. Bare your neck. Kneel.
The beast inside Bridget roared in furious defiance. Her knees locked. Her jaw clamped shut. She had to force herself to tremble, mimicking the human reaction, while every instinct screamed at her to bare her teeth and challenge the oppressive weight.
She stepped forward, keeping her chin tucked against her collarbone, and set the heavy pitcher on the table. She began to fold the linens.
Garrick didn't look away from her. She could feel his gaze on the top of her head. It burned.
"You," he rumbled. His voice was a low octave that vibrated in Bridget's chest cavity.
"Yes, my king," she whispered.
"Look at me."
Bridget's heart hammered against her ribs. She couldn't. If she looked at him, he would see it. Wolf eyes didn't lie. But defying a direct order from the alpha king was a death sentence.
Slowly she raised her head. She kept her eyelids heavy, adopting the dull, terrified expression of a broken servant. She met his bruised sky eyes.
Garrick frowned. The scar over his left eyebrow pulled tight. He leaned forward, ignoring the protests of the old healer. He inhaled. It was a subtle shift of his shoulders, a slow intake of breath through his nose. He was catching her scent.
Bridget stopped breathing entirely. She smelled like lye soap, stale smoke, and human sweat. She had made sure of it. She had even rubbed crushed garlic on her wrists before entering the hall.
But Garrick was not an ordinary wolf.
He reached out. His hand, vast and rough, clamped around her wrist. Bridget flinched. The heat of his skin was shocking. It seared straight through the damp wool of her sleeve.
"What is your name?" he asked quietly.
The rest of the hall was roaring with drunken laughter, but in their small radius, everything was dead silent.
"Brid," she lied. Her true name was long buried.
Garrick's thumb pressed into the inside of her wrist, right over her pulse point. Bridget panicked. A human heart under the gaze of an alpha should be rabbit fast, fluttering in pure terror. Her heart was beating with the slow, heavy, measured thud of a cornered predator. Thump. Pause. Thump. Pause.
She deliberately bit the inside of her cheek. Hard. The sudden spike of pain made her pulse jump, erratic and fast.
Garrick's eyes narrowed. He looked at her wrist, then back up to her face. He smelled the fresh drop of copper blood in her mouth.
"You don't smell like fear," Garrick stated, his voice a dangerous murmur meant only for her.
"I am terrified, my king," Bridget whispered. It was truthful. Just not of him. She was terrified of herself.
Garrick studied her face. He was searching for something — ambition, deceit, an assassination plot. What he found seemed to confuse him. He found a void, a wall of solid iron where a human's fragile emotions should be.
Before he could push further, Corvin slammed his fist on the table. "My king, the scouts report the rebel stragglers are trapped in the eastern gorge. If we ride before dawn, we can skin them all by sunrise."
Garrick broke his gaze from Bridget. The suffocating pressure eased. He released her wrist.
"Have the men rest," Garrick ordered, his attention snapping back to his general. "We march at first light."
Bridget didn't wait to be dismissed. She backed away, leaving the water and bandages, and practically fled into the shadows of the service corridor. Once she was out of sight, she slumped against the cold stone wall, clutching her chest. She was gasping for air. The spot where Garrick had touched her wrist was throbbing, glowing with a phantom heat.
He knows, her wolf snarled in the dark. He felt us. Let me out. Let me rip his throat out before he hangs us.
"Shut up," Bridget hissed to the empty hallway, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. "Shut up. Shut up. Shut up."
She had survived twenty years. She would not die today. She just had to stay away from the king.