Chapter Thirty-One
Dean
The wolf wouldn’t settle.
He’d been pacing since the throne room. Since I’d stood in a crescent of impossible thrones and seen the gap where mine should have been. A cold, bare stretch of stone where the roots stopped growing and frost crept across the floor like a scar that wouldn’t heal. Winter’s throne. Arik’s throne.
There had been a time when I didn’t want it. When it wasn’t even a blip on my radar. But things were different now. Everything had changed, and the only way I’d ever sit beside my brothers was to take it from Arik. The man who was on his way to laying an entire realm to waste.
Ice crawled under my skin as I walked the perimeter of the Fifth Court, restless energy that had nowhere to go.
It had been getting worse since the forest. Since the magic had flooded through me and frozen those creatures solid, it had felt different, like the power wasn’t borrowed.
Like it was mine by right. I’d embraced it, I’d welcomed it and the damage it could inflict.
But I needed more and part of that terrified me.
That the cold would invade my veins and heart and there’d be less of a man left behind.
Maybe that was what had happened to Arik.
Maybe it was the frozen chill of winter that turned him against everything else in this land.
Not that it mattered. There was no other way for me.
If Alyssa was going to succeed she needed all of her Kings at her side, and to have this final one in place, I needed to become the thing that frightened me.
I needed to become the Winter King. But the only way to do that was to destroy the man who currently sat on the winter throne, and it seemed like such an impossibility.
An impossibility that I had no idea how to achieve.
But failure was not an option. I had to get stronger.
I had to embrace it all. The ice, the changes, the horrors it could bring.
And deep down, if I was honest with myself, I realised that there was a part of me that didn’t want to do that.
So I walked. And I let my mind spin with all the impossible choices I faced, trying to find a way to come to peace with the terrible things I was going to have to do and the terrible things I’d already done.
Walking I could do. Pretending I could do.
The Fifth Court’s borders were strange. Not walls or fences or anything you could mark on a map.
The shifting silver light of the court simply thinned at the edges, giving way to dense forest and normal sky.
It felt like walking from a dream into waking, the colours going flat, the air losing that hum of ancient magic that made the hairs on your arms stand up.
I was a hundred yards past the treeline when the wolf went rigid in my mind.
Not aggressive. Not yet. But every sense dialled to maximum, ears forward, body coiled. Something was out there. Something that didn’t belong.
I drew my blade and moved through the trees without sound. Holden’s training. The army had turned me into a soldier but it was the general who had turned me into an efficient killer, and efficient killers moved quietly.
I found it in a clearing.
An Endless. Standing motionless in the centre of a patch of dead grass, with its helm discarded at its feet, arms loose at its sides, head tilted at an angle that wasn’t quite right.
Like a puppet whose strings had gone slack.
It was a woman, or it had been. Young. Fae features still visible beneath the hollowed expression and the strange, glazed quality of her eyes.
For some reason she was barefoot, her feet bloody from walking through the forest, and she showed no sign of having noticed me.
I stopped at the edge of the clearing. Blade up. Wolf snarling.
Then her head turned toward me. Smooth, mechanical, like something rotating on a track.
And she smiled.
Not her smile. Nothing about the expression belonged to the woman whose face it wore. It was too wide, too knowing, too amused by something I couldn’t see.
“Dean.” The voice that came out of her mouth wasn’t hers either. Deeper. Male. Carrying the particular cadence of someone who was used to being obeyed. “I was wondering when you’d come out to play.”
Arik.
The ice surged under my skin. My grip tightened on the blade until the leather wrapping creaked.
The wolf was throwing himself at the walls of my mind, demanding release, demanding blood, but I held him back.
A puppet wasn’t worth the shift. The puppeteer was somewhere else entirely.
We couldn’t hurt him, we could only hurt the poor woman he was torturing for his own amusement.
“You found us,” I said. Flat. Calm. Don’t give him anything.
“I’ve always known where you were.” The Endless woman took a step forward and the movement was wrong, joints bending at slightly off angles, a body being operated by someone who didn’t care about the damage.
