An obtrusive cold brushed its way up along my back and woke me from disturbing dreams. I curled myself into a ball, pulling my limbs up against myself in an attempt to conserve as much of my body's heat as possible. As the last dregs of drowsiness left me, I realized I was alone in the colossal bed. The embers, glowing peacefully in the hearth, were now my only company.

Turning over onto my back, I inspected the vacant space beside me. It was dimly illuminated by the slate-hued beams of dawn breaking through the window, muted by what promised to be another colorless winter day, for all of the four short hours that the sun might grace us with her presence.

Most the the furs and blankets had been relegated to a useless heap on the flagstones and were thus the reason for my chilly awakening. Where was Lucian and why did I feel so melancholy of a sudden? I supposed that a bride should want the company and reassurance of her husband on the morning of her first day as his lady. I concluded then that I did miss his presence beside me, having grown unconsciously, and miraculously, used to his solicitous warmth in the night. A shy smile crept over my lips as I reminisced indulgently over the night before.



"You are not going to sleep already, are you, wife?" came my husband's challenging query.

"I had planned on it, yes." I snuck a demure look at his wicked grin.

Something had occurred to me — an unseemly thought that made me giggle quite out of character and certainly did not pertain to anything I might consider appropriate romantic discourse. Lucian scowled at me, which frightened me not at all for he yet maintained a sly curve to his aspect.

"You would laugh at a naked man?" He feigned an offended glower, and ineffectually withal for he still appeared amused. "Will you not share the joke?" I bit my lip bashfully, unwilling to voice the silly notion. I regarded it, of a sudden, not as humorous as I had previously assumed. "Tell me," he urged, leaning over me so that his right elbow now pressed into the pillow beside my head and his large, left hand splayed possessively over my belly.

"I... well, it's just that I thought..."

"You thought what exactly?" Still he was calm. Ostensibly delighted by my flustered babble.

"It's...not the way...you know, the way the hounds do it," I finished with a groan of discomfit. He seemed somewhat taken aback.

"My technique, you mean?"

I nodded as my cheeks became suffused with the color of heated humiliation. Lucian scratched thoughtfully at his stubble; the same stubbled that had chafed my skin raw moments ago. I watched with trepidation as a new, wayward grin merged his features into something purely devilish. Deviant.

"Well then..." He flipped me over onto my hands and knees with effortless talent, a bewildered squeal erupting from my lips as he did so.

"What-"

But before I could articulate my confusion, he pressed his chest into my back and wove his fingers into the back of each of mine. Lucian then brought his lips close to my ear with wicked intent.

"I accept the challenge!" he whispered teasingly before inducting me further.



I pressed my hot face into the pillow remembering each detail of the long night. I had slept little and yet I felt no fatigue. Tender in places, yes, but not tired in the least.

The mattress dipped behind me and I held my breath as Lucian eased himself flush against my bare back. As per usual, I had not heard his stealthy approach. I stilled in anticipation, waiting for what he held in store for me next.

"What happened to your arm?" There was a dangerous edge to his voice that chilled my bones. This was not the direction I had hoped his mind was bent.

My hand flew to my forearm, but the bandage had since been removed while I had slumbered unawares. What to say? I had dreaded this moment, but I could not lie for I sensed he knew the truth... he always did.

"I think you know, Lucian." There was a long pause between us, thick with tension. I was playing a treacherous game with a man who seemed wilier than a wolf and equally nefarious.

"Aye, I do know!" he seethed, grabbing my arm to push the wound up against my face. "Did I not warn you against trespassing there again!" The words rumbled forth in molten whelms as his other hand tightened painfully on my hip, but I kept still, satisfied at least that he had not denied my claim of his already knowing all. "I had not thought you so lacking in sense, woman! Do you know what you have done!"

My head shook of its own volition, for I was too cowed to speak yet.

"That creature nearly gnawed its way through the bloody gate! We had to replace the damn barrier all because you have an unhealthy curiosity!" He leaned in, his voice diminuendoing dangerously. "You could have died!"

"You will not tell me the truth. I therefore sought the answers for myself!" I said, trying to reason with him.

"Not at the expense of your life!" He roared and I bit my tongue to silence, but he continued in a low hiss. "And as to the truth, you could not bear it, and I would be relinquishing you to a grave fate, were I to speak with candor; the consequences of which would be deadly... to you." He took a deep breath. "However greatly I am beset with the need to confess all, I am yet forbidden that privilege, Aria."

