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“Ragnar. Sit.”
He sat. Quickly and without further fuss, face wiped clean of its smile.
“Where have you been?”
Ragnar’s shoulders rounded forward a slight fraction, and his gaze fixed on a spot to the left of Leif’s face, so their gazes didn’t quite meet. “Does my collar come with a leash now, alpha?”
The faintest trace of bitter mockery laced the words, and that put Leif’s hackles up. He said, “It can, if it’s necessary. You were with Cassius – I can smell him on you.”
Ragnar’s gaze shifted over a fraction, so it collided with Leif’s, a visual strike, a flash of blue; Leif expected to hear the chiming of swords. “Jealous?” Ragnar said with something like relish.
The pitiful part was, Leifwasjealous. A little. The sensation of having misplaced a favorite pair of gloves and finding someone else wearing them. (No, no, that wasn’t the right sort of metaphor at all, but he refused to think of unfaithful lovers in this instance;refused.) But he couldn’t smell so much as a trace of sex on him, not even restrained lust, nor the hateful urge to fuck someone for debasement. His anger was purely personal, crackling and sharp-edged, and Leif knew that he would tell any lie, now, to share a little of that anger with Leif.
In a calm voice, Leif said, “Why did you go down to the wine cellar to see him?”
Ragnar’s gaze slid away again, and became hooded. He shrugged. “I was bored, and you didn’t want me around.”
Ah. Ragnar was jealous, too.
“I wanted to speak with Amelia privately a moment, is all,” Leif corrected.
Ragnar’s sneer returned, nasty to hide the underlying hurt. Leif could hear the jerk and leap of his heart in his chest; felt the constriction in his lungs as if it were his own. He didn’t understand the source of his anger, but he didn’t think it had anything to do with Amelia, jealousy or not.
“A short meeting,” Ragnar said, with a low, humorless chuckle. “You must have left the lady wanting.”
“There was no wanting involved,” Leif said, firmly, though Ragnar’s sly look said he knew that wasn’t true. A less-than-steady sly look. “If you must know, I wanted to suggest she take up sparring, properly instructed sparring. I wanted to suggest it in private so as not to embarrass her in front of her people. That way, on the road, sparring can look like her idea, rather than a weakness I’ve noticed.” He lifted his brows. “Satisfied?”
Ragnar snorted. “Hardly.” Some of the tension across his shoulders eased, however. But not all of it. And his torso was still a stack of hard knots, his smirk flickering and faltering as his gaze flitted toward the dark window.
Leif stretched his legs out before him, and massaged at a sore place in his right quadricep. “Ragnar,” he said, conversationally, and saw the pluck of awareness at the back of Ragnar’s neck, the stiffening of his spine. “Was he lying? Or were you tasked with killing me? You, personally,” he clarified, not wanting to offer a chance for any dodging or half-confessing.
Ragnar held still a moment, while Leif stared at his back, and then bent his head, shoulders bunching as his arm lifted; his voice came out muffled, as if he was chewing at a hangnail. “I think you already know the answer to that.” Clearer; the slackening of his arm, as his hand dropped back to his lap. “You just want me to say it.”
“Yes,” Leif said, not ordering, but asking. “Did your Sel managers tell you to kill me?”
“Yes.” Voice breathless, and quiet, as though saying it aloud bore a cost.
Leif waited for an anger that didn’t come. He was more curious than anything…and the strain in Ragnar’s voice – his beta’s voice – was plucking at his alpha side in a way that made it difficult to stay seated. “How were you supposed to do it?” When Ragnar didn’t answer straight off, he said, “The Sels are arrogant and think us stupid. They gave you specific instructions.”
Rueful note in Ragnar’s voice, “You know them that well, do you?” Quiet again, voice heavy and resigned: “Yeah. I had instructions. I was supposed to kill all three of you: you, Rune, Erik. At the Yule Feast. After. When the house bedded down for the night, I was supposed to tiptoe through the palace, and kill you all in your beds.”
Leif snorted. “With guards in the halls? And torches? Erik with Oliver in bed beside him?”
“I told them that would never work,” Ragnar said with contempt. “I said, ‘The boys, maybe, sure. But I could never sneak up on Erik, and even if I did, and I got past his guards, and I cut his throat, his little Southerner would wake and scream bloody murder before I could cut his throat, too. There was no way I could get away with all three of you and live to enjoy the fruits of my labor.”
“And that was the whole point for you, wasn’t it? To be crowned King of Aeretoll? You’d need your head attached to your body for that.”
Ragnar moved in a sudden burst of violence, upper body twisting around, hand slapping the foot of the bed, expression twisted up with a snarl that was more pain than fury. “Do you not understand?” he asked with a growl. “They want to wipe your country from the map. They want to enslave the girls pretty enough to rape, and kill the rest. The bargain I made would have killed a king, but saved a people.”
Leif met his sparking gaze with a level one of his own. It was easy, in these moments, to let him rave, and to draw upon a reserve of alpha calm; to lead, and let Ragnar thrash through his role as follower until he’d tired himself out. “I didn’t think you cared about Erik’s people.”
Ragnar bared his teeth with a snap. “They might have been mine. If Erik had died of a fever, or in battle; if he’d fallen beside Frode, they would have been my people.”
Leif shook his head, slowly. “Mother still would have had children. I would always have had the greater claim to the throne.”
“You…” Ragnar snapped his teeth together.Click. He took a huge breath, and faced the window again, shoulders trembling as he exhaled. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, voice leashed again. “I was never going to be king. I wasn’t meant for it, and wouldn’t have been good at it anyway.”
Leif listened to his ragged breathing a moment, the wolf in him wanting to cross the room and bridge the gap between them; wanting to offer proximity and touch as means of comfort.
