Chapter Three
DIERK
Ihad no windows, but I could smell the moon and the dark. I knew it was still night when the door opened. Hurried steps and swishing skirts cut through the quiet. I stopped pacing, shoulders squared, my wolf ready as if he wasn’t caged.
She wore black today. A martial, unforgiving absence of color. Even the laces binding tightly her light hair were black. When her eyes met mine, they were as hard as the set of her jaw.
I sniffed, searching for that tension in her scent. I was left bereft. No forest-and-flowers. Not anything. Why was there nothing? My wolf paced in a displeasure I didn’t understand, but I still shared. “Why can’t I smell you?” I growled.
“Do you have an answer for me?” she asked instead, lifting her arrogant chin.
“An answer for an answer. Why can’t I smell you?”
Her teeth looked ready to shatter from how tightly she ground them. Her lips pressed into a thin line. “I bound my scent.”
“Why?”
“An answer for an answer,” she shot back. “Did you think about my proposal?”
“Yes. Why do you bind your scent?”
Fire sparked from her hands, her eyes burning straight through me. “Because they can’t know how much I despise them all. Do you accept it?”
“That you despise them? Absolutely.”
A rain of tiny fires shot from her, like burning pellets, faster than thought. I threw my arm up to shield my face, bracing for the impact, for the pain. There was always pain.
It never came.
I peeked from behind my arm. The fire hung midair, inches from my skin, blazing but frozen.
“Did you, or did you not, think about my offer?” she repeated, her voice the epitome of calm.
My wolf howled his approval of her. I didn’t share the feeling. But I straightened. “I did.”
“And?”
“You want me to take down the Alpha and his court. That would make me the Alpha.”
She swallowed again. Her nostrils flared in the slightest. “Yes.”
“And you’re fine with that.”
She might as well have been carved in blazing, silent stone.
“Doesn’t make much sense,” I pushed. “I see three options. One: you plan to make me your tool, brainlessly doing your bidding. Which won’t work.
Two: you trust me enough to hand me, a feral stranger with no past, the pack you’re ready to bleed for.
Which is stupid. Or three: you didn’t think it through, and now it’s blowing up in your face. ”
Elske scoffed. “Of course I thought it through. All of it.”
“Then explain.”
“If you succeed,” she began, putting a lot of weight into the word if, “then you’ll swear the Fire Oath to the Mother Moon.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Because my family stopped taking it. That’s why we’re in this situation.
It’s an old oath that binds the Alpha not to the crown, but to the wolves.
It makes him not the despot, definitely not the owner, but the shield and the strength of the pack.
He rules with a council, bound to the pack’s safety, health, and wealth.
If he breaks the vow, the wolf is stripped from him.
I don’t think you're cruel, Dierk. But I don’t know you, and I need to do all I can to protect my pack.
The Mother will know and act accordingly. ”
“How did they get away with not taking it anymore?”
Her head flicked in annoyance. “Feuermeister Adelmar will give you the full history lesson soon enough. For now, I need to know if I have to kill you or hide you.”
“I fight. I win. I take the oath. And I become Alpha,” I summed it up, just to be sure of giving the right answer.
She nodded, a strained movement. “Aided by the council and under the Mother’s oath, but yes.”
“Then no.”
Surprise was genuine in the way her eyebrow shot up. “Excuse me?”
“I don’t belong to a crown.”
“You’d rather die today than fight for what’s right?”
“I don’t care about what’s right.”
“But you care for revenge.”
My wolf was dead set on her now, ears forward, hanging on every enticing word she so calmly spoke. “You can get the Alpha’s blood on your fangs.”
I scoffed, pushing the idea away with a swipe of my hand. “I want nothing more than that, but then what? I despise politics. Hierarchy. The last thing I want is to wear the crown of the same system that’s destroyed wolves like me.”
“You have a chance to change it. To make sure no one else suffers the way you have.”
I bared my teeth. “You don’t get it, Princess. The throne is the problem. Whoever sits it rots sooner or later, and everyone else suffers.” I paced, frustrated, angry.
She stepped forward, sparkles of temper at her fingertips. “I just explained to you how we’re taking the Oath back to avoid rulers like my father, and his father before him.”
“The same Oath they managed to throw in the piss-pit.”
“We can change this pack. We can make things right.”
My laughter was more bitter than wormwood. “Making things right? What’s right never kept me alive,” I snarled. “Teeth did. Running did. Justice is a lie the strong promise to make the weak kneel. I will never be part of it.”