"Lucian I only wish to-" I was not completely sure we were talking about the same thing. Neither of us seemed able to acknowledge the monster that sat insidiously between us.

"No, do not ask it of me again! I am sworn to silence!" A frustrated sighed issued forth, a tinge of weary dejection there too. He hugged me close and buried his nose in my hair. His mercurial moods were playing havoc with my sense of well being. "I will tell you aught else you wish to know, but let the other matter rest for the moment."

Did he still not trust me? It was just as well, for I too did not trust him completely. There were yet so many unanswered questions. What were they all hiding? What was inside the trapdoor? Howbeit, I was now certain of the answer to the latter question: the freakish animal that had attacked me was more than likely what the family had been hiding in the maze heretofore — under the trapdoor.

I found the idea of supplying it with a live source of human flesh completely horrific; a grisly abomination. If the church, or any lawman of the realm, were to realize that despicable truth, it would mean certain death and disgrace to the Greybacks. Why not just kill the thing and be done with it. But they were my family now and I would not betray them. To think that I had wondered through the bowels of that awful place... I shuddered to think on the matter further.

"That thing is a menace. You should kill it!"

He snorted and rolled his eyes. "And you should mind where you poke your nose. You were lucky this time, now forget the matter; and for God's sake, do not mention this to anyone!"

"As you will, Lucian," said I finally. But perhaps the subject of Rose was a safer territory. Her peculiarities still baffled me quite. "Rose mentioned yesterday that I had featured in her dreams. She is rather odd, is she not?"

"Yes," he replied tersely. I pursed my lips in annoyance. Infuriating man!

"Do her dreams mean nothing, then?" I muttered flippantly.

Lucian half sighed, half growled, but said only, "she believes herself to be an augury, Aria. Pay her no mind, for she is as flighty as those selfsame birds that send her the supposed omens."

An augur. "A seer?" I confirmed. She had said nothing of birds, only that she'd received a sign in her dream state.

"Aye, if you wish to call it that," Lucian yawned. I sighed and dropped the subject completely, dispirited by the wedge he was wont to place betwixt us.

The air was now wrought with a heavy stagnancy, uncomfortable and soiled by the awful secrets he still withheld — not about Rose, but rather the former conversation. Lucian, seeking to rekindle what had been afflicted, ran a left hand from my hip bone up along my ribs and slid it sensuously around my ribs and below my hardened breasts. I froze.

"Relax, Aria. I am quite sated," the smile in his voice evident as he spoke. Now he was smiling again? The man was changeable as the weather and just as volatile! Had I thought him wolf-like before? Aye, he was that and a maelstrom of inclemency besides!

However, I would as soon not engage in further bed sport, for it was true, I had been well and truly initiated throughout the night and was now more aware of a dull soreness between my legs and the bruises forming on my thighs. And I was yet wroth with him.

Fortunately, he instinctively understood this and seemed only desirous to hold me at present. How curious that was: I should never have known that he was so affectionate, having only been granted with glowering disdain and chilly tempers for the most part of our acquaintance. He held me thus, for the longest time, and I finally let the matter of his secrets go... for the present at least. Truth be told, I had expected worse when I had considered what his reaction to my injury would be. I had thought that he might beat me for defying his wishes and breaking the vow I had made when he had forbidden my return to the labyrinth.

Soon I became restless and moved ceaselessly against him, unable to relax and find my ease in his stirring company, yet strangely not out of fear. I was beset now with a separate aching to the dull pain of my loss of innocence. One was a smarting tiredness and the other, conversely, a growing hunger. The two perceptions warred for supremacy and, inconceivably, it was the desire for him that seemed the more insuperable of the two.

"You are not tired?" Lucian murmured into the grey light. I shook my head no. He sighed, pulling me closer. "Tell me about your mother." Surprised by the request, I twisted in his arms so that we were facing each other.

"My birth mother?" I clarified. He gave a single solemn nod. "There is not much to tell," I said trying to gather what remnants I could from my memory. "I know only what my father and Mildred told me about her which, from my father's perspective, was not much. My old nurse said that she had been found unconscious at the bottom of a tor, her lifeblood staining the ice with crimson. Most of it had come from her womb, I think." I became lost in thought and Lucian remained silent, waiting for me to continue in my own time.

