Chapter 28
T he horn’s baritone bellow rattled the trees, and Bronze heard Raff take off with a burst of speed he’d had not thought the lycan capable of.
And it fucking terrified him.
Bronze sprinted toward the forest, keeping his head down and ears open to whatever he could detect. He had no time to cower under the eerie sensation that came with his loss of vision, nor did he sink into his survival instincts that all but demanded he slow down, stop, and step lightly lest he plow into a tree. That was what his hands were for, and he kept those suckers out and around him like iron clotheslines. He’d never kneecapped a three-hundred-year-old heart pine before, but he’d go at it with gusto if it got him to Clara before Raff found her.
Clara. Oh God, Clara! All at once, images slammed into his head, morbid scenarios that were a thousand times worse than the night he’d first found her. Deep gashes, blood soaking the forest floor, severed limbs, the final puffs of air being pushed out of lungs quickly filling with viscous liquid. You name it, and Bronze imagined it, no matter how haunting.
“Shit!”
He couldn’t think like that. All he could do was keep moving forward. Keep scenting, keep listening, keep?—
The side of his heel came down on a tree root. His ankle rolled, and then the rest of his body rolled some more, tumbling to the forest floor in an uncoordinated tangle of limbs. The impact evicted the air from his lungs, but his muscles were on autopilot. Rising. Slowly rising.
Get up. Get the fuck up.
He spared only half a second to test for injuries. Bruised, not broken. Then he pressed on. Faster, harder, until his breathing became the only sound he could hear and all he could smell was the salt from his sweat as it soaked into the blindfold. Goddammit, he was powerless like this! Every muscle strained to shift into his bronze armor. His wings begged to be set free, even though his fire and the celestial powers that fueled his transformation were little more than dying embers in his core. There but withered and starved. Useless.
Nothing responded. Fucking nothing. Not even a ripple of yeah, we hear you, bro, but we’re a bit tied up at the moment . His formerly powerful body was nothing but a shell for empty echoes.
And then he heard it. It wasn’t loud, not in the least, but it also wasn’t the leaves under his feet, nor the sounds of his ragged breaths. It was something , though. There! He heard it again. Bronze did the hardest thing he’d ever done and stopped moving. A faint wince, like that of a creature in pain, then a wheezy inhale. Muffled moans but higher pitched, not the kind an injured animal would make.
Clara.
Bronze fled toward the sounds, homing his mind’s eye to each cadence and pitch as if they were his heartbeat. With his arms still out in front of him, he moved as fast as he dared, until he broke through a thick cluster of trees and heard the noise as loud as a fucking bullhorn.
It was his name. Garbled, yes, with all the consonants blurred together, but he’d know his name on Clara’s lips anywhere, and that shit was coming through clear as a cathedral bell.
“Clara!”
Screams of panic behind what must have been a gag rose up to answer his cry. By the mages, he hoped it was just a gag and not something worse. But she was there, close by. No more than twenty paces or so, judging by how the sound carried. So close. He stepped toward the echo of her voice?—
The crack against his skull rang his bell so damn hard, he wondered whether it was just blood that slowly seeped out of his nose. He hit the ground with a roar of pain, but it was nothing compared to Clara’s muffled cry that his senses still prioritized. He had to hand it to the king, though. Whatever the blindfold was made of, it was fucking solid. That shit didn’t budge.
“Do you have any idea how positively fucking annoying you can be? She isn’t even of your race, demigod . None of these creatures are. You are not lycan. You are not one of us. Did you really think you could outmatch me in scent ?” The rage in Raff’s declaration loomed larger, louder, until his fucking puss was inches in front of Bronze’s, judging by the hot dog breath that caused his nose to twitch.
“You know”—Bronze winced around a pain in his ribs—“that’s the highest number of words I think I’ve heard you string together at one time. Bravo. I’d clap, but I think I’ve got a couple dozen splinters in my hands. Aagh! ”
Raff’s heels crunched against Bronze’s wrists, forcing them into the damp earth. Bones and tendons shifted beneath the rubber soles as Raff pressed down harder.
Bronze gritted his teeth and swallowed around a choking cry of pain. “Please tell me you’ve taken off your blindfold. Give me permission to rip this thing from my eyes so I can wrap it around your throat, you self-important prick.”
“I do not need my eyes to kill you, nor do I need anything beyond what the Moon Mother has bestowed upon me at birth.” A sharp claw pierced the skin at the center of Bronze’s chest and dragged lower, lower, until the curved edge glazed over his sex and curled beneath other far more tender parts of him. Bronze’s breath caught in his throat, but he choked it back down, forcing his mind to work out a solution as quickly as possible.
