Osvald grinned again, and released Nick’s hand. “They call you the Iron Prince.”
Janna remained close, and only when her mate was speaking did she smile as well. “Seems you might have actually deserved the name.”
Nick looked over at her and then around at his people standing nearby, almost all of whom were smiling at the name. “I’m better with swords than I am with crowns. I’ve never found them to be of much use.”
“No?” Janna said as she looked around. “Looks like you have plenty of material to make one, though.”
“I’m not worried about the crown right now. At the moment I’m more worried about the bullets and the knives. When there’s peace again, we can worry about crowns.”
They nodded and took a few steps backwards. “After the Fulness, we’ll speak again.” Janna promised, sounding more and more convinced with each passing moment.
It wasn’t long until they disappeared completely, leaving the Ironborn pack and their newest additions. It was then that Zara approached him with a smile. “That went well, don’t you think?”
“We knew the Earthborn outliers would come easily. They’re as pissed on and generally pissed off as we are, most of the time.” He sighed and rubbed at his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me about the other three Alphas coming in?”
“I only just found out a little while ago.” She moved closer to him, but she didn’t touch him, since she didn’t want to make him feel uncomfortable. You didn’t need your mind weighed down by the thought of all that while you spoke with the Swedes. They needed to see the confident and controlled wolf that I know you are when you’re not overwhelmed.
When will they be here? He was annoyed with the fact that he hadn’t been told, but there was nothing to be done about it, so he just moved past it.
They said to expect them not too long after the Fulness.
We’ll expect them, then. He sighed and looked back at the faces of his people all around them, all of whom were whispering among themselves. As he looked at them, many of them bowed toward him, some of them knelt, as whispers of ‘Iron Prince’ went around the pack like wildfire. He could hear it moving even faster through their thoughts by way of Zara’s link to him, and it spun his head even worse than it had after the events of the day so far.
VII
Aura was always up early in the morning in recent days, and especially with the Fulness starting that evening, she felt even more anxious than ever. Just feeling the pull of the tiny lives inside of her toward the power of the moon was enough to keep her moving in her sleep and give her insomnia for hours at a time.
Ziem hadn’t exactly moved in with her since his declaration, but he might as well have. He had everything at her house that mattered, with the exception of some clothes that he didn’t really care for out in a tent. Obviously living in an actual house made of metal was better for him than living in a tent, so she couldn’t blame him for being happy to ‘move’ in with her.
She also liked the fact that there was someone sleeping next to her on the bed, even though they hadn’t been intimate. She was so conflicted about so much else in her life that she couldn’t convince herself to say yes to that just yet.
A few rays of sun were bursting through the cracks in the window, and she turned onto her side to look over at Ziem. Aura reached out slowly and ran her fingers across his forehead to brush his hair away from his face, then smiled gently as she watched him sleep. She was learning things about him one day at a time, the hundred intimate details of a person she always wondered about when they were young but never had the opportunity to experience about him before his exile. He could sleep through just about anything, even her thrashing about, which was nice. He was good for her, and she knew that she had feelings for him that had lasted throughout the years. She wanted to make a good life with him.
Part of the reason why he’d been able to sleep through just about everything around him, including her thrashing, was that he hadn’t slept on a proper metal bed in quite some time. He had to keep up at least the appearance of being human during his exile. It was a strange relationship that they were starting to build, mostly because Ziem was so free in talking about the human girls he’d been with fairly often while he was away from the pack, while the one thing the two of them never spoke about was Aura’s own romantic history. Ziem hadn’t had a real relationship with any of the human women, and so he felt safe talking about them as though they didn’t matter. They weren’t wolves, and so none of them, he made sure to remind her, could compare with her.
He stirred somewhat in his sleep, but didn’t wake in the slightest as he turned toward her, snoring even more loudly in the process.
She actually laughed softly as she watched him, but then she leaned in and kissed his forehead before she snuggled in closer to him. They didn’t always cuddle, really, because she was moving so much in her sleep. But now that she was awake and feeling even more energized by the coming Fulness, she just wanted to be closer to him.
He wasn’t Nick. He wasn’t Orlando. But he was Ziem, and she was finding out a lot of things that proved that he was just as good as anyone else. Possibly better, since he was willing to look past what she wasn’t to what she was.
He actually growled eagerly