"The miller and his wife had found her and run for help, but she was cold and lifeless, her soul having already passed, ere she was brought into the manor where the physician could see to her. My father, mad with grief and urgency, demanded that the child be cut from her belly; so convinced was he that she carried a son. The surgeon, certain of the child's demise, had tried to dissuade my father, but he was adamant and so the procedure was performed despite the doctor's demurral." I imagined the scene as I spoke to Lucian, as though I had been the one standing over her instead of within her cold and empty shell. 'The child's demise,' I had said. But it was no stranger to whom I referred. I had been that babe.

"How long had she been dead?"

"I know not. Perhaps a half hour," I guessed. Mildred had said that Cara's body had been half frozen — having, by that time, quenched the floe with most of her essence. But I did not wish Lucian to know how truly unnatural I was to have survived so long inside a corpse. He nodded his head thoughtfully, as if I had just clarified something for him.

"You should not have survived," he murmured, but there was no trace of recrimination in his gaze.

"I know."

All my life I had known that there was something aberrant about me. I had been told so many a time ere I'd left, but Mildred had sheltered me from most of the superstitious and unpleasant gossip that followed me wherever I went. I knew that now, as I looked back with an adult's perspective.

"I might have been considered a miracle if I had but been the male child my father had wanted. Instead, my poor, dead mother was delivered of a girl and I was labeled a curse. He has hated me ever since then. My mother might not have died, most likely would not have bled out, had she not been so heavy with child. I was therefore guilty twice over: once for not being the heir he desired and secondly for killing his beautiful wife — a vessel that may yet have borne him a bountiful meed."

Lucain remained attentive all the while I spoke, holding my gaze solidly as I exorcised my morose reflections. "I have not been treated as anything but a lamia — except by Mildred, of course — until I was brought to Nørrdragor." I smiled contentedly as he tucked a dark curl behind my ear. "You are fortunate to have grown up with the love of such excellent parents as yours," said I, running my fingers over the plains of his chest.

Godwin was, despite his sedate and tenebrous bearing, neither despotic nor unjust. Certainly not overly warm with his affections, but I had come to realize that he was indeed a good man.

Lucian pulled my fingers from his chest and pressed my palm against his own with a sombre expression, studying our joined hands with distrait intensity. Then, turning onto his back, he released a heavy sigh and stared at the ceiling.

"Aria, I did not grow up here," he muttered. "You know that."

I suppose I did. I'd hardly seen him, but I had assumed that he'd been home a lot before I had come to stay.

"It was Fendrel that raised Caine and I." He was quiet a while. "I went to live with my uncle at the age of seven, serving him first as a page and then later as his squire. This is the longest I have ever been home from Skådrokk since I first left."

"Was he a hard taskmaster?" I did not envy him all the time spent in military service to Fendrel, despite all the traveling he had done and all the wonderful places he had been to. Lucian turned back onto his side to face me.

"Your father... Edwyn," he clarified, as if I should not know to whom he referred, "despite his cruelties, was paragon by comparison." His face darkened bitterly. "But I still believe yours was the harder lot before you came to Nørrdragor."

"It was not so bad." I did not want him to feel sorry for me. "I had Mildred and she more than compensated for Elinor and Edwyn's lack."

"Still and all, at least I've always known who I am. You have no idea. And nor do we."

"Aren't we a sorry pair?" I half laughed mirthlessly, not wanting to discuss my abnormalities just yet. He'd inferred I was different before, and maybe I was, but I knew exactly who I was: Edwyn's unwanted daughter.

"For what possible reason can you claim sorrow now?" He scoffed dubiously. I felt the pull of wicked mirth as it tugged my lip from between my teeth.

"I married you, did I not?"

Lucian lunged at me the moment the words were out of my mouth. I squealed, laughing like a loon as he tackled me over the bed and onto the furry pile of bedding still scattered and discarded on the floor. My tender flesh and wounded arm suddenly forgotten.



❆



Caine took another long sip from his tankard, a tinge of green to his pale visage, as Lucian and I seated ourselves on the dais.

"Ahh, the drink of old women and toddlers," said Lucian smirking, but his brother ignored the dig and took another large gulp of warm goat's milk.

"I feel like a boiled turd." Caine's groan was utterly pitiful.

"You look it too," Lucian drawled. "Will you be joining the hunt today, old man?"

Caine's condition clearly attested to the fact that the celebrations had continued long into the early hours of the morn, which might not ordinarily have been considered ample enough time to drink oneself into a stupor, but he had started well before the ceremony had even begun! I had, on more than one occasion throughout the months since his return, seen him snoring supine in the rushes of the hall — after a drunken bout — while one of the mastiffs lapped lovingly at his wide open mouth. This morning had been no different.

