Chapter 27
King Declan Calloway
The chamber beneath the arena was colder than the grave, wet stone bleeding chill through the soles of my shoes.
It was almost dusk, so the moon was barely visible in the winter sky.
Down here, light filtered in only as sickness, a thread of mercury seeping in through the grates and falling in trembling streaks over the table, the altar, the floor where Dominic would either die or become unkillable.
The place reeked of centuries-old sweat and the yellow of fresh fear.
I breathed it deep. The copper in the air would be worse soon enough. I made sure no one could make entry.
Dominic was already in the circle, stripped to his skin as Moira commanded.
His flesh was marbled with pale, bloodless streaks, his veins webbing blue beneath the surface like worms pressed between glass slides.
He shivered. Not from the cold—no, I recognized the shudder of a man preparing himself for a pain he could not conceptualize.
His tongue darted across his lips, flicked at the dust of words he couldn’t say.
Moira circled him, barefoot and silent as a shadow, drawing lines in the salt with a sprig of something brown and leafless.
Her eyes were voids; even when the candlelight splashed across her face, it was as if the light gave up and drowned there.
Her hands moved with predatory grace. The sigils she drew on the stones seemed to shimmer, then fix, as if the world itself was reluctant to let them stick.
“Do not move,” she whispered to Dominic, not looking at him. “If you move, you’ll tear the boundary and invite everything in at once.”
He looked at me, desperate for assurance. I gave him nothing.
Moira muttered in her death-dry tongue. I heard only fragments—words about teeth, and debt, and the part of the moon that does not turn to face us.
Then she leaned in, pressing her palm to Dominic’s chest. Her fingers left behind a smear of gray powder that began to sink into his skin, as if his body was thirsty for it.
Dominic gasped. Not a scream. Not yet. But close.
Moira’s hands blurred. She produced a knife from her belt—its blade old, blackened, the hilt a tangle of wire and bone.
She made the first cut below his right collarbone, and the sound it made was not the sound of a knife going into flesh, but the wet rasp of something burrowing out.
Dominic’s back arched, muscles clawing up from beneath his ribs.
Moira slashed again, down the length of his sternum, then along the curve of his hip.
She was drawing runes—not simple lines, but entire alphabets—onto his body, inking them with his own blood.
He screamed now. The sound wasn’t human. It was the scream of a wolf gutted and hung upside-down, of a kingdom’s last heir dying for nothing. I felt the hair rise on my neck.
Moira chanted. The wounds did not clot. Instead, they blossomed, the edges writhing, knitting and unknitting as if the flesh was thinking about what it wanted to be.
Dominic bucked, heels pounding the stone, but the salt ring held.
Moira’s eyes rolled back, the white showing and then going gray as ash.
She bent low and whispered into his ear. Dominic’s jaw clamped so tight the bone creaked. Blood streamed down his chest, pooling in the hollow above his belly. Moira dipped her fingers in it, then painted the last sigil on his forehead. She stepped back, out of the circle.
The power hit like a car crash. Dominic’s spine bent backward, and for a second I saw every rib through the skin, straining to break free.
The runes on his body caught fire, blue and orange, burning without heat, and the air filled with the stink of ozone and black pepper.
His eyes rolled, turned black, then gold, then something else.
Moira watched, arms crossed. “It will end soon,” she said, but she looked at me when she said it, not at him.
Dominic thrashed, then stilled. His body jerked, every muscle spasming at once.
I thought he would snap in half. But then, with a final convulsion, he collapsed into a heap, panting, half-conscious.
The runes on his chest had stopped bleeding.
Instead, they seemed to have sunk under the skin, glowing faintly, like the filaments of a light bulb behind thick glass.
Moira knelt, finger to his throat. She nodded, satisfied. “It’s done.”
I stepped forward, careful to avoid the lines of salt and the crust of drying blood. I gripped the king by the back of his neck and hauled him upright. His head lolled. Then his gaze snapped into focus, hard as a diamond. He looked up at me with pupils so wide there was almost no blue left.
