Varder could not sleep. This wolfless woman had threatened her sister to escape him and he didn't even know why it bothered him so much.
He turned that fact over in the grey morning light with the same flat assessment he applied to intelligence reports and tactical problem. He turned it over and he looked at it from every angle available and it remained what it was regardless of the angle.
She had rejected him.
And She was asleep.
He had not expected that. He had assumed she would lie awake the same way he had — rigid, managing, counting breaths in the dark — but she was asleep with the specific complete unconsciousness of a body that had finally spent everything it had and simply stopped. She was on her side facing the wall, still in the crushed dress, her hair spread across the pillow in pieces, her face in the grey morning light stripped of the careful controlled expression it wore when she was awake and composed into something younger and less defended.
He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at her.
He was Prince Varder. Heir to the throne of Alpha King Denton. He had led campaigns that rewrote territorial boundaries. He had made decisions in the space of seconds that other men agonized over for weeks. He had walked into the most dangerous rooms available to him and walked out again and the walking out had never been in question because he was the most dangerous thing in every room he entered.
And this girl — this wolfless Gamma's daughter in her ruined dress — had tried to run from him.
He moved around the side of the bed.
He stood over her.
She stirred slightly — some instinct registering his proximity even in sleep — and her breathing changed, shallowed, the specific shift of a body moving from unconsciousness toward awareness without having arrived there yet.
He looked at her face.
He thought about the calculation. The way it had resolved itself in the arena. The specific clean efficiency of a problem that handed you its own solution. He had used her as an instrument and the instrument had performed its function and the function was complete and what remained was simply the reality of what pack law required and what he had established publicly .
His hand found the bedpost. He gripped it.
She was waking up. He could see it — the slow incremental return of consciousness, the eyes moving behind their lids, the breathing changing again.
The morning light moved across her face.
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then he reached down and his hand closed around her shoulder and he turned her toward him and her eyes opened — startled, immediately awake, immediately present in the specific way of someone who had learned that the transition between sleep and danger could be very short — and she looked up at him and he looked down at her and the room was very quiet.
"You are my wife," he said. His voice was level. It was always level. "This is my bed."
She looked at him incredulously, like he was a mad man who didn't know what he was saying.
"There are things that are required of a wife," he said. "You are my wife. This is my bed."
He leaned down until the distance between them was no longer a distance.
"You will stop looking at me like that," he said quietly, "and you will do what wives do."
She held his gaze.
She did not look away.
He looked at her face in the morning light — the two marks, the fallen hair, the eyes that had not done a single thing he expected since the moment she climbed out of that bag.
He straightened.
"Wives spread their legs for their husbands and you will do the same," he said.
Ava blinked at him, as if she didn't understand what she just heard.
"Are you deaf, didn't you hear me, strip yourself and spread your legs for me " He repeated, his voice low like he was saying something sensible.