Chapter 28 #2
Juliet pulled me up, set me on my feet, and looked into my face like she needed confirmation the world was real. “He did it,” she whispered, shaking her head. “He actually fucking did it.”
I nodded, not trusting my voice, and pressed my face into Menace’s neck. I felt his pulse, erratic but alive, and tasted salt and iron where I bit him by accident.
The crowd was finding its voice now. There were cheers, yes, but also gasps and the low, ugly rumble of the Council’s own guard, who lined the perimeter and bristled at the sight of their champion’s death.
There was a second, deeper layer to the noise, too—a kind of animal yelp, sharp and panicked, as the scent of fresh blood reached the balconies.
If you’d never heard a room of supernaturals scent a kill, you don’t know what fear is.
We barely made it two steps before a klaxon sounded and the whole arena went pitch dark.
Spotlights slammed on, blinding everyone, and the big screens above the pit flickered to life, showing a blurry security feed.
For a second, I thought they were going to replay the fight.
Instead, the camera zoomed in on my father, Declan, standing in a cold stone room with a witch beside him.
The sound cut in, echoing around the chamber: “You promised he would win,” Declan hissed at the witch, voice shaking with more than just rage. “You said the mutt would never survive him.”
The witch’s face stayed calm. “I promised a temporary advantage, Your Grace. I made it clear to Callum—your son, as he explained so forcefully—that the magic would wear off with time. I cannot control your daughter’s betrothed’s incompetence.”
A gasp ran through the gallery. They were broadcasting the evidence of cheating, and not even the most loyal bastard in the room could deny it.
The video cut to another feed—Callum, my brother, in a hallway with the same witch, handing her a fistful of gold and a vial of what looked like my own blood. “It’s hers,” he hissed, “straight from the source. Use it.”
The video cut again. Declan, pacing, ranting: “If the Council discovers this, you are dead. We all are. Is that clear?”
The screens went dark. The house lights snapped back on.
All hell broke loose. Council members shot to their feet, some shouting, others turning on each other, a few openly laughing.
The East’s seats emptied in a slow-motion exodus, the faces in those rows tight and ashen.
At the head of the dais, the Councilwoman banged her gavel, the sound useless against the chaos.
Amid all this, I was still holding Menace, half-sobbing, half-laughing. We’d won. We’d actually fucking won.
Then I heard the scream. Not from the pit, not from the Council, but from directly behind me.
Declan barreled through the mass of bodies, shoving guards out of the way, his face a color I’d never seen—bloodless, veins showing blue under the skin.
He fixed his eyes on me, and I realized with a sick certainty that nothing in the last twenty-four hours mattered.
I would always be prey, and he would always be the wolf at the end of my story.
He hit me hard enough to knock the air from my lungs, driving me into the stone wall. I heard Bronc shout, and Juliet curse, and someone in the crowd start to laugh—a thin, brittle giggle that belonged in a hospital ward, not an arena.
Declan’s hand closed around my throat. He squeezed. The world went gray at the edges, then white. I clawed at his fingers but got nothing. He leaned in close, his breath sour with whiskey and hatred. “You think you’ve won?” he spat, voice a splinter. “You will never be free. You’ll never—”
Menace broke him off. He wrapped his arm around Declan’s neck and yanked him away, the movement so fast and savage I barely saw it. They went down together, rolling across the ground, a tangle of blood and muscle and old, unspeakable fury.
They wrestled, less a fight than a slow-motion homicide. Declan clawed at Menace’s face, and Menace just kept squeezing, cutting off the blood to his brain. They rolled across the arena floor, into the legs of Council guards who only watched, too shocked or too delighted to intervene.
Finally, Declan went limp. Menace let go, shoved him aside, and staggered back to me. He knelt, cradling my face in his hands. “Red,” he whispered, “you okay?”
I tried to nod, but my neck wouldn’t hold me up. “You’re bleeding,” I said. “Everywhere. Please. You have to—”
He smiled, blood in his teeth. “Don’t worry. We’re wolves remember? My wounds are already starting to heal.”
In the lull, the Councilwoman’s voice rang out. “The challenge is decided. The mate bond stands. The Council recognizes the new—” She never finished.
Declan got up. His face was purple now, veins bulging, eyes wild. He didn’t run at me, though. This time, he aimed for Menace. There was a knife in his hand, pulled from somewhere in the folds of his ruined suit.
He screamed, “You’ve destroyed everything!” and drove the blade at Menace’s chest.
I moved, but not fast enough. Menace blocked the first blow, but the second caught him just under the ribs. A wet, sickening thunk that made me want to vomit. Declan twisted the blade.
The guards swarmed him then, pinning him to the ground. But it didn’t matter. The knife was in Menace’s chest, all the way to the hilt.
He fell, catching himself on his hands. The blood pooled around him, dark and spreading. He looked up at me, and his eyes were full of something I’d never seen before—fear, maybe, or the sudden, animal knowledge that everything he’d fought for could be taken away in an instant.
“Savannah,” he said, and then collapsed.
