45
A pack of forty wolves charges into the forest from the castle.
Inside, brutal screams of visceral terror ring through the halls—guards dying, maids choking on their blood, the fetid stench of gore rising, smothering—as the strange wolves begin to slash their way through the royal and noble werewolves as if they’re peeling back the layers of an onion.
The outer ring collapses first. Then the next.
Blood sprays. Entrails plummet from open stomachs, squelching on the ground beside unblinking eyes and limp claws.
The new pack doesn’t feast. It only kills.
An ambush , I think in horror. A calculated assault.
But that can’t be right. This can’t be real .
Queen Jae transforms as the pack slices their way through the court, but Instructor Shepherd’s words during Combat echo in my ears. If you transition in the midst of a fight, of a war , you lose your upper hand.
Sure enough, the split second that the Wolf Queen of the Asian Court’s back breaks, a wolf leaps atop her and rends her head from her neck with a single bite. Though I cry out, stricken, Evelyn roars . Her hands don’t work, however. Her head doesn’t twitch.
It’s… it’s as if she can’t move either.
Compulsion.
Sin stiffens beside me, exhaling a harsh breath. “Shit.”
I try to flex my bones, my limbs, but he cages me against him with an iron grip as we take in the shock wave of violence. “Sin?” I whisper, that horrible gut instinct sinking in my stomach like a pocketful of bricks in the ocean. “Sin.”
“It’ll be over soon,” he says quickly, brushing his hands over my hair, down my arms.
A lie.
I hear his words as if from very far away. He can’t have spoken them. They don’t make sense . “What have you done?” I whisper.
He swallows hard and says, “What was needed.”
And I’m in a free fall. Dropped from the heavens and crashing into the ocean.
I’m drowning. Around me, the elders enter the fight.
They’ve learned from Queen Jae, and they don’t transform.
Instructor Shepherd manages to wrench the heart from the chest of a gray beast, and Lord Allard swiftly removes his sword to behead a black wolf that leapt past to attack the remaining queen.
Queen Sybil snarls as their head lands at her feet.
She glances around her. Chaos shatters her perfect rite into a million shards.
Her claws emerge, and she leaps into the fight.
So do my classmates. Portia. Antionette.
Myles, Eric, Katerina. Calix. They throw themselves at the bloodthirsty pack with remarkable skill.
But it’s not enough.
My bones scream that it won’t be enough.
These wolves—they’re stronger, somehow, than the rest of us.
They move in a blur of speed. When one snaps a soldier’s ankle, dragging him off his feet, they slow long enough for me to notice their ears.
They’re both human . And the russet wolf beside them—my vision narrows—has two sets of teeth.
One pair sharp and wolfish, the other… also human.
As though these wolves… their transformations went wrong .
Sin’s arms tighten, and he spins me into his chest, shielding me from most of the carnage—but not all of it.
He can’t hide all of it. “Sin, please,” I beg, but my body still refuses to move.
My mind still refuses to believe Sin is involved in this.
Not again. This is so much worse than before.
The blood has spread from my hands to everywhere else—everywhere.
Everyone. Evie screams again, and tears stream down her face as her father joins her mother on the ground.
As her brother rips a wolf from Nettie’s throat. “Let me go! Let me fight!”
Sin looks away swiftly as Nettie collapses, his expression pained. Then, voice harsh—“I can’t.”
“They’re dying —”
His bones shudder, as if he wants to fight. As if he wants to shift. But he… he’s not. I don’t understand why he’s not . I can feel the tension in his body. More than that, he feels appalled by the scene around us. But how can he be? He compelled me; he expected this fight. This execution.
Sin is a Dreamweaver.
He lied about his power. Time and time again, he concealed the truth from me—wording his answers so carefully, always so carefully. Has he ever told me the truth? I thought I could see past the golden prince, but maybe… maybe I don’t know Sin at all.
“You told me you love me,” I snarl. “Was that true?”
He flinches as a white wolf clamps their jaws around Lord Allard’s middle and dismembers him with swift ferocity.
Another beast launches onto Instructor Bhat, and she crashes to the ground with a cry.
Sin’s mother dives over the fresh corpse to give chase, and her crown tumbles to the blood-soaked petals.
“You know it is,” he says. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. ”
I would do anything to protect you.
