Chapter 12 Behind Locked Doors

• It began small, the way cruelty in a mate bond often does, easing in sideways instead of announcing itself. A sharp word after a long patrol, a comment about her weak shift dressed up as a joke among his men, a night he came home carrying another wolf's scent on his collar and dared her, with his eyes, to say something about it. Ivy, who had spent her whole life being the one who wounded, who had never once had to learn how to absorb a blow instead of deliver one, did not know how to be the one wounded now, and she fought back the only way she knew, with her own sharp tongue, her own raised hand, her own wolf snapping uselessly at the edges of a bond gone sour before it had ever properly ripened.
• It was not a fair fight, and it never had been from the very first week. Damon's wolf was strong where hers had always been small and half formed, and a mate bond with a wolf like that did not soften him the way the old stories promised bonds were supposed to. It only gave him a longer leash, a claim he could point to whenever anyone asked why the princess never came to the village markets anymore, why her laugh, once sharp and quick, had gone quiet and careful.
• The first time Damon struck her, open handed and sudden, over some argument neither of them could later have named the cause of, she struck him back out of pure animal anger, refusing even then to simply take it, and it was that, more than anything, that unleashed something in him she would spend years learning to fear properly, the way you learn to fear weather once you've survived one real storm. He beat her until she could not stand, until the room went white and ringing at the edges, and ordered his own guards to lock her in a cell beneath the east wing with no food and no light, and told them, in the flat, absolute voice of an Alpha used to being obeyed without question, that no one, not the villagers, not her father the King, was to know where she was.