Chapter 11
ADRIEN
Looking down at Raana, flushed and half-nude beside him, for a moment, Adrien felt like an idiot—and an asshole.
His own body was still wound up tight, the scent of her arousal still staining his senses.
He wanted her. Goddess, he wanted her. So damn much he’d nearly marked her moments ago.
It had been a tremendous effort of discipline not to give in to her demands on the couch.
To not tear off what remained for them both, plunge his cock inside her, and let her ride him until they were both screaming. Forget who could hear them.
But he couldn’t do that; he couldn’t allow her to give herself to him without telling her the truth. She’d dealt with enough today, and he knew her well enough to know if he’d taken her body and then disclosed this—something that felt so world-tilting—it would feel like another betrayal.
For a long while, she didn’t speak. Only lay there. Only stared at him as though she was in some trance. Her body was so still, he thought she’d bleed into the pooling shadows around her and disappear forever. The darkness gently rolled over her skin as if soothing her, shielding her again.
Adrien took the moment her quiet shock offered to roll off the bed and locate the shirt she’d thrown.
He only made it a step.
“He…” Raana began, just above a whisper. “He wants me to what?”
Adrien breathed slowly, taking the few more movements to retrieve her clothes as time to gather himself. He needed to keep his emotions in check, if only not to feed into hers. “Kill—” Goddess, he could hardly say it. “Kill Kai.”
If Isla were here, she would’ve already been on him with her claws at his throat. She would be storming Io’s Pack Hall, trying to rip apart his father. And Adrien, frankly, wouldn’t fault her.
Raana blinked. Once. Twice. Her hands had barely moved from where he’d once pinned them. “I can’t tell if you’re serious right now.”
Adrien gritted his teeth and handed her the shirt. “Why would I joke about something like this?”
“Because it sounds insane.” She’d blissfully softened her voice just as it began to rise, and though she’d taken the garment from him, she didn’t put it on.
Slowly, she sat up, her eyes fixed on the window and its distant forest view.
She folded her knees to her chest, seeming to test out the words, “He wants me to kill Kai.”
Adrien didn’t move. “Yes.”
Her look of fear and panic broke something in him. “Adrien.”
A desperate plea for him to be lying, for it all to be a joke.
Adrien lowered to the bed to sit beside her. “I know.”
“Adrien.”
“I know.” Firm, reassuring words. This was something they both had to weather.
Raana looked away from him, back to the forest, bathed in the moonlight. “I don’t know where to start—why or how he thinks that would even be possible?”
He’d had the same two questions when he was up in his father’s office.
He’d also thought his father was playing a twisted joke.
Adrien dragged a hand through his hair. He hoped there were enough walls and barriers to evade eavesdropping ears, keen even if they spoke quietly. “Which do you want first?”
Raana wouldn’t look at him. “The why.”
“He said he’s a problem. A—threat.”
“A threat?” Her brows raised, her gaze going distant as if picturing Kai standing before them. “To whom?”
Adrien’s shoulders rose and fell. “To everyone.”
Her forehead pinched. “How?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“I’m sorry.” She whipped her head around to look at him. “He doesn’t know. But he needs me to—to kill him,” the words seemed to grate her throat, “because of it?”
Every beat—precisely as it had been between him and his father.
And it still made as little sense.
Adrien just felt… wrong. Dirty. Unfamiliar in his own skin. Simply entertaining the words felt like a betrayal. To Isla, to the camaraderie he’d experienced with Kai, and the mutual respect and understanding between them. A slight to his own honor as a wolf.
“Being Alpha is a thankless job,” his father had told him as Adrien sat there, stunned and furious.
“It requires sacrifice and choices that not everyone will come to understand or appreciate. That’s why we are the ones chosen to shoulder the burden.
Separate your personal feelings from the job that must be done. ”
The ease with which his father had spoken still chilled him—held a weight, like he’d made those decisions, those sacrifices many times before. Some, Adrien suspected, he would never become privy to.
But this?
The walls of the suite closed in, his wolf feeling caged in this prison he couldn’t escape.
He slid a hand over the mattress, stretching to caress Raana’s thigh, but something sharp and cold coiled around his wrist, halting him. The shadows weren’t permitting him through to her this time. A glance at her grimacing face told him she’d been responsible for it.
“What else?” she said through gritted teeth, her body trembling. “There has to be more than that.”