He flexed his hand. It cracked like dry wood. Then he grinned, feral, and reached for the metal goblet on the table. With a flick of his wrist, he crushed it to a wad of tin and let it clatter to the stones.
“I can feel it, Declan,” he hissed, his voice a grate dragged over wet stone. “I could tear Menace limb from limb with my bare hands now.”
“You may have to,” I said. I let him stand on his own, watching his balance.
He trembled, but with the excitement of a dog straining at a leash, not from weakness.
“Do not overplay your hand. The first minutes are critical. They’ll expect you to fight like a wounded animal.
Give them what they expect, then break it off in the wolf’s throat. ”
Dominic nodded, still flexing his fingers. “You want his head, or should I rip out his heart?”
“Both. And you will make it memorable. The Council needs to see the old law reasserted. But above all, you must finish him. Leave nothing for the scavengers.”
Moira lingered behind us, cleaning her blade with a scrap of salt-stiff linen.
“It is not permanent,” she said, her voice hollow.
“He will be strong for a little over an hour tonight. Then the body slowly starts to weaken. If you want it to last, you will need to repeat the ritual. Or accept the consequences.”
Dominic didn’t even look at her. “I only need an hour.”
I dismissed Moira with a flick of my hand. She gathered her things and faded into the dark. I’d already resolved to have her killed once this was over. Menace was a problem, but witches with debts to my family were a liability that grew teeth in the dark.
Dominic rolled his shoulders. The wounds on his chest had already stopped bleeding. His skin was hot to the touch, his pulse rapid as a hummingbird’s. I handed him a cloak, the old kind, thick and black, the lining stiff with velvet. He shrugged it on, wincing as it settled over his raw flesh.
We walked together up the corridor, away from the salt and blood and wet stone.
At the foot of the stairway, I stopped him.
“When you go out there, you’ll be watched by every king and traitor who did not stand with us.
Do not let them see your fear. Remember, you are more than a king tonight. You are a weapon.”
He smiled, teeth sharp as razors. “I am.”
“And what of Savannah after?” he asked, not as an afterthought, but as a man considering the problem of leftovers from a particularly rich meal.
“You will keep her sedated until the bond is cleanly gone. We cannot have her running, or killing herself in a fit of romance. If you win—and you will—you will hold her, and you will let her see what her choices have cost.”
Dominic licked the blood off his lips. “And the witch?”
I didn’t hesitate. “She must be eliminated. No one can ever know what we’ve done here today.” I made a note to call Callum later. He was always best at cleanup.
Dominic laughed, the sound gone ragged with the echoes of agony. “Let the Council try to prove it. The witch will be dead before dawn.”
He started up the stairs, climbing two at a time, the black cloak flaring behind him. I let myself smile. Relief that I’d have my miserable daughter under my control in a matter of hours and secure not only the Eastern territories but the Midwest as well.
I lingered a moment in the quiet, then followed. By the time I reached the top, the sounds of the arena were already pulsing through the walls: the drums, the howl of thousands, the promise of violence waiting for us above.
Whatever it took, whatever it cost. My kingdom would remain and expand.
The corridor from the chamber to the arena was a throat lined in bone.
The stone overhead sagged with the weight of two centuries’ worth of challenge, every inch scarred and pitted from the passage of kings and killers.
The guards who met us at the foot of the stairs did not speak.
They wore the livery of the Council—silver on blue, hoods up, faces shadowed—but their heads dropped as we passed, the deference automatic, the kind of obedience you only get when everyone believes you capable of anything.
Dominic walked ahead of me, the black cloak trailing in a wake of velvet, the edges already sticky with old blood and the sweat of the condemned.
The silver chains that bound the front were thick, heavy, but they did not slow him.
If anything, they seemed to amplify his stride, each step a slow-motion violence.
