Chapter Two — Room Service, Do Not Disturb (1)

By day four of her hostage situation, Layla Gray had learned three things.

One: the Wolf King of Verath had never once in his life looked at a human being and thought what would make them happy — and it showed. Two: his attempts to fix this knowledge gap were the most terrifying thing she'd ever witnessed, which was saying something, because she'd seen him kill a man with his bare hands. Three: she was in so much trouble it wasn't even funny, and not for the reason the palace thought.

The trouble started with the phone.

"Here," the King said, shoving a brand-new smartphone into her hands on day two. It was gold. Solid gold. It weighed approximately as much as a brick and had a screen saver that was a professionally framed photo of himself.

"Why is there a photo of you on my phone?"

"It's in case you forget who you belong to," said the King of the wolves, absolutely deadpan. Then, as an apparent afterthought: "It's also in case you need me. It's the second number in my contacts."

"Who's the first?"

"Locke."

"Why is Locke above you?"

"He handles my scheduling."

"So if I'm dying, I should call Locke?"

The King considered this with the gravity of a man solving a geopolitical crisis. "No," he said finally. "If you're dying, call me. I'll kill Locke for being unavailable."

Layla stared at him. "That's not how phone contacts work."

"That's how I work."

She put the phone down very carefully, like it was a live grenade. "Your Majesty. King. Sir. You do understand that I'm a hostage, right? Hostages don't get gold phones with the kidnapper's face on them. Hostages get chloroform and a basement."

"You had a basement," he said, offended. "It was damp. I had it converted into a reading nook."

Layla closed her eyes. "I don't have a reading nook."

"You do now," said the Wolf King, with the quiet certainty of a man who had conquered nations. "It has a hammock. The guard said humans like hammocks."

"The guard is lying to you."

The King's eyes went narrow. "Locke," he said, without raising his voice. A door opened somewhere down the hall.

"Yes, Your Majesty?" Locke's voice floated back, resigned.

"The human-comfort consultant you hired. Fire him."

"He was your idea, Your Majesty."

"Fire me, then," said the King of the wolves. "And hire someone who knows what a human wants."

"You're a tyrant," Layla said, from her reading nook, which did indeed have a hammock.

"Tyrant is a title of respect in this palace," the King informed her. "You may call me that if you like."

"I wasn't complimenting you."

The King's mouth did the almost-smile thing. "I know," he said, and there was something obscenely warm in it. "That's why I like it."

* * *

The second incident happened on day three, in the kitchens.

Layla had wandered down to raid the pantry — she was a hostage, not a prisoner, and the pantry was bigger than her old apartment — when a guard she'd never met blocked her path. He was young, handsome in that gym-bro way, and he looked at her the way men look at meat.

"Well, well," he said, grinning. "The King's little human pet. Heard you're pretty." He reached for her chin. "Let's see if the rumors—"

He didn't finish the sentence.

One second he was reaching for her; the next he was on the floor, and the King was standing over him with his boot on the young wolf's throat, and the temperature in the kitchen had dropped twenty degrees. The King's eyes weren't gold. They weren't even gray. They were red — the red of a live wire, of a wildfire, of the monster everyone in three nations whispered about after dark.

"Touch her again," the King said, in a voice that didn't sound human at all, "and I will remove your hands. Then your tongue. Then the rest of you, in the order that amuses me most. Do we understand each other?"

The young wolf made a sound of agreement that was mostly whimper.

The King lifted his boot. "Get out of my palace."

The wolf fled. The kitchen staff, all eleven of them, had pressed themselves against the far wall like they were being held at gunpoint by a mood.

The King turned. His eyes met Layla's. And the red drained out of them like water through a sieve, replaced by that soft, stunned gold, and his whole face went from nightmare to... worried.

"Did he scare you?" he asked.

"No," Layla said. Her voice was steadier than she felt. "You did."

The King flinched. It was tiny — a flicker, a twitch of a jaw that had probably never twitched for anyone — but she saw it.

"I apologize," he said stiffly, like the words were being extracted with pliers. "I will endeavor to scare you less in the future."

"You don't need to—"

"I will endeavor," he repeated, "to scare you less." And then he bowed — bowed, the Butcher of Verath, in front of his entire terrified staff — and left the kitchen.

Locke materialized beside her, holding a plate of pastries he'd somehow acquired mid-drama.

"So," he said, biting into a croissant. "Fun fact about the King: he's killed, conservatively, four hundred and twelve people. I counted. He's never once apologized to a single one of them. Not one. He once made a vampire duke cry and described it as 'a satisfying Tuesday'."

Layla looked at the doorway where the King had vanished.

"And then he met you," Locke went on, "and now he's out there right now, probably searching the internet for a manual on how to apologize to a human hostage without traumatizing her further, because he's never once had to apologize to anyone and he has no idea what he's doing."

"That's..." Layla didn't know what to say.

"Terrifying?" Locke offered. "Adorable? Both? Both. It's both. Welcome to the most dangerous situation in the supernatural world, lady. You're the only person in existence who can make the Butcher of Verath nervous, and I gotta say, watching it is better than any show on television."

* * *

That night, the palace was quiet. Layla couldn't sleep.

She sat on the windowsill of her reading-nook-suite — fine, her suite — looking out over the city of Verath, glittering below like a circuit board in the dark. Somewhere out there, humans were living their normal lives. Microwaving forks. Locking themselves out of apartments. Not being held hostage by the most dangerous creature in the known world, who apparently thought hammocks were the key to the human heart.