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Griffin was silent. He set his hand at my waist and squeezed like he knew where this was going. “Reyna… You don’t mean…?”
“Yes.” Somehow saying it to Griffin made it more real. Anxiety curled in cold in my chest. “I’m to go as the representative from Daybreak.”
Griffin stepped back and pushed both hands through his hair. “You can’t. Reyna, you can’t go to the Court of Nightfall.”
“I don’t exactly have a choice here,” I said. “I’m a Lady of the Court, and the duke has ordered me to go.”
“Fuck the duke,” Griffin said low, through clenched teeth. “We can talk to him—there has to be something—”
“He can barely stand to look at me,” I said with a disbelieving laugh. “Do you really think he’d listen to anything I had to say? I tried to get him to consider other women who could go, but he wouldn’t hear anything.” I frowned. “He even bared his teeth at me.”
Griffin sighed heavily. “Bared his teeth? Immediately?”
“Immediately,” I said.
Griffin swore under his breath. I didn’t love the obscenity, but I understood his anger. I felt the same way. Neither Griffin nor I shifted often, and he also considered brazen shows of one’s wolf to be rude and lacking control. He knew that if my father was revealing his wolf with such little provocation, there would be no getting through to him. He’d made up his mind.
“We’ll run,” Griffin said. “We’ll leave Daybreak. We can leave tonight.”
“Don’t be naïve.” I tugged him closer with my hand on his hip. “You know my father would come for me.”
My pack was a seafaring one, and once upon a time, we’d been a pack of explorers, too. We knew how to travel and how to track. If I ran, my father’s wolves would find me with ease.
“Then what?” Griffin asked. “You just go?”
I nodded. “That’s exactly what I do,” I said. “I’ll go. I’ll compete in the King’s Choice, and I’ll lose.”
“You’ll be disgraced if you do that,” he said. “You won’t be able to show your face in the court.”
“Exactly,” I said. “If I lose, we’ll be able to get out of here—for real. We can start our own lives.”
“You make it sound easy,” Griffin said. “Like you’re not going directly into the Court of the Bloody King himself.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, even if I only halfway believed it. “I know how to hold my own. Even if it is the Nightfall wolves.”
Again, Griffin sighed. He knew I was stubborn, and he knew he wasn’t going to win me over in this discussion. Not when I’d already made up my mind about how I was going to play this. “You know it’s not as simple as losing. If you offend the king, he’ll do worse than kick you out.”
“I know,” I said. “I can walk that line, Griffin.”
He didn’t look convinced—and honestly, I sounded more confident than I felt.
He was right. I had to remember that the king wasn’t above making an example of a wolf who offended him.
“I trust you,” Griffin said, “it’s the king that scares me.”
“Me too,” I admitted in a small voice.
Griffin wound his arms around me, pulling me close to his body. I wrapped my arms around his slim waist and rested my cheek against his shoulder, breathing in his familiar scent tinged with the inescapable stale beer smell of Marco’s. He brushed his nose against the crown of my head, careful not to disturb my braid.
“But I won’t let anything happen to you,” Griffin said. “If the king tries anything—I’ll come for you, Reyna.”
I nodded, hugging him a little closer to me. Even if that didn’t seem possible, my heart wanted to believe that. That there was someone in Frasia who cared enough to come for me if the king decided I wasn’t worth keeping alive. And Griffin and I still had so much to do together. We’d been together for a long time, but we’d only kissed once—at the solstice party, on the rare occasion of my being drunk on wine. I wanted to be married before we did anything more than that. I was a lady, after all. I wanted our first time to be special—I wanted it to be the beginning of the rest of our lives together. And I wanted to know that he was the kind of man that would wait until I was ready. A man who would commit to me for me.
I had high standards for the company I kept. I knew that to some members of the Daybreak pack, that made me seem standoffish and cold—and I knew they called me the Ice Princess behind my back because of it. My pale features certainly didn’t help, either.
But it was easy to be myself around Griffin. I pulled away and offered him a small smile.
He placed his palm on my cheek. “I mean it. I won’t let anything happen to you. The Bloody King won’t hurt you.” His expression darkened. “And I won’t let him marry you, either.”