He flexed his fingers as he went, the new runes beneath his skin itching for release.
“Remember, they’ll be watching for the change,” I said, low enough that only he could hear. “Don’t let it take you too soon. If you lose control, you’ll go feral before you ever reach Menace.”
Dominic rolled his neck until it cracked, then shot me a grin. “I can hold it, Declan. I’ve never felt more alive.” He meant it, too; the usual tremor in his hands was gone, replaced by a tremor in the air itself.
We reached the final landing, the iron gates that divided the underground from the stage above.
Two more guards waited here, armed with pikes that glittered with a fine dusting of silver.
They stood aside when I nodded, their eyes fixed firmly to the floor.
The rules were the rules: at this point, the king’s word was as good as law.
Above, the crowd was already a living animal, its voice a thousand-headed thing that vibrated the mortar loose.
I could smell them—sweat, wolf, vampire musk, the ozone of demon magic.
Every great house had sent an envoy. The cameras would be streaming to every territory.
I watched as one of the guards checked Dominic’s wrists for forbidden weapons, then drew back, confused to find nothing but bare skin, the runes all but invisible under the darkening flesh.
I stepped close, straightening his collar, readying it to fall away with his shift. Dominic bore it like a child suffering a final fuss from an overbearing mother. But when I touched his jaw, I felt it: the furnace heat under the skin; the heart drumming triple-time. He was ready.
“This is not just a fight,” I whispered. “It’s a reckoning. If you lose, your line ends. If you win, no one will dare question the old laws again. Do you understand?”
He nodded. “Of course I do. Remember, I am also a king, Declan.”
I let the words hang between us. I wanted to say something else, but the moment for royal sentiment had passed centuries before either of us was born.
One of the guards signaled, and the gates began to rise. The scrape of iron on stone was nearly lost in the roar from above. Dominic braced himself, flexed his hands one final time. I took my place at the side, in the shadow where the firsts wait for their fighters to prove themselves or die.
At the top, the Council’s stage was set: a circle of packed dirt, surrounded by tiers of stone benches, every seat filled with something dangerous or beautiful or both.
The arena was rimmed with torches, their flames blue and white, burning without smoke.
At the far end, the dais for the Council, the Chairwoman in her robes of authority, flanked by the other adjudicators.
I could see the box where Menace’s people sat.
Savannah sat with Bronc’s whore of a Luna, and all the traitors who voted against us also joined them.
They’d somehow even had the Kozlovs—Kazimir and Lucia—with the patient hunger of old money in their box.
They’d all feel my wrath when their man fell.
Across the pit, Menace and his first Bronc appeared. Menace stood in a cloak of battered leather and arrogance. Soon he’d be nothing but blood and memory.
Dominic took a breath and stepped into the light. The runes on his chest were hidden from the eyes of everyone. No one would know he had a significant advantage over the mutt. There was a ripple in the crowd, a collective intake of air.
The Chairwoman’s voice rang out over the arena: “Let all witnesses record the rite of challenge. By ancient law, by the will of the Council, by the blessing of the Goddess, two men enter, and one will leave. No weapons save those born of flesh. All debts paid in blood. Once the battle begins, it shall not end until only one stands.”
A hush fell. The only sound was the torch flame; the animal whisper of wolves on the wind.
Dominic let his cloak fall. He wore nothing underneath. The crowd’s roar rose again.
I locked eyes with Menace across the pit. He gave me a small, mocking nod. He knew somehow, that we had cheated, that the deck was loaded. But he was still here. Still ready to die for a girl he’d only known months.
Dominic stepped forward, and so did Menace.
The next moment would decide everything.
I stood at the edge, hands clasped behind my back, every muscle locked. There was no prayer for what was about to happen. There was only law, and blood, and the hope that when it was over, my daughter would know the pain that she had caused me.
The horn sounded, and both Dominic and Menace instantly shifted, their wolves both magnificent.
The battle had begun.