I caught him as he went down, blood turning the front of my clothing into a sticky second skin. I pressed my hands to the wound, trying to hold him together. His heart was still beating, but the tempo was wrong again, slowing and skipping and then stopping for whole seconds at a time.
He looked at me, and his mouth shaped my name, but no sound came out.
The world shrank to a tiny dot. Just the two of us, his dying, and my inability to do anything about it.
I screamed for help, but it wasn’t enough. It never was.
Menace’s blood was hot and too slick for me to grip the wound closed from where the knife had been, but I pressed my palm there anyway, bracing his body on the sandy floor of the arena.
He blinked, once, and the eye that wasn’t swollen shut rolled up to find me.
“Savannah,” he said, and the word was wet with red.
“My mate.” His fingers tightened on my wrist, then twitched away.
I kept calling for help, not knowing who was around me or what they were doing.
Maybe it was the Council, maybe Juliet, maybe just the dead wolf inside my head who refused to believe in endings.
I heard Bronc cursing, heard boots shuffling in the sand, but the world had collapsed to a hole barely big enough for the two of us.
I threw myself across his body as the bond between us shrank and shrank, thinning to a thread, a wire, a ghost of itself.
I felt his heartbeat stutter and then skip.
Once, twice. The third time, it didn’t come back.
“NO! Don’t you leave me! Bridger! Come back to me! You can’t leave me alone! You won! We won! Please!” I sobbed uncontrollably.
He went slack. The blue of his lips bled into gray.
I pressed my mouth to his, desperate, as if I could give him my own air, but the world’s best CPR couldn’t raise the dead.
The thread snapped. It was the sound of a violin string breaking in a dead-silent concert hall.
The pain was so sharp and final that for a second I thought I’d been stabbed too. Maybe I had.
I wailed, my face in his throat, the world refusing to end but also refusing to keep going. His body stayed warm, but the soul inside it was gone. I rocked him, muttering his name over and over until the noise dried up in my mouth.
That was when the hush hit the arena. I didn’t notice at first. But then the silence was a weight, a tidal shift that crushed every living thing flat. I looked up, expecting the Council to have fled, or the guards to be dragging Declan away for execution.
Instead, the entire crowd had parted in a ripple, everyone staring at the far stairwell.
A figure was descending the steps. He was tall, seven feet, and he wore white, just white, not the blue of the Council or the silver of a king.
His hair was long, white-gold, and it trailed behind him like a sheet in a hurricane.
His face was beautiful the way icebergs are beautiful: too sharp, too old, too indifferent to care who it killed.
He moved with a slowness that was not hesitation but mercy, as if every step down the stairs was a gift to the crowd, giving them time to reckon with what they were about to see. He never took his eyes off me. Not once.
When he reached the pit, he walked through the guards as if they were smoke. I’d moved off to where I was seated next to Menace’s body, and he knelt at my side and set a hand on my shoulder. His skin was cool, but it didn’t sting. It just was. He looked down at Menace, then at me.
“May I?” His voice was so low I didn’t know if I heard it or just felt it vibrating in my chest.
I nodded. I couldn’t have said no even if I’d wanted to.
He placed his palm over the wound. I expected fireworks, or light, or some movie-bullshit about grace and salvation. There was none of that. There was only the slow, steady pressure of his hand, and the way the blood seemed to flow backwards, rising from the sand and knitting into the torn skin.
He whispered something in a language I didn’t know. The syllables wrapped around my brain, slippery and untranslatable, but I understood them anyway: hunger is not the same as evil, mercy is not the same as weakness, all debts are paid in flesh.
The wound closed. Menace shuddered, once, then again. The coldness in his body drained away, replaced by the animal heat I had always felt burning under his skin. His chest rose. He coughed, spat blood, then sucked in air like he’d never tasted it before.
The bond flared back to life, and I gasped from the feel of it. Other than that, I didn’t move. I just stared.
The white-haired man sat back on his heels, wiped a streak of blood from his wrist, and looked at me with eyes that were the color of winter sunlight on new snow. “This one’s important,” he said. “Try not to lose him again.”
He got up, flicked the blood onto the sand, and left. Just like that. No applause, no explanation. I knew the angels didn’t interact with the Council more than necessary and was shocked he’d taken the time for us. Something profound had just occurred.
Menace’s eyes opened. They found mine. He smiled, small and weak, but real. “Did you miss me?” he croaked.
I was too spent to cry, too empty to laugh, but I held his face between my hands and said, “Never do that to me again.”
He nodded. “Not if I can help it.”
I kissed him. I didn’t care that it was bloody and awful and the whole world was watching. He was alive. We were alive. Sometimes that was the only miracle that mattered.
The Councilwoman banged her gavel, but I didn’t hear the verdict. The only thing I heard was the thrum of the bond between us, alive and electric, the thread rewoven, unbreakable.
After what seemed like forever, Bronc and Juliet helped us to our feet. Menace was stronger than he had a right to be. I guess when an angel breathes on you; you bounce back quicker than not.
He had entered the arena Bridger “Menace” Hardin, VP of Iron Valor MC. He was walking out Bridger “Menace” Hardin, King of the Midwestern Wolf Territories. And I remained his one true fated mate.