There was—a lot more. And though Raana would struggle to understand all he meant, Adrien would rehash it with a small hope that maybe he, himself, could fathom his father’s reasoning.
He drew back his hand, but not far. He let it linger close enough that she could reach for it if need be.
“My father said that on the day of the Hunt, our warrior rite, when we were all standing at the Gate, he felt our ancestors calling to him, telling him to pay attention.” Absurd had been Adrien’s initial thought at that until he remembered his own training.
An alpha’s otherworldly sense, gifted by the Goddess.
“Kai was there to compete, and when the call came for him and the other Hunters to shift, my father said he felt… something.”
“Something?”
“Power,” Adrien said. “Unchecked, raw power. Like an ember of a flame.” Raana’s lips twitched downwards, her spine locking straight. “What?”
She glanced at him, then looked away, her throat bobbing. “Nothing. I thought you all were powerful. Especially alphas. I mean, your eyes remind me of flames.”
There was a kick of her heartbeat, a distance to her voice. Both made Adrien narrow his eyes. She hadn’t shared the entirety of what was on her mind, and she had a point, but—
“I guess it must’ve been different. I hadn’t sensed anything when I watched them, but my father’s an alpha, the Alpha, so his senses are sharper than anyone else’s. He said he felt it again when we were in Deimos. When Kai killed that rogue during the challenge.”
“But the rogue killed himself,” Raana said softly. “He clawed himself to death. I watched it.”
At those words, the gruesome display reeled through Adrien’s mind again. The blood and gore splattered over the arena stones, the screams of horror from those who could and couldn’t bring themselves to look away. And Kai…
A wolf who’d fought for his life. Who’d fought to defend his home, his family, and most of all, his mate.
Adrien would be lying if he said the image of Kai’s wolf standing there, covered in carnage, with a stare promising instant death to the next person he crossed paths with hadn’t caused his own to bristle—not in fear, but in preparation to fight back.
Adrien dragged his hands over his face with a soft groan. “That’s what I told him, but he thinks Kai made him do it.”
Another contortion of Raana’s features. “How? Wolves aren’t able to coerce.”
“An alpha can demand, but even that’s just a strong suggestion you’d be foolish to disobey.
” Which sure said a lot about him. “I believe there would be a line when an alpha commands you to claw yourself to death, but my father can’t think of any other explanation.
He’s certain in what he felt and saw. So, that’s why he wants you. ”
Adrien could sense her heart pounding and could hear it, too. Raana wedged her hands into her curls, resting her elbows on her knees and shaking her head. “I don’t get it. What can I do? I’m not some trained assassin. I barely have offensive magic.”
“I know.”
“Then how, in the Mother’s name, does he expect me to kill a wolf, let alone an alpha?”
Adrien steeled himself.
It was time for the most absurd part of it all. He pulled his hand away completely, resting it in his lap as he followed her gaze to the moon and forest beyond the window. “Have you ever heard of the dark moon?”
“No.”
“Neither had I,” he said. “But it’s happening sometime soon, and you may be the only person in this entire realm not affected by it.
” He paused, allowing the information to settle.
Though Raana looked at him, he didn’t look back.
“It’s once every five centuries. Apparently, the world shifts, and the moon just…
disappears, which is how it gets its name.
It seems like an eclipse, but what happens is…
not good. And no one realizes until it’s too late. ”
He went quiet again, but Raana pushed, “What happens?”
Adrien sighed. “The entire mortal realm tips into chaos. We’ll lose our ability to shift. Sirens lose control of the tides. Your mortal magic turns against you. Crawlers become ridden with bloodlust, even turn against each other, and even humans are left to equal madness.”
Now, Raana was quiet, staring at him blankly. As if in response to the looming threat, darkness curled over her shoulders. “And how long does that last?”
Adrien shrugged. “An hour, two, as long as it takes for it to pass. My father only knows of it from scrolls he dug up from the catacombs beneath the hall. All anecdotes from five hundred years ago.”
“Why have I never heard of it?”
He’d asked the same.
“Trying to get a person to remember the issues of last week is hard enough; forget a centuries-old phenomenon. Frankly, I don’t even know if it’s real. It could just be some stories from bored ancestors.”
“Pretty brutal stories for boredom.”
“It was a different time then,” Adrien said, not bothering to add that it was around when they’d had an entire pack destroyed by dark magic, too.