Calla

We sat by the frozen ice fountain in the human quarter. The pedestrians gave us a wide berth, making a giant ring around us. Klaus curled his lip at the humans and pulled his fur coat closer, but Queen Ingrid seemed mildly amused at least, even waving to a few onlookers.

“If you were so desperate for an outdoor venue, I could’ve suggested one,”

Klaus muttered to Briar who simply shrugged at him, clearly still having him on a tight leash.

“I like the colors,”

she said with a flutter of her lashes. I could easily see behind my sister’s performance, but Sweet Moon was I impressed that she could still put it on, especially with someone as insufferable as Klaus.

Grae leaned into me and murmured, “This is where I first heard you sing.”

My cheeks burned and not from the cold as I remembered singing “Sa Sortienna”

with Ora in this very square. It felt like years ago and just yesterday all at once.

“This whole place reminds me of Ora,”

I said as I cradled the warm mug of cider in my hands. “Ora was the first person to help me put words to everything I was feeling inside. They are the one who helped me realize I was merem.”

Ingrid immediately extricated herself from the conversation between Briar and Klaus to turn her icy gaze on me. “Merem?”

My pulse quickened. I hadn’t thought she’d heard. Should I say she misheard me? Should I try and move the conversation along? Everything within me felt like it was shrinking smaller and smaller to appease her, and I didn’t know if I could take it any longer.

I probably should’ve denied it—it would’ve been better for my court and our alliance—but instead my eyes narrowed at her above the steam curling from my mug. “Yes?”

“You use a human word to describe yourself? A Wolf Queen?”

She looked at Grae for his reaction instead of me, as if my use of the word “merem” was an offense to him.

I blinked, trying to think of a more delicate response. The amount of contorting myself I had to do to stay on Ingrid’s good side was already breaking me. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t perform this version of myself for her anymore. I had considered hiding my gender from her entirely, but I couldn’t win. It hurt so deeply to not be who I truly was, but it hurt me even more to think of Ora and so many others who needed my help and I couldn’t do it without Ingrid’s allegiance.

“It doesn’t have to be only a human word,”

I said tentatively as I worried my lip with my tooth. With a bit more strength, I added, “And I am not the Queen of just Wolves.”

“You are so determined to get rid of all Wolf customs, aren’t you?”

Her slender brows lifted, her expression so sharp she could’ve sliced me in half. “When will it be enough?”

My brow furrowed. “Enough?”

“I agree that we need change,”

she said. “I thought you and I were aligned. We want Wolf Queens to be able to rule. We want equality for all Wolves. We want progress.” She waved her hand around the square. “And want a good life for all of our citizens.” She said it like it was an afterthought.

Grae let out a rough laugh. “Pickled fish and rotten vegetables is hardly the same as the things you grow in the greenhouses of your palace,”

he said. “Would you truly consider this equal?”

“Humans and Wolves equal?”

She looked at him perplexed. “You can’t compare the two. We both have such different strengths. We serve different purposes and occupy different spaces in the world. The humans wanted Wolves to rule.” Ingrid pinned him with a look. “And the Taigosi humans have the best quality of life of all the courts of Aotreas.”

I knew from the way she looked at me with the word “all”

that she was implying the Olmdere humans had it worse than the Taigosi ones. It was true. I hoped for a better life for them, worked hard to help undo all the damage Sawyn’s reign had done, but even so, the humans of Taigos were still better off.

For now.

If we weren’t under the threat of Nero, the scales would’ve tipped in our favor even sooner. In my court, it would be the humans themselves who decided what a “good life”

looked like as defined by and for themselves. And I’d do everything in my power to help them achieve it.

Grae seemed to read my mind as he tilted his head at Ingrid. “Have you asked your people?”

He considered the space around us. “Have you asked them if this is the life they want? If there is any way it could be improved?”