“Did you think the Fifth Court was hidden from me? I was born here, a part of it exists inside of me.”
“Then why send a scout instead of an army?”
The smile widened. “Maybe I wanted to talk.”
“We don’t have anything to talk about.”
“Oh, but we do.” The Endless tilted its head again, and the gesture was so deliberate, so performative, that it made my stomach turn. A man playing with a corpse. “We have a great deal to discuss, you and I. We go back further than you think.”
Something cold settled in my chest that had nothing to do with the ice magic. The wolf had gone very still.
“I watched you once,” the Endless said, conversational. Almost friendly. “In a bar. Dirty little place. Cheap tequila. A woman with long blonde hair who threatened to kill the man sitting next to her.”
The cold spread.
“You were so angry that night. So desperate. Your brother had been gone for nine days and you’d been told he was probably dead, yet you walked into that bar ready to do whatever it took to get him back.
” The Endless took another lurching step.
“You had your rifle trained on her. Steady hands. Good discipline. Always so disciplined. But then she did something you didn’t expect, didn’t she? ”
No.
“She threw a knife into your commanding officer’s shoulder and sent three rifles flying across the room with a wave of her hand, and you tackled her to the ground.
” The voice was almost tender now. Reminiscing.
“You pinned her hands above her head. Straddled her waist. Got so close your lips nearly touched. Then she looked up at you with those eyes and said something about it being a position she could get used to.”
My blood had turned to ice. Actual ice. I could feel it crystallising in my veins, the magic responding to something deeper than anger, deeper than fear. The wolf was howling but I couldn’t hear him past the roaring in my ears.
“But that wasn’t the interesting part,” the Endless continued, and Arik’s voice dropped lower.
Intimate. Like a secret between friends.
“The interesting part was what happened after. When she touched your face. When she told you she was sorry about your friends. And you leaned into her hand, Dean. Just for a moment. Just long enough for anyone watching to see exactly how easy you were going to be. Oh how I enjoyed it. Even I didn’t realise who she would become to you, who she would become for all of you.
And there I was with one of you writhing on the floor in agony.
It made torturing him so much more delicious.
Breaking his mind was the greatest fun of my life. ”
The clearing was silent. The forest was silent. Even the strange ambient hum of the Fifth Court had gone quiet, as if the land itself was holding its breath.
“How do you know all that?” My voice didn’t sound like mine. Too controlled. Too empty.
The Endless spread its arms in a gesture that was almost a shrug. “Things fell into place that night exactly as they were supposed to. So many little puppets already attached to my strings.”
The ice cracked inside me. Not outward, not yet, but I felt the fracture lines spreading through my chest like a frozen lake giving way.
Because there was only one person who could know those details.
Only one person who had been in that bar, who had watched the whole thing unfold, who had seen me lean into a stranger’s hand with nine days of grief carved into my face.
The briefing. The off-the-books mission. The three rangers he’d handpicked. The brother he’d sent through a portal to a realm he knew would consume him.
General Philip Holden had sat on the stool next to Alyssa and watched us meet her for the first time.
He’d engineered the whole encounter. Damon wasn’t missing.
Damon had been sent deliberately, knowing the nightmare would take him, knowing we would do anything to get him back, knowing that desperation would be the weapon that put all of us in her path.
Holden was Arik.
Arik was Holden.
There was no other explanation.
The man I’d followed. The man I’d trusted. The man whose training I carried in my muscles and my instincts and the way I positioned myself between threats and the people I loved. He was the threat. He had always been the threat.
I stood in the clearing and felt my entire foundation crack. Every mission. Every briefing. Every time I’d thought Holden would know what to do. He’d known. He’d always known. Because he’d been playing a game so long and so intricate that we’d never even realised we were pieces on his board.
The Endless was watching me with Arik’s smile. Drinking in the devastation the way a man savours wine.
“There it is,” he said softly. “I do love watching the moment it lands. She had to come home, Dean. I need her here. I need her. You make her powerful, but I will make legends with her.”