Layla
He didn't say a single word as they left the market square behind, the heavy silence stretching between them like spidersilk, fragile, easily broken, but unexpectedly strong.
Not when she slid into step beside him, falling into rhythm of those long, lethal strides that ate up the distance like a dark promise.
Not when the people stared, not at him, for once; the terrifying King, but at her. The girl the Wolf King had claimed.
He led her deeper, through the guts of the city, not the polished marble dream the bards of other lands liked to sing about; all gilded domes and false grandeur—but the brutal truth of it.The raw, exposed bone.
Stone skeletons of crumbling towers clawed at the bruised sky. Ivy choked and clawed over shattered battlements like a desperate disease.
Black rot stained the corners of derelict buildings, spreading like a sickness.
Down streets where smithies glowed like dying stars, the rhythmic clang of hammers echoing—boys barely out of childhood hammering old, broken blades into farming tools, reshaping death into reluctant life.
Past wells where women gathered for water, their laughter a little too loud, their smiles stretched a little too hard, thin veils of pride pulled tight over the dark bruises of their lives.
This was the heart of the beast. This was what Belstram ruled. A place that refused to die, clinging to existence with blood and hammered steel and the last, ragged gasps of stubborn, defiant hope.
"Why are you showing me this?" she finally asked, the question torn from her chest,their combined breath fogging the chill air between them, heart already too full, too heavy with the weight of their suffering, of their resilience.
Belstram didn't answer. Not right away. He just walked, silent and relentless, the heart of the broken kingdom.
She followed him through the city's arteries of ruin until they reached its very edge, where the broken road split into three jagged, uncertain paths—all of them winding like open wounds into distant mountains choked high up into storm clouds promising ice and fury.
There, he stopped.
There, he turned to her, his dark cloak snapping behind him like a banner no one dared challenge, a symbol of power in a place that had forgotten ceremony.
"I needed someone who could see this," he said, his voice low and graveled, like stone grinding against stone, raw with an unspoken vulnerability that stole my breath. "See it, and not flinch away in disgust. Not run screaming back to where they came from."
His eyes dropped to her hands—still stained green from crushed herbs, still bearing the dirt of the market square, the indelible mark of healing.
"You looked at this kingdom," his mouth twisted then, a complex contortion of bitterness, of deep-seated hurt, and bewildering wonder.
"You looked at this ruin like it was worth saving. Even when I couldn't see it anymore myself."
And then—before she could rethink it, or retreat into the safety of herself, she reached out.
Took his hand.
It was large, calloused, scarred, the hand of a warrior king. And it was trembling.
She held it anyway. Held him. A small, fragile anchor for them both in the face of the overwhelming truth.
His eyes fluttered shut for one heartbeat, the armor cracking just enough for her to glimpse the devastation within.
And when he opened them again—he smiled.
Not the half-lidded smirk of a predator assessing prey. Not the cold, brutal smile of the king on his throne.
A real smile.
Sharp. Beautiful. Devastating in its unexpected vulnerability. It broke more of something inside her.
God, she was in trouble. Deep, trouble.
"Come," he said again, his voice quiet and rough and so soft it felt like a caress, like a promise whispered into the wind.
"There's more I want you to see. More you need to understand."
And like a fool, like a queen stepping onto a battlefield, like whatever cursed, wild thing she had become in this savage land, she followed, into the gathering storm.