Chapter Eleven
ELSKE
Night pushed heavily on Dornwulf.
The moon, a blood moon, hung red in the empty sky, bearing witness to everything I’d feared and everything I’d hoped for. A reckoning long overdue.
It had been ages since the arena was used last, but it was cleared up and now waited, carved in the earth like a wound never healed.
Stone walls were blackened by firelight, torches guttering against the wind.
Smoke and pine and anticipation clung to every breath.
Villagers filled the stands, packed shoulder to shoulder.
The council watched from its higher stand, cloaked in fur and worry. They knew what would happen if Dierk won tonight. At their center, a seat was empty.
The next Alpha’s seat.
A circlet rested on it. Dornwulf’s crown.
It was forged from blackened silver, the metal dulled and dark as stormlight on a blade’s edge.
Instead of smooth filigree, it was made of overlapping fangs, each one curved and tapering to a point where it locked against the next, like a predator’s jaws closed in an eternal bite.
The craftsmanship was brutal and elegant, every fang polished along its edge, so it caught faint light, flashes of pale silver against the darker metal.
The next Alpha’s crown.
I knew Gerhard, Matthis, and Adelmar were somewhere in the crowd, hiding under cloaks and shadows.
But none of those things registered. Not fully.
I was no warrior, but at this point, I had stood on battlefields. Watched males die. I had blood on my own hands.
This was different.
This was my heart. My soul. My mate.
My stomach twisted, and my heartbeat thudded in time with the low drum that preceded the fight. My wolf pressed close beneath my skin, restless and afraid. Trying to calm either of us was futile. Terror was a living presence within me. Not for me. For him.
Don’t die, I prayed. He’d promised he wouldn’t, but some things were beyond his will, no matter how mighty.
The wind shifted and carried the scent of him before I saw him.
He stepped into the torchlights, bare to the waist. Scars I kissed in the quiet of the night gleamed across his skin, turning him into something equally mortal and divine.
For a moment, everything blurred. Everything but him.
Alive. Defiant. Mine. As if he heard me, our eyes met.
Words from only days ago echoed in my brain. Then we survive.
The drums picked up rhythm. Deepened. Thundered off the stone until the ground itself seemed to hum.
The crowd fell silent.
My father stepped into view on Dierk’s opposite side.
He wore a tunic of dark leather, the front stamped with the insignia of our bloodline—a wolf’s head with its jaw open in eternal fury.
His hair, once a deep strawberry blonde, had gone to frost at the edges.
The eyes, though, had lost none of the cruelty.
They were fixed on me, and filled with hate.
He’d kill me, too, if Dierk lost. And he would make it slow and painful.
The thought didn’t frighten me.
I had no interest in living without my mate, so if the worst came, I’d gladly plunge a knife into my heart myself. It was sitting on the inside of my boot, ready.
The drum stopped at once, and a thin, high voice broke the silence.
The Master of Coin stepped forward. With Adelmar and Gerhard absent and hiding, he was the highest-ranking male and would call the beginning of the challenge.
He lifted his hands. “By moon and by fire, by blood and by fangs,” he declared, his voice carrying over the pack, “the challenge is called.”
The crowd answered with a single roar that rolled through the pit like thunder—then silence, so deep it swallowed the air.
It was Vargan of House Fireborn against Dierk the Stray.
My father moved first. His breath fogged the cold air, and he took the center of the arena with steady, unbothered steps, years of dominance clear in the lethal grace of his movements.
Dierk walked forward. He was younger, his strength undeniable and unrestrained, but he’d nearly died not three days back, and my father was far from being weak. Mother help us, he was far too skilled with fire, even if it wasn’t as strong as mine.
Their eyes met. Gold clashed against iron. Neither moved.
Then my father attacked. The crowd roared as flames burst from his palms, white hot and furious, warping the air around them. The wave hit the ground where Dierk had been a breath before, spraying sparks into the night.
Dierk was already moving, his hands igniting as he spun.
But the flame broke apart midair, torn by the wind of its own haste and fury, fading to embers before it could touch the Alpha.
The crowd murmured; some laughed. My heart hammered so loud it drowned it all.
“Keep your head,” I murmured, prayed, ordered, clutching the edge of the stone barrier. “Keep your head.”
He did—at first. But my father’s attacks came, relentless, each more ruthless than the last. More precise.
More lethal. Fire rolled like waves and blades, searing, burning.