“Then let me go.”
He tears his gaze away from the massacre, searching my own.
For a second, I think he might do it. I think he might listen.
“Please,” I breathe, and I swear I can see him in there.
The boy I love is still in there somewhere.
Torn with indecision. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. “Please, Sin.”
Despair shifts in his eyes. The scent of it curls around us like smoke.
Then his face darkens. “No.”
My heart doesn’t break this time. It shatters.
Behind him, Lyra screams and flees an enormous wolf, ducking around the statue of a scorpion.
Calix tackles the beast before they can touch her.
Most of our instructors have fallen now.
They’ve been caught off guard. And Oona—I scream too as Instructor Shepherd defends her with Lord Allard’s blade.
He keeps her behind his back, but even he cannot battle so many wolves at once.
His movements are growing slower with exhaustion.
One of them manages to slash open his thigh, and he stumbles into the nearest tree. Leaving Oona vulnerable.
It’s Celeste all over again. Panic claws up my throat.
“Sin, help her! Help them !”
He doesn’t. He doesn’t move. Instead, Calix dives forward, snarling and launching one wolf into the trees before tearing the head from another.
A third snaps at his back. My body shakes— quakes with pent-up rage as my heels dig into the earth—but Sin won’t release me from his compulsion.
I can’t lift a finger as two more wolves with smoking snouts descend on my oldest friend in this castle and the instructor I disliked the most. Right now, they feel no different.
Oona or Shepherd. They will both bleed red.
No no no.
“If you don’t stop this right now,” I tell Sin, chest heaving with the effort to break free from his compulsion, to reach them in time, “I will hate you forever .”
“At least you’ll be alive to hate me.”
The words are too familiar. It can’t be coincidence.
“How long have you been planning this?”
His jaw clenches as he stares at me. He swallows hard. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Vanessa. You—you’ll understand when you learn the truth.” When I shake my head viciously, his hands tighten again. He forces me to look at him. “I am not the villain here. All of this, I did it for—”
“Don’t you dare say me.”
His eyes narrow. “I thought you didn’t want me to lie.”
Visceral hatred pounds through me. It feels like poison. It feels corrosive. It feels different than anything I’ve ever felt—for Calix, for Evie, for the queen and the court. Even for myself. As my classmates fall around me, as I gaze into the eyes of the boy I loved, it changes me.
It devours me.
Through whatever soul connection we share, Sin feels it too.
“Don’t do this, Vanessa.” His hands tremble, and his claw tears from his fingers.
It pierces my gown, but not my skin. Even now, he wants to protect me, and when he speaks again, his voice hardens.
“Listen to me now—hear the truth in my words—I love you. I fucking love you. This court would have torn you to shreds. You weren’t going to survive it.
I told you: I would damn it all for you.
For you, Vanessa, do you understand me?”
Tears blur my vision, and every word is a truth. Every word hurts . I can feel that sense of calm trying to wash over me, but I reject it. This can’t be for me. And yes, I loved him. I loved him so much it almost broke me. But—
Shepherd rights himself and Oona, pulling her beneath his arm. His gaze darts to the castle. They make a run for it, and my eyes widen as Oona trips. Instructor Shepherd glances back at her in horror. It just takes a second.
“Oona!” I scream, so loud the windows of the castle vibrate. Crack. “No!”
My foot slips forward an inch.
A gray wolf smothers her instantly, and the ground falls out from under me as their fangs sink into her chest. As they crunch through bone and come away with Oona’s heart.
Bile rises up my throat. I bury my face in Sin’s chest, unable to watch, and he tries desperately to console me—to make this better—but he can’t make this better. Oona is dead.
She is dead, and her blood weeps into the earth. When I look back again, Instructor Shepherd cradles her body. The same gray wolf rends his head from his neck.
To my left, Katerina tries to flee, but the wolves are too fast. I can only watch as one slams her to the ground, rupturing her into a thousand fissures of skin and blood and bones. The wolf digs through her intestines like a sandbox. Digs and digs until she doesn’t exist anymore.
Myles is next. He dies easier still. Torn to pieces between two wolves.
Calix seizes Portia before they can slaughter her too.
Eric isn’t so lucky. He’s taken out with a claw at his throat and another at his back.