“You’ve been a thorn in my ass from the moment you fired off your mouth at the dinner banquet. I should have dispatched you then if I’d known you’d be so much trouble, but hindsight and all of that. Now, however, it’s done. You’re done. The princess is mine . Her womb, her lands, her father’s money, all of it is mine! I will not be a slave to the humans any longer! They may have their guns and their land, but I have centuries on my side and nothing but patience.” Then he dipped his head closer, his foul breath causing Bronze’s eyes to water beneath the blindfold. “I’m done playing games, and so are you.”
Bronze tried to buck against the weight above him, but a subtle warmth landed on top of his right arm. It surprised him at first, enough to make him grow lax beneath Raff’s hold as the lycan tensed above him to deliver the final blow.
Head. Radiance. Comfort. Then, surprisingly, the rain halted. If he’d had his vision, he would have imagined a subtle sun poking through the dense fog of clouds. A beam of gold striking the forest floor to chase away the drizzle. And then the strange warmth moved down his arm, over his strained bicep, and along his forearm, until each finger wiggled with a rebirth of energy and blood flow.
So many questions assaulted him at once, but none so expedient as to what his newly charged fingers had just brushed up against. Had that been there before? Rough wood. Thick wood.
A weapon.
There were times for questions and times for action. This was most certainly a time for the latter. With a soft grunt, Bronze gripped what his fingers sought—a heavy tree branch. Then a great primal roar erupted out of him, loud enough to shake the trees and stir the birds to fly. Loud enough to create a new oath and have it reach the Empyrean to proclaim for all who would listen that Clara was his, and he would not leave her helpless to her fate.
Bronze’s cries stunned Raff, who lost his balance and was unseated just enough for Bronze to break free and swing his arm wide.
The impact wasn’t loud or jarring. Rather, it was wet and dull and followed the body it had struck to the ground with due devotion.
With the weight lifted off Bronze’s chest, he scrambled back and, giving zero fucks about the king’s rules, ripped the blindfold from his eyes.
Well, shit. If Bronze had known he was capable of such good accuracy with a long wooden stick, then why the hell had he been losing at pool to Chrome on the regular?
Raff lay motionless on the forest floor, still blindfolded, with a long thinly angled branch protruding from his ear. Like, dead center. The twig—though the thing deserved a posthumous promotion after its bold act of service—was only six inches long, but it was a proud offshoot of the thick bough Bronze had grabbed and hurled at the male.
He didn’t bother to check for proof of life. There was only one life he was concerned about.
“Clara!” With his sight available to him once more, Bronze whirled in the direction where he last heard her voice . . . and stopped in his tracks. “Oh, Clara.”
His beautiful lycan princess was bound to a tree so tightly the rope dug beneath her ribs, leaving a concave depression on her torso. The moonstone relic of her proud heritage hung limply around her neck like some sick shrine of perceived activism. She had been gagged, as he’d suspected, but there was no discernable blood to speak of. Just a nick, then, most likely. A trick of the mind to get him so worked up, he’d fumble before he left the gate.
It had nearly worked.
But the thing that broke his heart the most wasn’t the torrent of tears that ran down her dirt-smudged cheeks and over the stained rag covering her mouth, nor the way she sank against her bindings as if she had no strength left in her.
No. It was what they’d done to her hair that made him see red.
Bronze approached her not with the speed his heart commanded him to but with the gentle tenderness of freeing a wounded animal from a hunter’s trap. “Oh, sweet Clara. What did they do to you?”
On the right side of her head, her beautiful white hair hung wet and limp over her shoulder. The left side, however, had been shorn close to her scalp, revealing patchy silver peach fuzz that, despite its lack of concealment, the rain didn’t touch. It was as if her own body, mutilated as it was, refused to bow even for the storm’s sake.
Bronze’s soul shattered, jettisoning into a million fucking pieces for what she’d lost and what he’d failed to prevent.
He removed her gag first, then her bonds, and welcomed the weight of her slim frame as she fell into his arms. After entire centuries passed just holding her, convincing himself that she was well and alive and, mages willing, capable of healing just like he was, he finally heard the whispers spoken against the column of his neck.
“I agreed to it.”
He tensed. “What?”
“The shearing. I agreed to it. My father was going to kill you if I didn’t consent to marry Lord Raff and take part in the final game and whatever else my father wished me to do. Him cutting my hair . . . it was my penance for the trouble I caused him. The price I had to pay for publicly refuting his selection of my would-be mate and forcing him to enact the games. For a lycan female, their hair is very important, symbolic even. A sign of our lineage and bloodline. Our power. He knew that, knew what it would mean for me to willingly have him cut it, and so did I.” Then she pulled back to look at him, a sad strength shining in her eyes. “And I’d do it all over again if it would save your life.”
