Revenge and Ruin (The Bone Moon Trilogy #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

NIKO

His home was burning. Smoke curled into the air, a call for help and a warning, thick and white beneath the eye of the false Bone Moon.

He tilted his head back and howled, choking as the reek of scorched timber—and worse—stained his lungs.

His pack didn’t reply, but that was the least of his concerns.

The people he’d sworn to protect were dying, and he was going to be too late to save them.

Guilt fueled his stride as his paws pounded the forest floor, mashing the rowan trees’ fallen berries to raw, bloody pulp.

And beside him, where she belonged, his Dimi ran, her red hair streaming behind her in the fractured light, her cheeks stained with the tears they’d cried together, her magic gathering beneath her skin.

She was wild. Beautiful.

And his.

But was she real? That was the question that plagued him.

Elena had tortured him with illusions when he wouldn’t bend to her will, making him watch Katerina die in a thousand terrible ways.

When that hadn’t moved him, she’d become more…

imaginative. From his place in the corner of that damnable cottage, she’d forced him to watch Maksim and Konstantin sink into his Dimi’s body, her head thrown back in ecstasy and her hair freed from its braid, the better for them to grip it in their fists as they rode her like mindless animals.

She’d conjured Katerina in the clothes his Dimi had worn when he’d last seen her, still wet with his blood, and made the woman he loved whisper a thousand untruths: she’d never loved him, she’d only sought to use him, she’d forgotten him, she was already bonded to another.

On one particularly depraved occasion, Elena had invaded what passed for his sleep and made him dream of Katerina, and when he’d woken aching, desperate, craving, he’d found—

No. He wouldn’t think of that. He’d sworn never to think of it again, though his dreams were a different story.

But what if this, here and now, was no more than another illusion?

What if Katerina had never come for him, had never beaten Elena with no more than the force of her determination?

What if he’d never clawed his way to the surface in her wake, or felt her magic surge through him as their bond healed, or held her in his arms and heard her say all the words he was so desperate to hear: she still wanted him, he hadn’t lost his place fighting by her side, he was still worthy of the Light?

He was broken. He knew that, no matter what Katerina told him, illusion or otherwise.

But this…to kiss her beneath the moon just like that first night in the forest, her body warm and real beneath his hands as his Mark came alive, to be free at last of Elena’s insidious rage and curdled desire, to feel almost whole, and then to smell Kalach burning at the hands of a demon…

It was torture of the highest order, exactly the kind the Dark-corrupted Elena Lisova would conjure: to dangle what he wanted most, and then rip it away, to replace it with his greatest fear.

He would probably arrive at the village’s borders to find a thousand versions of Katerina burning to death, each of them mocking and belittling him as she took a man deep into every orifice of her body.

But on the off-chance that this was real, that the woman running beside him was truly the other half of his soul and not a Dark-induced hallucination, that Kalach was really burning and he had a chance to save it—well, what choice did he have?

The answer was: none at all. Because for the chance to redeem himself, to reclaim his honor and his Dimi, he would do anything.

And so he ran, the fire searing his lungs, his pack’s howls echoing in his ears at last, not knowing what prayer to wing toward the Saints.

Because if this was real, his village was most likely doomed, and with it, everyone he had sworn an oath to keep safe.

But if it wasn’t, then Katerina had never braved the Underworld to save him, and this was the cruelest of jokes, at the hands of a woman who twisted hate and called it love.

Niko Alekhin ran ever onward, closing the distance between himself and the flames, knowing that no matter the truth, he was damned.