His spine is pulled from his body, and he crumples before his heart is yanked out.
Evie’s screams explode the windows of the castle.
Glass sprays over us. Cuts our skin while heartbreak wrecks Evie to the core.
I ache to take her hand. To hold her. To be with anyone except Sin.
But Nettie… She hurls herself at a sable wolf and plunges a claw into their chest instead.
“Fuck you!” she yells—a war cry.
“Nettie, stop,” Evie pleads, fighting her compulsion as her spine quivers. “Nettie, come here ! Stand down!” The ground rumbles from Evie’s pent-up power, but she can’t break free of the magical binds. Her tears flow faster now.
“What are you doing ?” Nettie yells at Evie across the field.
She yanks another heart from another wolf, the organ still beating and impaled on her claw.
Dead bodies scatter the ground. Everywhere.
Blood everywhere . “Help me!” Her golden eyes implore Evie to move, to fight, before flicking to me and Sin.
“What the fuck is going on? Why are you all just standing—”
One of the wolves leaps—ignoring Evie’s shriek of rage, of fear —and latches onto Antionette between one word and the next.
Her body jerks. She twists, spins, but Nettie doesn’t stand a chance.
Not as another wolf piles on, and another and another, until her body vanishes from sight.
I still see the second her soul leaves it, however, because Evie’s mouth falls open on a silent sob.
As with Katerina, Nettie is simply… gone.
Dead.
A dam bursts inside my chest, a torrent of grief—of agony—at the sight of the carnage around us.
At the feel of Sin’s traitorous arms around me.
They still form a cage. His words form a cage.
Just don’t fight. And I haven’t. I’ve worn their stupid fucking gowns, and I’ve attended their stupid fucking balls, and I’ve played the part of their pathetic docile Bitten werewolf until it’s almost killed me.
Until it has killed them—all of them. Friends.
Enemies. They lie on the forest floor, strewn together, red.
Everything red. And I can’t take it anymore. I can’t remain frozen.
I won’t.
Glancing down at my foot, I realize the cage containing me—containing my power—has begun to crack, and my rage… my rage is the wrecking ball. “This—this is your fault,” I snarl at Sin, whose brow furrows in alarm.
And I shove him.
I shove him hard enough that he stumbles backward, but I don’t give him the chance to speak.
I whirl to help the others—the survivors.
Calix. Portia. Lyra. The queen. Though they still attempt to fight, the wolves are slowly forcing them into the middle of the clearing.
Their eyes cut to mine as I charge forward to take my place amongst my court.
“Vanessa!” Sin’s voice rings out behind me. “You don’t understand—”
“Liar,” I hiss through my teeth. Because I do understand. I know exactly who to blame. Calix meets my eyes, and he seems to understand too—his gold gaze bleeds to furious red, and this time, it stays that way.
Alpha.
The realization shudders through me. Of course he is.
The wolf who killed Celeste had red eyes.
His eyes. He must’ve hidden them somehow.
But… it all seems so insignificant now as Queen Sybil raises her clawed hands in confusion.
In surrender. Her hair blows over her eyes, and sweat and blood plaster the black strands to her forehead.
To her nose. She looks like a ship battered by a wave.
Disheveled and broken. Anger still sharpens her voice as she tries to stride toward Sin.
When the wolves block her path, snarling, suspicion dawns in her obsidian eyes. “Sinclair, son—”
“Don’t call him that.” A woman emerges from the trees, and the pack of vicious wolves lowers onto their haunches. They bow.
My heart finally stutters to a halt.
This woman looks similar to the queen, her chiseled features emphasized by a familiar shrewd scowl, but more than that… I know her. My vision narrows on her familiar face, and my head—searing pain spikes through it. I nearly double over from the shock, but Calix steadies me with his free hand.
Those dark gray eyes track the movement, swirling as riotous as any storm in the Atlantic.
The woman picks up a forgotten crown from beside a mangled corpse—Eric’s, I realize—and sets it atop her head. Stretches her neck as if to adjust to its immense weight before finding me again. She grins, revealing sharp white fangs.
The woman from the dungeon.
She isn’t human, though, isn’t some poor victim tortured by the queen, because Sinclair Severi meets her gaze reluctantly and walks toward me as he says, “Hello, Mother.”