"Are you questioning my manhood, brother?" Caine said tersely, but ruined the effect with a queasy burp. I stuffed a piece of bread in my mouth to keep from laughing.

"Merely expressing my concern." He then ruined the affected concern by slapping Caine heartily on the back so that his brother had to brace himself with splayed hands across the trestle, lest he crack his pretty face on the hardwood tabletop. "Come, the rest of the hunting party has already assembled outside."

When we alighted the stairs into the bailey, I was momentarily stunned by the impressive spectacle that was to be our hunting party; it appeared more like a military cavalcade, except that some of the young men looked ridiculously dandified in their expensive raiments, codpieces and extremely long-toed boots that were laughably unsuited to the hunting expedition. I rolled my eyes at that.

Most of the men, my husband included, were carrying bows and arrows and silver-lined hunting horns. Their hunting garb was of the finest eastern cloth and displayed with colorful and intricate pattern work. I especially admired the detailed silver buttons that ran down along Lucian's surcote and cuffs; the familiar depiction of the standing wolf etched into each one. I myself was wearing my favorite red, fur-lined hood and a pair of sturdy leather boots.

There were about five and twenty dogs altogether, straining at their silver collars and leashes, and three huntsmen dressed in thick leather leggings and green cotes. There were a number of daggers hanging from their belts and a hunting horn hanging loosely from around each one's neck. The pack consisted of mastiffs and greyhounds, but the alaunts, stalwart aggressive beasts, were by far the largest and most fearsome of all the dogs yipping and barking in the courtyard — eager and ready for the hunt as we all were.

The huntsman had spotted the tracks of a large hart earlier this morning, and the master of the hunt had already deemed the beast worth the chase by inspecting the droppings and investigating the trees and bushes where it had rubbed the velvet from its antlers. He now called the pack to heel and I watched as they obeyed him directly. Finally, we were off, into the forest with the sun's light already dwindling, the early hour not withstanding. It would be full dark in only a few hours.

Each of us was on horse back, save for a few handlers, as we followed the pack into the woods. They yelped and sniffed excitedly all the while they tracked the deer's distinctive spoor. I sat sideways atop Hagan, my feet on the footrest of the side-saddle, as one of the grooms led my palfrey — the saddle too uncomfortable by half to hold the reins myself while also trying to control my mount.

At last, the master of the hunt let loose the dogs and they sprinted in between the trees as a long blare from Godwin's bugle rent the misty air, bringing the hounds to bay. The hunt was on and the hart had been spotted. I wished that I too could ride astride like the men, and keep up with the chase, but alas poor Hagan was consigned to an easy gait alongside the other ladies as we watched the lords of the party galloping after the hounds, their chargers sleek and swift of hoof, with lances high and poised to slay the fleeing deer.

By the time we reached the men and the heavily panting dogs, the huntsmen were already skinning the carcass as the fewterers divided the bloody spoils amongst the pack. I watched, with a sense of presentiment, as Lucian dismounted and made his way purposefully over to me, lifting me easily from the saddle without a word. He then glanced at the others and pulled me directly into the thickets surrounding our hunting group.

The rest of our party, meanwhile, were making themselves quite comfortable in a little clearing where the servants had set up a picnic of wine, meat and fragrant bread. It would be a while yet before the huntsmen took the animals, that were once again leashed, back into the thicket to stalk the next quarry.

"Where are we going?" I asked, furiously trying to keep my skirts from catching on the brambles and twigs, as Lucian hastened into the dense brush with me floundering in tow.

"You shall see..." he responded enigmatically.

At length he brought me into a quiet, secluded little area that was shaded with evergreens. He then pinned me up against the rough, ribbed bark of an imposing elm and I giggled quietly as I fought the unyielding hands that were trying to free my legs from the bulky skirts of my riding habit.

"Lucian!" I gasped with mock censure, an unconvincing note of warning in my tone.

"Aria!" He mimicked the pitch of my voice playfully, undeterred. His teasing only made me laugh all the harder, which inspired him to kiss me to silence with an uncompromising potency that did just as he had intended. I spoke no more.

I was blissfully unaware as he devoured every inch of me with expert skill. His drugging kisses so effective that it took me a long moment to realize he had ceased them altogether.

He stood now frozen and watchful; his body was suddenly rigid and alert. I blinked away the foggy concupiscence and raised a questioning gaze to his face. He was curiously distracted and darting narrowed eyes into the shadows beyond the trees.'Twas not me that held his attention now...



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