49. Caspian
Caspian
She was here. My girl was here.
My wolf hadn’t settled since she left. Howling at a sky with no moon in it, snarling at nothing, charging other wolves when I let him out on a run, because Max was on the other side of that wall of shadow and he couldn’t smell her.
I held the line. Barely. My wolf didn’t have my training, and he didn’t give a fuck about my discipline. All he wanted was to follow his mate and put himself between her and the terrible things coming for her.
He’d seen the Haven. She’d almost died there. She’d come within a breath of joining that sadistic fucker’s collection. His slave. His forced bride. The Haven had been terror, but we’d been with her. Whatever came at her had to come through us first, and that was a fear my wolf could live in.
Mate! Mate safe!
He threw his head back and howled, and finally, finally went quiet.
My fear only changed addresses. My girl was here. My brother wasn’t. Drakken had been taken, and we couldn’t go after him. Not yet.
My jaw started to lengthen. I hauled it back.
Hang in there, brother. We’ll come for you. Soon!
The battle with the demon horde had ended the second Max came out of the Veil, and now those things would guard our southern border for us.
I still didn’t know what to make of it. It’d go to the war council.
We’d need every scrap of help we could get with two hostile kingdoms going for our throats at once.
Nikolai drove us to the train station once the outpost healers were done with Max. She gave us the rundown on the way. Fast and flat, a soldier’s report. Her father. The counter to the geas. The rite that forced it back, one coil cut, three of us left and a clock already bleeding.
She got about four words into the rite before I stopped hearing them.
My wolf had caught it when I held her outside the Veil, under the blood and the ash and the burnt-air stink.
Drakken. All over her.
Deep in her skin, in her hair, and my wolf had lifted his head and growled and read the whole story off her in one breath.
Nikolai had stiffened. His face didn’t change. His hands stopped moving on her spine for a second.
We’d known this would happen.
The night Drakken insisted on going with her, there at the forge, every one of us heard what was under it. We’d watched him lie to himself about hating her. Nikolai called it in three words, walking away from the forge. “He’s a goner.”
So it shouldn’t have surprised me that he mated her before I did.
It still landed in my chest like a boot.
Aelindor had been her first, and that one never cost me a night’s sleep.
But I’d pictured myself next. The one she reached for.
Instead she’d done it on a bridge in Hell with a crowd of demons watching.
She hadn’t had a choice, though. Not with the geas at her throat.
And Drakken had gone down into the dark with her and given her what she needed to walk back out.
My wolf chewed on it too. Then we both made peace with it.
Pack. Brother.
That was all.
My girl was here now, and I’d protect her with everything I had.
I walked Max to our cabin. Nikolai had cleared the car. The Spartans and the officers took the others, and nobody asked why.
The VIP cabin at the head of the train was ours alone. Long bench seats, wide windows, a door that locked. The second it did, the air changed.
The soldier ran out of Max, and her eyes came up full, open in a way she never let anyone else see. My girl was tough. She’d also learned she could stop holding it together in front of us.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said. “If you’ve changed your mind, either of you, if there’s any part of you that’s not—”
Nikolai kissed her before the tears could fall. Slow, deep, claiming, and it answered her better than either of us could have with words. When he finally let her breathe, I leaned in and told her in dirty detail what I was going to do to her.
Her face went a very satisfying shade of pink, for a Spartan woman holding a war together.
The speed train pulled out, humming with a note of Coldiron in its Stormglass engine.
Through the armguard Max had forged onto my forearm, I could feel that she’d brought more of the metal out of the DarkVeil with her.
The new ones rode her arm muttering their little murder-hymns, and my armguard sang right along with them.
I pushed their voices down and kept my eyes on my girl as we ran for the capital. For Aelindor.