The Darkest Wolves - A.K. Koonce Page 0,19

Zilo warns, his finger pointing at me like he’s shaming a puppy instead of a full-grown woman right now.

“Fine.” I force a smile to my lips and hold Zilo’s hard gaze.

I note the way his attention shifts over my body, my tattered shirt and tight pants. It’s a heated, lingering look that he corrects in the blink of any eye.

“She’s going to get us all killed,” Roman growls.

“No, she won’t.” Avian shakes his head adamantly, setting loose some of his shining dark locks into those silver eyes.

A silence falls over the room as the three of them seem to have a passing of words without using actual words. Two of the three still have a heavy furiousness weighting their brows.

As for me, I just wait. I stand trial before these three men who brought me here to help save their kingdom.

Now, they’re ready to throw me to the wolves already.

“Get going,” Zilo commands without so much as a second glance my way. “Dinner starts in ten minutes.”

He’s striding out the door and down the darkness of the hall before my mind even processes what that means.

They still want me.

They need me anyway.

And that’s good enough for now.

Seven

Brothers

They don’t have me change for the royal dinner. The three men dine in nothing but their pants and boots covering their hard bodies. All I can think about is how one hot spill of tea will scar a nipple or two if they’re not careful.

Not that I mention it. They’re not my nipples to care about after all.

I suppose I just expected more glamour from the kingdom of hell. Instead, I’m surrounded by tattered shirts and blood splattered jeans everywhere I look.

And as for the notorious dark prince, he’s nowhere to be seen.

Literally I’m just luncheoning with a few hell fae whose glittering black horns reach high above the crowds, drawing my attention to their depthless onyx eyes and pointed ashen-stained ears. Rows of sharp cutting teeth rip apart their food, and they cackle with laughter and half masticated meat still hanging from their lips as they chatter restlessly with one another.

They’re not like the fae my grandmother read to me about. They’re not alluring and enchanting at all.

They’re fucking terrifying.

“Don’t stare,” Rome says on a growl of a whisper. He says it while lifting a black cup of ale to his lips and taking a big drink. He drinks for so long my attention lingers on the sharp lines of his jaw…his throat…his—

“I said don’t stare,” he growls again as he lowers the cup and digs into the meat on his plate.

I avert my eyes to my own plate of charred food. I have no idea what the meat is, and it makes me slightly uncomfortable to know that none of these people care if this is a beef steak or a human steak.

Both options seem feasible.

My shoulders remain squared, my spine hard as I sit like a small child between Zilo’s enormous body and Roman’s. Their elbows knock into my arms with every bite they take.

Everyone here is animalistic. Including the few half shifters whose tails sweep back and forth behind their chairs. A beautiful woman with big brown eyes and furry fox-like pointed ears sits diagonal from me, just next to Avian, but neither of them speak to one another.

She howls with laughter as the two women across from her snap off line after line about how they ran out to honor the full moon in their human form. Without a stitch of clothing.

I search discreetly from table to table, but I don’t spot the white-faced woman with the alarming black lips I met the second I stepped foot here.

I don’t know why I look for her, but I do.

The thousands of people in this room, they’re happy, but they don’t intermingle.

The men around me are High Hell. They should only associate with other High Hell, it seems.

And yet, they’re so fucking silent the only words they pass to one another are grunts of approval about the meat they’re eating so quickly I swear they’re more dog than man at this moment.

Disgusting.

“Good hellish evening, friends,” a voice booms over us, raining down on me so hard I feel those words vibrate through my chest in a sense of anxious adrenaline.

There’s a quiet that cuts through the darkly lit dining hall. All that manic laughter and scuttling talk ceases to exist, and every eye in the room is lifted to a spot high on the wall that I wasn’t even aware