Chapter Twenty-Six #2
I should have been insulted that he didn’t want to put this on Alyssa, but he was happy to put it on me.
But I wasn’t. Instead, there was a part of me that felt kind of proud.
That the man I’d always looked up finally saw me as someone that could be relied on.
That he was willing to lean on me for a change.
“Okay,” I said. The word came out rough. “Okay. We’ll do it.”
Something shifted in his face. Not relief exactly. More like a door opening. “Dean.”
“Yeah?”
“I know you’ve been avoiding me.”
My jaw tightened. “Damon...”
“I don’t blame you.” He said it simply, without accusation. “I’ve heard the things the nightmare says with my voice. I’ve seen the way it looks at people through my eyes. If it were you in these chains, I don’t know if I could have visited at all.”
The knife in my ribs twisted. Because he was letting me off the hook, and I didn’t deserve it.
“That’s not...” I stopped. Took a breath.
The wolf pushed at me, impatient with my inability to just say the thing.
“I wasn’t avoiding you because of the nightmare.
I was avoiding you because I couldn’t fix it.
And I didn’t know how to look at you and not be able to fix it.
It’s different. Having the wolf. Having another thing thinking in your head, not like the nightmare.
Not pushing against you. But… a part of you.
Another side of you that you never realised you needed before. ”
Damon was quiet for a long moment. Then he nodded. Once. The way we did. The way words weren’t always necessary between us because we’d grown up in the same hell and come out the other side speaking the same language.
“You can fix it now,” he said.
I reached out and gripped his shoulder. Squeezed once, hard. He leaned into it, just slightly, and the wolf settled into something that felt like peace.
“Where do we do it?” I asked, standing. Practical now. Focused. That was easier. That I knew how to do. Cut past the emotions and get down to the facts, to the thing that needed doing.
The question brought the others in. Ryder looked up from his conversation with Rhidian.
Tank turned from the window. Maddox moved two steps closer and then stopped almost like he was too afraid to hope.
Then Alyssa moved to the centre of the group, and I watched the shift happen.
This wasn’t the soft side of the woman we loved that we’d witness when she’d been carried in Tank’s arms relying on her mates to ease the burden while she succumbed to her exhaustion.
This was a queen stepping forward. The woman who made decisions.
“The throne room,” Alyssa said. She didn’t hesitate. “I’m stronger down there. More connected to this place. If something goes wrong, if the nightmare surges when the bite destabilises things, I’ll have a better chance of containing it.”
“It’s also contained,” Tank added. “One way in, one way out. If the worst happens, we can seal it.”
Nobody said what the worst actually meant. Nobody needed to. Nobody wanted to. Because the nightmare was strong even now, and what if we were handing it a weapon.
Ryder leaned back in his chair. “So we’re doing this in the room where a god just died. That’s not ominous at all.”
“Shut up, Ryder,” Maddox and I said at the same time.
Ryder raised his hands. “Just noting it for the record.”
“How long do we wait?” Maddox asked. The practical question beneath the emotional one. He was looking at Damon, and I could see the weight of what he owed his brother written across his face. “He could be out for days. Longer, maybe, given the nightmare.”
“Could be shorter,” Ryder offered. “Could be different entirely. None of us were bitten in Nymeria, let alone the Fifth Court and by a brand new alpha who’s never done it before.”
“You’re really not helping with any of that,” I told him.
“I’m managing expectations. Someone has to.”
“He’s right, though,” Damon said from his corner.
Everyone looked at him. “We don’t know what’s going to happen.
We can plan for the standard process. A few days unconscious while the wolf settles.
Someone watching me at all times in case the nightmare tries something while I’m under.
But we should also be ready for the possibility that it goes differently. ”
“How differently?” Alyssa asked.
Damon’s eyes met hers, and something passed between them. That thin, flickering thread in the bond that connected them. Not a full mate bond, not yet, but the potential of one. The shadow of what was coming.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I can feel this place. It’s been pulling at something inside me since we arrived. And whatever it’s pulling at, the nightmare doesn’t like it. It’s been louder since we got here. More aggressive. Like it knows something is coming that it can’t stop.”
Silence settled over the room. The kind that meant everyone was thinking the same thing but nobody wanted to say it.
Tank said it. Of course Tank said it. “Then we do it now. Before the nightmare adapts.”
I looked at Alyssa. She looked at me. The bond between us hummed with shared understanding, shared worry, shared determination.
“Now,” she agreed.
Damon got to his feet. The chains rattled, and for what I hoped was the last time, the sound of them filled the room.
“Get these off me,” he said quietly. “If I’m going to have a wolf, I’d rather not meet him in shackles.”
Taking those damn things off him felt like a sign.
Damon stood there for a moment, rubbing his wrists where the metal had worn the skin raw.
He rolled his shoulders, stretched his neck.
Such small, simple movements. Such ordinary things.
But watching my brother stand unchained for the first time in months made the wolf howl with something that felt dangerously close to joy.
Rhidian stood up from the table. He’d been quiet through the whole discussion, watching with those careful eyes, still figuring out his place in a world that must have felt so different even though he hadn’t been apart from us for that long.
“For what it’s worth,” Rhidian said, and his rough voice carried clearly in the quiet room. “I intend to be standing right there when you wake up. I owe you that much. Whatever I can do to get you through this, consider it done.”
Damon looked at him. At the man he’d given up his cure for. Something passed between them that I couldn’t quite read. An understanding, maybe. A debt acknowledged without it becoming a burden.
“You don’t owe me anything,” Damon said.
“I owe you everything,” Rhidian corrected. “But we can argue about it when you wake up and you’re finally free of that thing.”
When. Not if. I noticed that. So did Damon.
The ghost of a smile crossed my brother’s face. The first real one I’d seen in longer than I could remember.
“Yeah,” Damon said. “We can.”
I took a breath. The wolf pushed forward, eager, ready, certain in a way I wasn’t.
But certainty wasn’t required. Just will. Just the decision to try.
My brother needed a wolf. And I was going to give him one.
So we headed for the throne room, and I brought with me all the crushing doubts, the fear, and most of all a desperate hope that this was the answer we needed.