It was a conversation I’d had many times with my people. What did they need? What did they want? I’d asked if they even wanted me to rule and was ready to step down if they said otherwise. But in every corner of Olmdere, they saw my golden scars and demanded I stay on my parents’ throne. I’d wished for them to know peace with my dying breath, and they would hold me to account in fulfilling that promise.

Ingrid clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes at Grae. “I care about my people, Graemon, but you are seriously starting to sound like one of them. This isn’t like you.”

She set down her mug and leaned into the frozen table, resting her hand on Grae’s forearm. I forced myself not to lean forward and bite her wrist in half. “No matter your feelings, Wolves and humans are not the same. We are the shepherds and they the sheep.” She released him and leaned back, finally asking me, “Are you a queen or a sheep?”

I wanted to shout, wanted to flip the table, wanted to rage at her, and judging by the growl escaping Grae, he wanted to do all those things, too, but Briar cleared her throat and let out a soft laugh.

“What have they put in this cider?”

she tittered, trying to break the ice. I grimaced at her, and I knew she was internally cringing, too, even though her face was bright. But she pivoted to Queen Ingrid and smiled at her. “I hear that you have a herd of silver reindeer in Taigoska, Your Majesty,” she quickly diverted the conversation.

Ingrid bristled as if shaking off my comments and then turned to Briar with a new light. “They are exquisite,”

she said. “Would you like to see them?”

“I’d be delighted,”

Briar said, leaving her mug and standing. She took off with Klaus and Ingrid, casting a glance over her shoulder at me that said, “Come on, let’s go.”

I let out a long sigh, trying to release the tension in me, but my hands were still balled into fists. Maybe this was all a mistake. Maybe I needed a better tactic. I was sick of bending to the whims of a flippant Queen. Life and death were happening just beyond her borders and she was ignoring it. Maybe I just needed to do it all myself.

My cheeks were white-hot as I battled back tears. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t keep shrinking myself down to appease Ingrid. Patience was beginning to feel a lot like weakness. I was drowning here and all the while Ora was probably being tortured in a cell. I remembered what I did the last time. When it was Maez in a cell and Briar under a curse, when I was told to be patient and tempered and just wait.

No more. No more sitting on my hands and politicking and being a good little dog. My tether had finally snapped.

I fled in the middle of the night back then, and Queen or no, I could do it again now.

I was halfway out the door of my suite when a match struck to life in the hallway. My hand instinctively shot to the dagger on my hip, my years of fight training kicking in. But then that rainstorm scent swirled to me as a face I knew better than my own flickered in the burgeoning candlelight.

“You promised me never again, little fox.”

Grae’s voice held a quiet menace, softness laced with poisoned anger.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I noted that he was fully dressed. My mind spun. Had he really heard me tiptoe out of bed? Had he awoken and dressed while I packed my bag? Or had it been some sort of mate instinct, some sort of fear that I’d run off again?

“I need to get Ora,”

I said, my voice pleading. “I need to do something to help Damrienn. It’s my fault they’re suffering.”

Grae’s face softened but only for a split second before anger filled his expression again. He took one step, then another, and I found myself pacing backward into the room to keep the space between us. Grae shut the suite door behind him and lit the candelabra beside the door until the space was bright enough that his eyes were no longer cast in shadow.

“Wherever you go, I go, ,”

Grae said, echoing the words we’d promised each other so many moons ago. “To the ends of the world. To certain death. To the next life.” He set the candle back in its holder on the entry table and took another prowling step closer, his hands coming up on either side of me as he backed me into the wall. “You and I are tied together, mate. You and I are one.”

“I know,”

I whispered, my resolve breaking at that proclamation. “I just . . .” Grae searched my eyes. “I just can’t do this anymore. I can’t wait for Ingrid to understand me, if she ever will. I can’t wait for her to help us.” The words scratched out of me, and I hadn’t realized how broken this whole visit had made me until right then. “I feel like I’ve been selfish.” A tear slid down my cheek, and Grae brushed it away.

