The commander didn’t preen like a peacock, though I highly doubted he was capable. But he did give my hand a slight squeeze. “To the rest of you, maybe.” His tone held an undercurrent of apathy and something else. Perhaps discomfort.

“Have you lost many of your brethren to this war with Sinshell?”

“More than we’d anticipated,” he said, rough. “And I’ve a feeling it’ll only get worse.” As though worried he’d said too much, he attempted to change the subject. “Why haven’t I seen you before?”

But I wasn’t yet ready to decide what lies to feed him, and I wasn’t ready to let him escape what he wished to avoid. “Do you enjoy attacking your own ilk?”

The wolf tensed. I expected him to drop my hand and maybe even glower at me in outrage. Instead, he stared straight ahead to the sparkling river at the street’s end.

I quickly added, “I mean, I assume it would be extremely difficult…”

“We do what we’re born to do,” he evaded, tone clipped and stoic. “Protect and serve. We will bleed them dry for what they stole from our king and for the future they took from our people.”

I nodded, having heard the tale from my father quite some time ago.

The way he had spoken of this realm was partly why I’d decided to hide here. Over the fire, he’d told me the story of a young crimson king who had lost his parents to a battle that never should have happened. A battle with the golden fae who resided across the ravine that divided this continent of Nodoya.

A grave and culture-altering loss.

Regardless, I didn’t believe it warranted the extremes the king now hungered to deliver. Then again, I had seen firsthand that war of any kind never solved much of anything.

The softest heart, Rorn would say, wrapped in a thick layer of impenetrable gold.

Yet you quickly found your way in, I’d forever reminded him, the surest way to earn a blinding smile from him.

Another tug on my hand brought me back from thoughts I couldn’t have. Not yet. Not when it was all still so fresh and too much to digest. Not when I needed anything other than the ache of him. “Where’d you go just now?”

The wolf commander had stopped us outside of a small bookstore. “What do you mean?” I studied the faded etching of a stack of books upon the wooden sign hanging over the flaking brown door. A door in a city that wasn’t my own. A male who wasn’t my own touching me.

My chest flooded with cold as what I was doing began to rattle through me like a slow-to-take poison.