My wolf prowled restless in my chest. Not howling, not snapping. Waiting. Like even he wasn’t sure what I was doing—why I was signing my death sentence while shitting on the revenge I’ve been dreaming of my entire, miserable life.
She held my gaze for a long moment. Then: “Challenge my father, win the duel, take the pack,” she said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all.
“Then we’ll invoke the Trial Reign. We’ll hold it together for a year and a day and after that, you step down and we call for another duel, not to the death this time, to establish the new Alpha. ”
My pacing grew more restless, and I felt the walls closing in on me.
Better dead than in chains. I’ve lived by that creed.
And in front of me, she was tangling the tightest collar.
But what if the collar she would put around my neck dripped with the blood I’d craved my whole life?
Could I bear it if every link was hammered out of their ruin?
A year wouldn’t feel so long then. “One year. And then my wolf and I walk free.”
“A year and a day. Yes.”
“You’ll swear on it.”
“I will.”
The thought clawed at me, and my wolf snapped, eager for what she offered. “Fine,” I growled. “For now. But don’t mistake me for compliant.”
“I don’t want compliant. I need dangerous.”
Bells tolled in the distance. She turned toward the sound. “I have to go.” She took a vial from her gown pocket. “Greta, my maid, will come for you soon. She’ll take you to Adelmar’s chambers. Drink this. It will mute your scent.”
“I’m not drinking that.”
“Then a guard will sniff you out, get curious about why a stranger with a scent as powerful as yours is in the castle, and we all die.” She left the vial within my reach on the dry floor and walked to the door. She looked back once, dangerous as open flames. “Don’t be stupid.”
And then she was gone.
SHE WAS DESPERATE. That was the only reasonable explanation for taking me in the way she did.
She had to know how things were getting progressively worse. And she loved her pack enough to risk everything for it. Her life, first and foremost. Vargan wouldn’t bat an eye at killing his own daughter if he caught wind of what she was doing in the shadows.
So the only conclusion I could draw was that circumstances had cornered her so badly she had to take a chance on me. When you hit rock bottom, you reach for whatever blade is within arm’s length.
Even if that blade is me.
It was late morning when the door opened again. Steps. Different, even as they also came with the swish of a skirt. Lighter, less assertive.
A female walked in. Barely grown. Her scent was sweet as jasmine, pure as first sunlight.
Young. Innocent. Her steps faltered when she saw me.
Stopped altogether when she heard the low, menacing growl in my chest. Fear bled through her scent now, her delicate hands wringing.
“I’m Greta,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.
I reined in my wolf, but some of him still leaked through when I said, “Her maid.”
“Yes.” She took a couple of steps closer. “I’m supposed to take you to the Feuermeister’s.”
“Only you? No guards?”
She shook her head, pulling a heavy key from her pocket. The key that could set me free. “They’re all at the flogging.”
That was where she had to be. A public punishment.
It explained the mournful black of her clothes, the tension in her shoulders.
Vargan loved those. The cruelty, the spectacle.
It also gave me an opening. Even shackled, even with my wolf chained, the maid was so young and small I could kill her in a heartbeat.
Get that key. I had a potion to mask my scent. And everyone was at the flogging.
I could be free within minutes. Free to run. Free to forget this damned, stupid, suicidal plan.
Nothing stopped me.
“She said you’d be scary,” the girl whispered as she slid the key into the lock. “But that you wouldn’t hurt me.”
Trust. The little fool trusted her lady so blindly that she was about to free a monster on nothing but her word. Ridiculous. Of course I was going to kill her and run. I’d killed for less than freedom.
The key turned. The lock clicked. She pushed the iron door open.
That was it. All I had to do was shove her aside hard enough to crack her head on the stone, then go.
“She said you’ll help us,” the female said softly.
My wolf stilled. I stilled. And sighed.
Because she looked at me. And in the pup’s eyes was hope. She looked at me, at what I was, and despite what she saw, she dared to believe in the promise her lady had made. That I would kill, but for them, somehow.
I would kill for them.
The change in my thoughts was swift as bloodlust. Run, yes, but not away. Not yet.
Run to where the Alpha, his son, and the rotting heads of the powerful families were. And kill them all. My wolf liked that thought. I liked it too.
Kill them for what they did to my mother.
To others’ mothers. Sisters. Mates.