Chapter Twenty-Six
Dean
The dead man was eating soup.
That was the thing my brain kept snagging on.
Not the empty throne. Not the silence where a god used to be.
Not the weight that had settled onto Alyssa’s shoulders like something visible, something I could almost see pressing down on her.
No. My brain, in its infinite wisdom, had decided to fixate on the fact that Rhidian was sitting at a table in the Fifth Court, alive, dripping golden light from his hair, eating soup.
Maddox had made it. Of course Maddox had made it. The second we’d returned from the chamber, Maddox had gone straight for whatever passed as a kitchen in this place and started cooking. That was how he processed. Some people punched walls. Some people cried. Maddox apparently made soup.
The wolf paced in my head, restless. He’d been restless since the chamber. Since Damon had stepped forward and said no with more certainty than I’d heard from him in years.
I was leaning against the doorframe, watching. That’s what I did. I watched, I assessed, I positioned myself between threats and the people I loved. It was an old habit I never wanted to shake. Holden’s training. I’d always be a soldier. A fighter.
Rhidian looked wrong. Not physically. Physically, he looked fine.
Better than fine for a man who’d been dead.
The golden light had faded to a faint shimmer on his skin, and apart from the rough voice and the slight tremor in his hands, you wouldn’t know he’d spent days as a corpse.
But there was something missing. A hollow space where power used to sit.
I could feel it, or rather, I could feel the absence of it.
Like a tooth that had been pulled. The socket was still there but the thing that filled it was gone.
He didn’t seem bothered by it. If anything, he seemed lighter. His shoulders sat differently. The rigid posture of a man who’d carried the knowledge that one day he’d have to wear a crown didn’t want, and his family were more than happy to kill him for.
Ryder sat across from him, doing what Ryder did best. Talking. Filling the silence. Making it easier for everyone else to just exist without the pressure of figuring out what to say to a man they’d mourned.
“So you don’t remember anything?” Ryder asked, chin propped on his hand. “Nothing at all?”
“Gold,” Rhidian said. His voice was still rough, like gravel over glass. “Just gold. And warmth. And then cold, and water, and stone under my hands.” He looked down at the soup. “And then Maddox.”
Across the room, Maddox’s hands stilled on the counter. Just for a second. Then he went back to whatever he was doing, but I could see the set of his shoulders. The way he was holding himself together with effort.
I’d felt it through the bond when Rhidian had told Maddox he was grateful.
Felt the guilt crack open and start to drain.
It wasn’t gone. That kind of weight didn’t disappear in a single conversation.
But the worst of it, the sharp edge that had been cutting Maddox from the inside every day since Ice Falls, had dulled.
Good. One brother healing.
Then my eyes found Damon.
I knew what to look for. The slight twitch at the corner of his mouth. The way his fingers curled and uncurled against his thighs. The nightmare was still in there, and even caged behind Damon’s will, it was pushing. Testing. Looking for cracks.
The wolf surged forward. Not in aggression. In something I didn’t have a good word for. Need, maybe. The need to go to my brother, to give him what he’d asked for, to put a wolf inside him that could fight the thing that had been eating him alive.
I’d wanted to give him the bite since the moment Ryder had first proposed it.
The wolf had been howling for it. Every time I’d visited Damon in his chains, every time I’d watched the nightmare surface and twist my brother’s face into something cruel and wrong, the wolf had pushed.
Give him the pack. Make him ours. Let us protect him.
I’d held back. Because it had to be Damon’s choice. Not mine. Not the wolf’s. His.
And now he’d made it.
The relief should have been simple. It wasn’t. Because I’d also never done this before.
We’d all been bitten by alphas back in the human realm as a way to get into Nymeria in the first place.
Men who’d done it dozens of times, who knew the process, and understood the risks.
I had the instinct. The wolf knew what to do.
But I’d never sunk my teeth into someone’s flesh and pushed my venom into their blood, hoping that it would take instead of kill.
Because that was the other side of the bite. The side none of us seemed to want to talk about. It didn’t always work. Sometimes the body rejected the wolf. Sometimes the person just didn’t wake up.
We’d all passed out. Days of nothing, of lying still while the wolf and the body negotiated their new arrangement.
