I am a beast to them. You are the only one who lets me be a man.

He is everything you fear, and worse. He is also everything you hope, and more.

I brushed my fingers over the black flames of his warrior-mark. There were secrets behind these markings. This man was full of secrets, and I wanted to unravel them.

He was carving me. Marking me. I whimpered as blood dripped down my neck. 'Mine,' he said. A threat and a promise.

The blade hovered between us. I could kill him. He could kill me. That’s how it was meant to be—there could be nothing else between us now.

If the other Westlanders were frost giants, he was a leviathan; if they were beasts, he was their king.