He doesn’t need to look to hear it in her voice, the whittled sharpness of something almost bestial at heart. Fanged and barbed, and far more dangerous than the uninformed might guess. The part of her that first drew his eye— the part he never needed to fully glimpse in all its violent glory to know it was there.

He’d bragged to Fenris about it, once. Now, all he does is bask in its otherwise silent presence.

His voice practically curls like the tail of a cat. Smooth from wickedness alone when he asks, “How bloody were their deaths?”