Free Scion (Norseton Wolves Book 4) by Holley Trent Page B

broken, but Ashley wasn’t. Not yet, anyway. She had to be as resilient as elastic after what he’d put her through, and after the way she was raised. He could pull her to the point of snapping and was in a unique position to do so. He was her mate: her husband. But he didn’t want to break her.
    Their pack needed strong wolves, and the moment, he was the weakest link.
    Not her.
     

CHAPTER NINE
    Ashley suppressed a chuckle as she gathered up the pile of Uno cards.
    “That was mean,” Ótama said with a pout.
    “It was not mean.” Ashley tamped the cards into a tidy pile and shuffled them, grinning like an idiot, probably, and she didn’t care. The Afótama matriarch embodied so many contradictions, she made Ashley’s head spin. She was small, but powerful. Naïve, but tenacious when necessary. Sweet, but aggressive. Ashley couldn’t picture the tiny brunette making much of a Viking, but she swore that’s what she was—the only daughter of the chieftain Alfarinn, and probably the most dangerous witch in the country. Ashley was happy she was a wolf and wasn’t susceptible to the choking intensity of Ótama’s energy, even at its baseline. She’d heard from some of the folks in the mansion that it was incredibly humbling.
    “Those are the rules of the game,” Ashley said. “Sometimes, your opponents get a bunch of really great cards, and their goal, obviously, is to use them to make you pick up a whole lot of cards to keep you in the game longer.”
    “I never did like games of chance.”
    “Yeah, this one definitely has the potential to raise your blood pressure. If you want to play something a little more cerebral, there’s always checkers. Or chess. I never learned to play chess, though, so I wouldn’t be much of an opponent for you.”
    “Nor did I. Perhaps we could find the rules of the game in a book and learn together.”
    “Or we could just Google them.” Ashley snapped a rubber band around the stack of cards and returned to the shelf used to store games in the Norseton mansion’s library.
    “I find Google to be terribly distracting. I do not believe I wish to fall down that rabbit hole today. Only two days ago, I went to do a search for a recipe to give to Muriel and ended up on some purveyor of filth’s website.” She pressed her hand her heart and gave her head a solemn shake.
    Ashley cringed and carefully extricated the checkers from the stack of game boxes. “Sorry about that. Eventually, you’ll develop a gut feeling for what’s not safe to click on. I imagine Internet porn would come as a shock to someone from your era.”
    “ Pah .” Ótama waved a dismissive hand and fixed her cloak around her. Beneath it, the ancient princess had on modern clothes, but the best Ashley could tell, she wore the old-fashioned cloak as a sort of security blanket. Fiddling with it seemed to give Ótama something to do with her hands. “The content did not disturb me. I am not as naive in some regards as you children insist on believing.”
    Ashley pressed her lips together, praying the laugh she tried to tamp down didn’t find an exit route via her nose. Ótama looked to be around thirty, which might have been damn near elderly back in her day, and her habit of referring to people in Ashley’s generation as children amused Ashley and the rest of the staff way too much.
    “What bothered me was the fact that they wished to receive money for it.” Ótama scoffed. “What could possibly be worth thirty American dollars?”
    “Well, just between you and me, the premium stuff is unabridged, newer, and the clips have better sets and props than the stuff you get at the freebie sites.” Ashley set the checkers box on the table and lifted the lid. “Not that I’ve been looking.”
    Ótama leaned in, holding her cloak closed at the neck, her bright eyes awash with mischief. “But is it worth thirty dollars? My descendants manage my funds. I do believe they would investigate such a charge on my