Chapter 32 #2
She is standing inside the arena, twenty feet to my left, her arms crossed over her chest. The body of a man on the floor two yards from her boot is still bleeding out. She does not look at it. She is watching the brawl—calm, untouched, her hair pinned back at the nape of her neck.
She is smiling.
I duck back behind the doorframe before her eyes can drift toward me. The woman on my back has gone very still, her breath held against my throat.
I cannot fight Lydia with this woman gripping my shoulders. And I cannot leave her in this corridor where one of Lydia’s soldiers could find her.
I take the corridor back the way I came in long, quiet strides, my heel coming down on the concrete first, the soft pad of my boot rolling silently for the rest of the step. The first two doors are locked when I try the handles, my hand twisting under the woman’s thigh to reach them.
The third one opens.
A storage room. Shelves along one wall, a steel cabinet along another, a pile of folded canvas that smells of bleach in a corner. No window. No second door. The darkness inside is the soft gray of a room nobody has been in for several hours.
I step inside and shut the door behind me with my foot.
“Here,” I whisper to the woman. “Just for a little while.”
I crouch and lower her—carefully, carefully—setting the broken legs on the canvas in a way that should not put much weight on them. She does not let go of me at first. I cover her hands with my own.
“That’s my mate in there,” I tell her. “Those are my friends. I have to help them. I can’t abandon them.”
Her grip tightens.
“I won’t abandon you, either. I promise. The moment they’re safe, I’m coming back through that door. You understand me? I’ll come back.”
One of her hands lifts and finds my jaw. Her thumb passes over my collarbone where the dark lines of the curse show.
I pull the rock out of my pocket and press it into her palm, folding her thin fingers over it. “Anyone who isn’t me comes through that door, you throw this at them. Hard as you can. Then, scream—if you are able. I’ll hear you.”
She looks down at the rock and nods. Her other hand releases me.
I pull a length of the canvas up over her head, hiding her body completely from anyone whose eyes pass quickly over the room.
I reach underneath to touch her cheek with the backs of my fingers.
As an afterthought, I take off Lucas’s mother’s pendant and place it in her free hand so I don’t break it when I shift.
Then, I am out of the room, shutting the door behind me with a quiet click.
And I run.
The corridor flies past. My wolf is up at the front of my chest now, every part of her oriented, ears forward, the snarl already in her throat. The doorway to the arena is six strides ahead. Five. Four.
I let her come out. The shift rolls through me in one hard wave on the threshold of the arena.
And the curse mark sears into me.
The pain is so bad, I cannot see. The curse along my collarbone, the curse that has been climbing ever since Lucas mated me, opens up under the change and pours down through my chest in a long, burning line that is not pain anymore but something sharper, something with a taste.
Iron. Charcoal. The ash of something that has been left in a fire too long.
My wolf screams inside me, but the shift does not stop.
Her body lands on four paws under me, and the burn settles with a steady drag through every rib.
I am still moving. Lydia has not seen me.
She is still inside the entrance, arms crossed, watching the fight on the far side of the room. My paws hit the concrete, and the sound of them against the bare floor catches her ear at the last possible second. Her head starts to turn.
Too late.
I cover the last six feet at full speed.
The impact when I hit her is the best thing I have felt all day.
The full weight of my furious wolf takes her off her feet, and we go down together in a tangle.
Her shoulder catches the lip of the sunken floor, and we roll three yards across the concrete.
My jaws are at her throat before we have stopped moving.
But her elbow drives up under my chin, and my teeth close on air.
Her boot finds my ribs, and the kick lifts me off her, my paws scrabbling for purchase on the smooth floor.
I land badly on my injured side. The curse mark blazes again, even hotter.
For one second, my wolf body feels wrong, the curse corrupting as it runs through every vein.
Across the arena, Lucas roars, and I can feel him desperate to come to my side. However, he is surrounded. Lydia and I are alone in the center of the arena.
She is on her feet before I am, charging at me.
There is blood on her shirt from where her shoulder hit the floor on the way down.
Her hair has come loose and is hanging wildly, but she does not move to push it out of her face.
Her eyes are fixed on me with an intensity that has nothing to do with fear.
