Page 31 of Griffin Food

Then she will be ours.

Rafe clears his throat, like he can read all my lusty thoughts in my eyes. “Aye,” he says. “I don’t care how long it takes or what we have to do. The brat is not coming back down from that mountain until she is good and bred.”

Chapter Nine

Rafe

We are loading the last of the packs outside the farrier’s yard, where we stowed our spare supplies, when I see him.

More than a year. Several hundred miles. Through a portal and into another world.

Maren.

It takes me a moment to place him, and that bothers me. He is moving through the morning market with his head down, buying nothing. Just moving. I know that walk. I know what it means when a man moves like that.

I finish tightening the strap on my pack and say nothing.

He served Elijah directly—which means he’s Queen Elisa’s man too. The kind of man who got things done that his lord preferred not to be associated with. Scandals covered up. I knew him by reputation before he even arrived. A thug through and through, one who created his own share of trouble. There had been talk. A kitchen maid. One of the younger ladies in Elisa’s household. Nothing had ever come of either, because nothing ever came of anything where Elijah and his men were concerned.

What the fuck is he doing here?

He turns, and his eyes find mine.

He holds them a beat too long. Deliberate. A message, maybe, or just the arrogance of a man who thinks he’s untouchable.

I look away first. Like I haven’t placed him. Keep my face easy.

“Lark,” I say quietly.

“Already on him.” A pause. “That’s one of Elijah’s dogs.”

“Aye.”

“Hydornia is a long fucking way from here.”

“Aye.”

I can feel him working through it, same as me. “She’s not going to like this.”

“She’s not going to know. Not yet.” I shoulder my pack. “We continue to the shepherd’s lodge, same as planned.”

“And if he’s not alone?”

“We deal with it.”

Behind me I can hear Violet’s voice, bright and carried on the morning air, saying her farewells to Master Pugstone on the front porch of his home. She sounds like she does when she’s close to something she wants—a particular lit-up quality that I have tried and failed not to notice.

I turn and lift my hand in acknowledgment, fighting to keep my expression neutral. We quarreled this morning. My palm is still itching to make contact with her ass. But the cold dread that sweeps through me at the thought of that bastard being in the same kingdom, never mind the same town, sets my hands shaking and my body on high alert.

The chance of Elijah being here seems remote to the extreme, but still…

Her smile knocks me for six the way it always does, despite how she bestows it upon Lark with equal measure.

I do not look back at the market.

But I listen. I count. And I do not stop counting until we are through the village and the road opens up ahead of us into the mountain pass.

Violet