Maddox had stayed on his feet for a few minutes before going down, and everyone had been genuinely impressed.
Nobody managed that. The body needed to shut down so the wolf could settle in. Or lion as was the case with Maddox.
What if Damon’s body, already fighting the nightmare on every front, couldn’t handle the wolf on top of it? What if instead of giving him a weapon, I gave him another enemy? What if the bite was the thing that finally broke him?
The wolf growled. Low, certain. He’s strong. He’s ours. It will work.
I wished I had his confidence.
“You’re staring.”
Tank’s voice, low and steady, from beside me. I hadn’t heard him approach, which told me exactly how deep in my own head I’d been. Tank was a big man. You heard him coming. It was the side effect of being the human embodiment of the bear that occupied the other half of his soul.
“I’m thinking.”
“You’re staring and thinking. And grinding your teeth.” He settled against the wall next to me, arms folded, his gaze following mine to Damon. “Talk to him.”
“I will.”
“You’ve been saying that for days.”
I cut him a look. Tank met it without flinching. He never flinched. It was one of the most annoying things about him.
“What happened in that chamber changes things,” Tank said. Not pushing. Just stating. The way he did. “You know that.”
I did know that. Watching Damon refuse a cure, watching him choose Rhidian, watching him look at Maddox and say little brother with more love than the nightmare could ever touch.
It had cracked something open in my chest that I’d been keeping sealed shut since the day we’d had no choice but to put Damon in chains.
I’d been avoiding him because I couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand seeing my brother, trapped behind those eyes while something else wore his face. Every visit to his cell had been a knife in my ribs.
But the truth was simpler and uglier than what I wanted to admit.
I was afraid. Afraid that Damon was already gone and I’d been too late to save him.
Afraid that the brother who’d gone out into the night and fixed the biggest mistake of my life, showed me how to lead and how to survive.
But what if he was buried so deep under that nightmare that nothing could bring him back?
What if all I had to offer him was an end to it all?
But there was hope. Because when he’d stepped forward in front of a dying god he’d proved to me that the man he’d always been was still there inside.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
Tank clapped me on the shoulder once and walked away.
He went to Alyssa, who was standing by one of those strange windows that looked out on colours instead of what actually lay outside.
She leaned into him when he reached her, a small unconscious gesture that said more than words.
He murmured something I couldn’t hear, and she nodded.
I pushed off the doorframe and crossed the room.
Damon’s eyes opened when I was three steps away. Clear. Present. The nightmare was in there somewhere, I could sense it, but it was deep. Buried under the iron will that had held it at bay in the chamber.
“Hey,” I said.
Eloquent. Really profound.
The corner of Damon’s mouth twitched. “Hey.”
I stood there for a second, all the things I should say jamming together in my throat. I’m sorry I avoided you. I’m sorry I couldn’t face what happened to you.
What came out was: “You scared the hell out of me in that chamber.”
Damon’s eyes searched my face. “Which part?”
“The part where you gave away a cure.” I crouched down so we were at eye level. The wolf settled slightly, calmed by the proximity. “That was either the bravest or the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.”
“Coming from you, that’s saying something.”
I almost smiled. Almost. “You’re sure about the bite?”
“I’m sure.”
“Because once I do this, there’s no going back. The wolf is permanent. And we don’t know how it’ll interact with the nightmare. We don’t know if your body can handle both.”
“I know.”
“You could die, Damon.”
He held my gaze. Steady. Unflinching. And for a second I saw the brother I remembered.
The one who’d been older, stronger, the one who’d taken the worst of everything so the rest of us didn’t have to.
There was something so wrong with the world that Damon was the one the nightmare had tried to erase. It wasn’t fair.
“I could die sitting in these chains while that thing eats me alive,” he said quietly. “I’d rather die fighting it.”
“There’s still Alyssa.”
Damon looked away and I saw a flicker of shame cross his face before he admitted, “It’s not fair to put this on her, and you know we don’t have time to wait. This needs to be settled. There’s so much more that we need to do. I can’t be another one of the problems that she needs to solve.”
The wolf howled his agreement. Loud enough that I felt it in my bones.