Dire Bound (The Wolves of Ruin, #1)

by Sable Sorensen

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my twenty-three years alive, it’s this: Women in pain give men confidence. It stirs up something instinctive, deep inside them, that makes them believe they have the upper hand, even if every logical piece of evidence screams at them they do not.

He helped me hone my anger from something feral into something vicious, polished. Dangerous.

Even though my wound has healed, my muscles still ache, hot and insistent. They’re locking up and screaming at me for overworking them. My hands are basically blocks of ice. My head still pounds from the bonding. But that’s life. It’s always been my life. Pain and persistence.

I lean into the pain, into the indignant fury at the injustice of what’s happening. It fuels me.

I’ve been on my own before, and I haven’t let it kill me yet. I’m not going to start today.

I’ve always used pain to fuel my anger, to keep myself going. It washes over me, burning and biting, and I swallow it down. It ignites something in me. Something merciless. Determined. Unstoppable.

But all the food we couldn’t have ended up here, in Bonded bellies. The fuel for our fires ended up in these hearths. The taxes and the lowered wages, too, all so that the Bonded could hire servants to open their doors for them and sleep on silky sheets. We’re all putting our lives on the line in the war against the Siphons. Why should the Bonded get this luxury when soldiers on the front line are struggling, when commoners are starving to death and living in fear?

“You fucked with the wrong woman,” a voice growls—mine, I realize belatedly—as I tear his jaw open and slam his own severed hand into it.

So I do what I always do when faced with a seething man. I lift my chin and meet his furious glare.