“Don’t say that, princess. Don’t ever say that to me again. I’m doing all I can not to storm back there, rip out the entrails of the male you call a father, and use them to string him and this asshole up by their boots so the coyotes could have a decent meal.” He clenched her tighter to him with desperate relief. “Do you understand, Clara? I can’t ever see this happen to you again. It wouldn’t just kill me. It would break me. Mortals have no sense of how truly mad a male could go if his female was taken away from him. Death is not a kindness often granted to beings such as me.”
The corners of her mouth lifted slightly. “Am I that female to you? With all the ones available in this realm and the others?”
Bronze didn’t hesitate. “They’re not you. Never could be. Never will be.” He didn’t want thoughts of Polina entering this private, panicked space with his princess, but when they did, for the first time, they didn’t linger, nor did they track tendrils of guilt over his soul like muddy footprints.
Damn, it felt good. And freeing. Finally.
Clara bent down and picked up the discarded blindfold, inspecting the severed fastening thread at the back of it. “My father will use this as justification for not declaring you the winner, despite Lord Raff’s death. The king is a vicious man with no end to his machinations and manipulations.” She placed the fabric in Bronze’s hand.
He couldn’t explain why he did it, but something about that earlier warmth on his arm, which had led his fingers to locate the perfect-for-bludgeoning branch next to him, urged his thumb to swipe across the torn thread.
The brief pause in the rain Bronze had noticed earlier had rolled into a full-blown precipitation lockdown, taking with it the slight sprinkles of heavy mist. And when something drew Bronze’s attention northward, the barest patch of blue sky appeared through the thick canopy of elm trees. The sun—bright, golden, and damn insistent—shone through the opening and focused its honeyed rays on the back of Bronze’s hand right where it covered the thread.
I know that heat.
It had fled as fast as it arrived, however, pulling the dreary cloud cover back into place like a blanket over one’s head. But when he moved his thumb away from the severed fabric fastener, a bundle of intact golden threads took its place, just poised for the tying.
Clara gasped, but Bronze could only smile.
Saulé.
“Someone up there likes me. Here, put this over my eyes and secure it. I’m ready to win you good and proper.”
When Clara was finished, Bronze swept her into his arms and walked—way fucking slower, thank you very much—out of the forest, holding the most precious prize of all.
He didn’t put her down until well after they cleared the tree line and the crowd’s cheerful shouts had toned down to a joyous murmur. Behind his blindness, he waited . . . and waited . . . and yup, there it was.
“No! Impossible! This cannot be! Broderick, inspect the blindfold. He could not have bested a lycan at scent without removing it from his eyes. Where the hell is Lord Raff?”
Broderick’s thick fingers examined the fastener and then went stock still. Yeah, the dude totally knew that someone else’s grease had been under the hood of his handiwork. The question was, how would he play it? “All is secure, Your Majesty. Bronze has successfully retrieved what has been hidden in the forest under the rules of the match.”
Bronze whipped off the blindfold and appreciated the guard’s subtle nod of approval.
Yeah, he’s a good egg. I hope Clara keeps him around.
“Oh, and to answer your question,” Bronze said, “Lord Barf is dead. He kind of met with the pointy end of a tree branch. You might want to go get him before the animals do. That’s a whole lot of grade-A muscle meat to go around.”
Pascal stepped in front of the king, a note of restrained exuberance tugging at his features, as if he was finally allowed to say the words of his heart. “I hereby proclaim Bronze the demigod as the official winner of the Betrothal Games! I will, henceforth, update the records and document his place in the official line of succession.”
God bless that little lycan. There weren’t enough ill-mannered jokes in the world to get King Halpin as swollen in the chest as Pascal’s proclamation had just done. Maybe there were a few yo’ mama’s so thigh-slappers Bronze could have resurrected, but none of them would have gotten the color of the king’s beet-red fury just right. Ah, well. He couldn’t win them all.
But he could make it very fucking clear what he and Clara thought of his ability to rule and how badly his daughter wanted him out of the picture.
And also how efficient Bronze could be at dropping bodies and making them disappear.
Bronze lifted Clara to his chest once more, to the delight of every swoony female in attendance and several of the muttering males, and addressed the king. “Go to the woods and clean up your mess. By morning, ensure the rest of the western lycans have departed the keep and then the three of us are going to have a nice little sit-down so we can all come to terms with your kingdom’s new reality. And whatever else you need to say to me right now can be addressed to the back of my head because there isn’t anything else I intend to hear for the rest of the day other than the words of my betrothed.”
The crowd parted for him as he carried his prize back like a greedy pirate who’d just found a long-lost treasure after a decade of false alarms and wrong turns.
Clara drew his ear to her mouth and said with a laugh, “You’re too much sometimes.”
“Nope. Not hearing that.”
Because none of it was enough. He wasn’t enough, and whatever time he had left with her in this realm would never be enough, but he’d sure as hell soak up every second with her until destiny came to its senses and gave him his next marching orders.