Dierk was hit again and again. His chest, leg.
A shoulder. He didn’t call the wolf. Not yet.
No matter how strong and quick, fire was quicker.
The Alpha’s flames would burn fur and bone before a single claw could land.
He had to stand his ground as a man, long enough to buy the beast its chance.
I bit down a cry. My wolf clawed at my chest, demanding to break free, to throw herself between them. My fire burned, ready, willing. But I couldn’t. The law of the challenge was clear. Helping him would mean instant death for both.
I knew all of it. Despised all of it.
My father smiled, cruelly, as Dierk stumbled.
Blood ran down his ribs, flesh seared where my father had hit the hardest. The Alpha shot another blow, but Dierk evaded it and moved with the fury of a cornered animal.
Flames burst from his hands, bright, desperate.
Sure that it wouldn’t reach him, my father didn’t bother to block.
Arrogance had always been his biggest weakness.
The fire hit him square across the shoulder, the smell of scorched flesh turning the air sharp. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for Dierk to let go. The shift tore through him like thunder, his snarl primitive and brutal.
He lunged.
Fire curled around my father’s fists, but surprise at being hit, then the pain of it, made his reaction slow. Fire wouldn’t work this time. The Alpha barely had the time to shift.
They collided mid-air, claws and fangs and a blur of fur. Snarls filled the pit; blood hit the dirt.
The crowd roared, the council rose, but all I could do was stand there, shaking, as the bond between us pulsed like a living thing. I felt him—his focus, his fury, rage that lived caged for years, finally unbound. He felt no pain. He had no hesitation. Only his unstoppable will to end it.
The fight became a blur of motion and terrifying sound. Blood and snaps. They circled, vicious snarls vibrating throughout the pit. When they collided, the sound of bones and claws cracked through.
The black wolf moved faster than he should have been able to.
His jaws closed on Dierk’s flank, drawing blood, but Dierk turned, eyes blazing gold, and slammed into him with a force that made the ground itself flinch.
My father twisted, lunged for Dierk’s throat, and found him ready to meet him head-on.
Their growls deepened into a single, continuous, ominous sound.
My breath hitched as the older wolf faltered, his footing slipping under Dierk’s onslaught.
The crowd shifted, disbelief rippling like wind through leaves. They knew as I did.
He’s winning.
My father struck again, a desperate lunge that was met with fangs.
Dierk found purchase.
They rolled, snarls tearing through the night like nightmares.
My chest ached. I didn’t know how long I had neglected to breathe. My fingers dug into the stone until they bled. But I could feel it—his heartbeat pounding through the bond, and it didn’t beat to the rhythm of battle.
It beat to the rhythm of victory.
The old wolf twisted beneath him, tried to find leverage, but Dierk was done yielding. He forced him down, fangs to throat. The sound that followed ripped the night open.
Vargan of House Fireborn’s body stilled. The black wolf that had ruled Dornwulf with cruelty and greed went limp against the dirt, his blood seeping into the ground.
For a heartbeat, the arena forgot to breathe. Dust floated through the firelight, suspended, just like the time. Dierk stood over the fallen wolf, his sides heaving, blood streaking his fur.
Then he raised his head to the sky and howled. A single, endless note of dominion that bent the moon to his new reign. My knees gave out. I sank against the stone as his howl climbed higher, rolling through the pit, the forest, the entire kingdom.
And then others answered. Only one at first. Then another. Until the night trembled beneath the sound. But above all, Dierk’s voice held steady, unbroken.
The voice of a true Alpha.
DIERK
AT LAST, I HAD MY REVENGE. The blood of the male who’d let his army slaughter my mother, who’d made my life a cage, still coated my tongue. Hot, and sweet, and savage. It should have tasted like rage and pain. Instead, it sang with freedom. It wasn’t all-consuming, though. No.
Something else stirred in me. Something I had a taste of with Gerhard, Matthis, and Adelmar when they had sworn loyalty to me.
This was bigger.
It went beyond triumph. It was deeper than reckoning. Higher than deliverance.
A pulse strong as firestorm rolling through me and leaving nothing unclaimed.
An instinct that wasn’t only mine.
And when I looked at the faces in the crowd, all those eyes on me, I shivered.
It was the pack.
I felt all of them. Not as individuals, but as a consolidated link that bound me to them. That collective hum brushed against my mind. Hesitant. Testing.
It left me bare.