I lunge to intercept her. A knife comes up, and the tip catches me along the muzzle, leaving a long, bright line of pain that opens from the corner of my mouth to the top of my eye.
I twist my head, and my jaws close on her forearm.
Her bone is harder than it should be under my teeth.
She drives her free hand into my throat, the heel of it grinding into my windpipe, and the pressure forces me to let go.
“Twenty years of training,” she grunts, and her boot catches my ribs.
I roll away, and the curse mark pulses so hard, I almost go to my belly on the concrete. But I do not. I get my legs under me and start to circle.
She circles with me.
The curse has gone past pain to a dragging weight that has begun to numb the inside of my left foreleg.
My paw on that side does not set down right.
My wolf body has started to feel slow, Lydia’s run-and-strike movements coming to me through a haze, and she knows.
I see it in her eyes the second she registers the limp.
She comes at me again. The knife is aimed at my eye.
I duck, and the blade catches my ear instead, slicing into the top of it.
I lunge for her hip; she pivots, and my teeth take a piece of her thigh before her elbow drives into the side of my head.
My vision blurs, and the arena seems to tilt sideways just before I land hard on my back.
She does not give me time to roll. Her boot finds the line of my ribs, and the kick is hard enough that the snap of bone is louder than my yelp. The curse pours into the new pain, doubling it.
I am not winning.
Across the arena, Lucas’s voice has gone past wolf into something I do not have a word for.
I look up and see that he is fighting so hard against Lydia’s men, two more have come off the wall to hold him back.
The concrete behind his shoulders is cracking in long lines.
Darius’s wolf is trying to fend off the three operatives focused on him.
Violet’s magic flickers and dies at her fingertips. Lillian is on her feet, but barely.
Lydia crouches in front of me. The knife is still in her hand. Her breathing is heavier now, her shoulders rising and falling under her loose hair, and there is sweat at her temples. She has had to work for this, which makes part of me glad.
“He is going to watch you die in this room, Sienna,” she tells me. “I want him to see it.”
I bare my teeth at her. I cannot make my legs come under me. The cracked rib is screaming, and the curse is pouring into every part of me that my wolf used to control. I am so weak that I shift back to human form without even wanting to.
“You should have chosen me, Lucas,” she announces to the room. “I would have made an excellent luna. We could have stood side by side and ruled over every shifter, our own kingdom. But you’re so weak. You chose this useless little thing?”
She looks over her shoulder at where Lucas is grappling with a wolf and laughs.
“Really? How pathetic. You can fight all you want, but you’ll never get rid of all of them, no matter how many you behead.
You are severely outnumbered. And they won’t slow down.
They don’t feel pain. They’re killing machines. There is nothing you can do anymore.”
My eyes go to where Violet is struggling to stand, clutching her side, covered in blood. The others are no better off.
This is a losing battle, I realize grimly. We have already lost.
Just then, one of the enhanced shifters goes very still and then drops to the ground. Then another. And another. One by one, they all drop, unconscious.
I stare in stunned shock as Lydia looks around, confused and angry. “What is happening?!”
I’m just as baffled, but when I look around, I see a familiar woman clutching the doorway, standing awkwardly on two broken legs. Her hand is outstretched, and she’s chanting softly. Blood is pouring from her nose and her ears, but she keeps chanting.
Of course. She’s a witch!
Suddenly, the stone she gave me makes so much more sense.
As I watch her fell Lydia’s soldiers one by one, I take a long look at the woman and my stomach tightens.
Wait. It can’t be.
What if she’s Meera, the missing witch, the one who can break the curse?
Lydia spins back toward me. The rage in her eyes is beyond anything I’ve ever seen. She raises the knife in her hand and is about to plunge it into my heart when she freezes. She makes a choking sound, blood gurgling from her mouth.
My eyes lift, and I see my mate standing behind her. He is in human form now, with his claws out.
As Lydia falls to one side, she sees Lucas. A look of pain and betrayal comes into her eyes. Lucas kneels by my side, ignoring her rattling breaths. His fingers dig into my arm as we hear Lydia try to cling to life.
“It’s over,” I whisper to him as howls of victory erupt outside.
It’s over.