“Selfish? You?”

“I knew claiming the word ‘merem’ would be hard. I knew there would be people who wouldn’t understand.”

I swallowed the burning knot forming in my throat. “But it made me feel seen. It made me feel like me, maybe for the first time ever and . . .” I heaved a shaking breath. “And claiming that word had been so euphoric, I thought that should be enough. But what if revealing who I am will hurt our people? What if being myself comes at too steep a price?”

Tears slipped down my cheeks faster than Grae could swipe them away, and he gave up trying, pulling me into a fierce hug instead. He buried his lips in my hair, his strong arms pulling me so tightly as if he could pull my pain into his own body.

“Fuck anyone who would ever make you feel less than,”

he said. “You deserve to be exactly who you are, unconditionally and without fear.”

I sobbed as I remembered the way Ingrid looked at me in the square, the shock and disgust on her face that I would be so humanlike. It was as if I told her I hated being a Wolf. She looked at me like I’d betrayed her somehow. I felt it in that moment—her allegiance slipping through my fingers. I felt her backing away from me. And it broke me.

I sobbed harder, clinging to Grae’s shoulders as he gently rubbed circles down my back.

“Maybe being who I am comes at too high a price,”

I cried again as I stained Grae’s tunic with my tears.

“No.”

The word left his mouth before I even stopped talking. “Everything that you are, little fox—everything—is exactly as you are meant to be.”

“But Ingrid—”

“Fuck Ingrid,”

Grae snarled. “We will find another way. We’ve been bending over backward for her and the Ice Wolves. Briar has faked her heart away to that idiot Klaus. But more than all that, I’ve been watching you shrink yourself smaller and smaller in her presence. I bit my tongue because I thought it’s what you wanted, but I can’t take it anymore, either. If they can’t handle the brilliance with which you burn, , then let them all catch fire. I’d rather be standing on top of their ashes than miss the brightness of your flame.”

I let out a half laugh, half cry, my posture straightening as Grae’s finger landed under my chin and he tilted my face up to meet his storming midnight eyes. He planted a kiss on my lips, the contact making my whole body sigh. He licked the salty tears from my bottom lip and coaxed my mouth to respond. The tightness in my chest eased as my mouth molded to his.

I knew he at least could handle all I was. All the Golden Court could. All the people I represented. All the people who mattered would never ask me to dull my shine or pretend to be something I’m not.

Grae’s lips told me everything I couldn’t find the words to say: there would be another way. We would find a new path. One that didn’t break me in the process.

One that didn’t ask me to forsake merem.

His hands slid up my arms to cup my cheeks, his kisses earnest and eager. The way he cradled my head was like he was focusing me in to only him, my guiding star, the one truth that would pull me back into myself. The tears ebbed as I kissed him deeper, the sorrow morphing into yearning.

A rumble of pleasure reverberated between our mouths as Grae stilled.

“We will fight this. Together,”

he murmured against my mouth. “But I swear to all the fucking Gods, little fox, if you try to leave me behind again, I won’t be held responsible for destroying everything that stands between me and you.” His hands trailed down from my cheeks, following the curve of my body and landing on the swell of my ass. His voice was dark and pleading. “Promise me.” He rocked my hips into his hardening length, and I gasped with the power and possession in his demand.

“I promise,”

I said, and then again, my soul speaking directly to his. “I promise.”

I was about to pull him into the bedroom when a knock sounded at the door.

“Grae?”

Hector’s sleepy voice was muffled by the door.

“It’s always fucking Hector.”

Grae turned and leered at the door as I chuckled. “What do you want?” he barked.

“Queen Ingrid has heard from Nero,”

Hector called back, dousing ice on my burgeoning desire. “He’s agreed to a trade for Ora.”

I leaned past Grae, my heart leaping with the excitement before the dread cut it back down again. I stared at the shut door for a long time before asking, “In exchange for what?”