8 #2
Inside the inner pocket, the brass collar was caught between the doublet’s leather and the violent broadening of my shoulder.
The porous metal’s central hinge groaned under the crushing pressure and sheared into two uneven fragments.
One half of the collar—the front plate with the suppression seals blackened by acid—sprang outward and hit the yard’s frozen mud, beside the print of a soldier’s boot.
The oilcloth sleeve slid from the torn binding. I caught it between my teeth before it could touch the mud.
The first crossbow bolt whistled over my spine, clipping a tuft of gray fur and embedding itself in a firewood barrow with a thudding impact.
The second bolt ricocheted off a granite flag two inches from my forepaws, kicking up a shower of stone chips.
The third bolt was aimed straight for my throat.
Then an immense shadow dropped from the high terrace with the violence of a rockslide.
Darian Corven landed on the embankment between the crossbowmen and where I stood.
He wore neither his wolf mantle nor his dress gloves; he wore only his black military tunic, chest heaving from the sprint, a territorial fury so massive and terrifying rolling from him that the horses in the stalls dropped to their knees on the straw in tomb-like silence.
Arm extended, Darian cut across the third crossbow’s line of fire, deflecting the bolt’s trajectory with his hardened-leather vambrace. The quarrel grazed his silver bracelet and vanished into the ditch’s dark.
“HOLD!” the sovereign roared.
The voice of his primal wolf was no human shout; it was an absolute biological command that reverberated off the citadel’s ramparts like winter thunder.
The three soldiers scrambled three steps back along the walkway, hands trembling on their stocks, eyes wide with terror before the presence that had just crushed their will to obey.
Atop the parapet, Thorne lowered his blade with deliberate slowness, jaws clamped tight in impotent rage, not daring to dispute the sovereign Alpha’s voice.
Darian didn’t look at his guards.
He turned slowly in the frozen mud.
I held his gaze fifteen feet away.
I stood on four paws in the snow: a pearl-gray wolf with a dark stripe tracing my spine, my mother’s parchment clenched between my fangs inside its oilcloth sleeve, ribs heaving in short, agonizing gasps from the drug’s poisoning.
Darian went utterly still.
In his amber eyes there was no court calculation, no Council mandate, no judge’s cold severity handing down martial sentence.
There was a recognition so pure, so aching and absolute, that it pierced my chest with the force of a living mark.
His nostrils flared, drinking in the uncontrollable surge of rain, night flower, and sea salt rolling from my soaked fur.
He knew—without parchment, chancery seals, or an apothecary’s sworn word—exactly what I was: his bloodmate, a pure Omega the court deemed extinct, fleeing his citadel poisoned by the very compounds his laws condoned.
The Alpha took half a step forward, hands open, fingers trembling with the checked urge to reach for me.
“You’re mine,” he said.
It was scarcely more than a whisper, yet the claim rang through my mind with the clear strike of a silver bell.
He came no closer.
He didn’t try to bar my path to the palisade. He didn’t summon his men to encircle me, nor throw out his territorial command to force my wolf down onto her forelegs in submission.
He set himself between my body and the guard’s crossbows, shielding my retreat with his own back.
He was giving me a choice.
The first real choice anyone had offered me in six years of confinement.
I could stay in the yard under sovereign protection and risk the Council turning my body into a trophy of state, or I could leap into the dark of the forest with my mother’s will between my teeth and fight for my freedom on my own terms.
My wolf blew a rough huff across the snow, dug her hind claws into the frozen mud, and lunged forward.
I cleared the timber palisade in a clean arc.
I crossed the dry ditch in two desperate bounds and plunged beneath the low boughs of the birches, where untouched snow swallowed the sound of my paws in the night.
Behind me, the twelfth stroke of midnight faded away over Vhal Citadel, leaving behind a citadel burning with suspicion, a collar plate in the yard’s mud, and the indelible trail of a storm that had only just begun.
The birch woods were a tangle of pale trunks, frozen brambles, and shadows closing around me like wooden jaws.
I ran for hours without looking back.
My mother’s parchment was safe between my jaws, but the fever of the collapsed blocker ate away at my flesh with every mile I put behind me.
The chemical poison coursed through my blood in burning waves, numbing my forelegs and blurring my vision with halos of amber fire that merged with the moonlight between the branches.
With every leap, the memory of Darian’s eyes shielding me in the mud hammered back through my thoughts: a primal Alpha who had renounced his blood right rather than break my will.
I tripped over the root of a fallen pine and scrambled back to my feet, shaking the frost from my muzzle.
Four days of travel east remained before me. Four days of cold, delirium, and a hunt through the shadows before I reached the attic of the Valen estate and hid the will beneath the floorboards.
I clamped my fangs tighter over the oilcloth, drove my paws into the deep snow, and kept running into the dark.